- May 10, 2010
- Navarino Network
In May 2010, the NN welcomed Hans Giesecke, President of Anatolia College and ACT, for a discussion on: “Competition as a ‘quality driver’ in education”.
Dr. Hans C. Giesecke is the President of Anatolia College and the American College of Thessaloniki (ACT). As President and CEO of Independent Colleges of Indiana since 2002, he has spent his career in college-level education in California, Tennessee, and Minnesota, in addition to Indiana, with interludes in Germany and Austria. Each of Giesecke’s prior jobs has also involved significant outreach initiatives to K-12 education. He spent the period from January 2000 through July 2002 as head of the Student Affairs team at International University Bremen (now Jacobs University) in Germany. He has a long-standing interest in the democratic reform movements that swept across Eastern and Central Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which led him to write his doctoral dissertation on the rise of private colleges in Eastern Europe. He also taught International Relations and Organizational Studies at International University Vienna in the spring of 2008. As President and CEO of Independent Colleges of Indiana and, previously, of a similar organization in Tennessee, Dr. Giesecke has worked to strengthen the financial position of private colleges and to increase student access to financial aid. In Indiana he has also served as the supervising officer of the Lilly Endowment Community Scholarship Program, one of the largest private, single-source scholarship programs in the U.S., which awards some $18 million per year to nearly 900 Indiana college and university students. Dr. Giesecke is a graduate of Williams College, where he majored in Psychology. He holds an M.A. in Public Policy and Administration from the University of Wisconsin Madison, and a Ph.D. in Education and Human Development from Vanderbilt University.
