Condoleezza Rice

Condoleezza Rice (born November 14, 1954) is an American diplomat and political scientist who is the current director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

In 1967, the family moved to Denver, Colorado.

She attended St. Mary's Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school in Cherry Hills Village, Colorado, and graduated at age 16 in 1971.

Rice enrolled at the University of Denver, where her father was then serving as an assistant dean.

Rice initially majored in music, and after her sophomore year, she went to the Aspen Music Festival and School.

There, she later said, she met students of greater talent than herself, and she doubted her career prospects as a pianist.

She began to consider an alternative major.

She attended an International Politics course taught by Josef Korbel, which sparked her interest in the Soviet Union and international relations.

Rice later described Korbel (who is the father of Madeleine Albright, then a future U.S. Secretary of State), as a central figure in her life.

In 1974, at age 19, Rice was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and was awarded a B.A., cum laude, in political science by the University of Denver.

While at the University of Denver she was a member of Alpha Chi Omega, Gamma Delta chapter.

She obtained a master's degree in political science from the University of Notre Dame in 1975.

She first worked in the State Department in 1977, during the Carter administration, as an intern in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

She also studied Russian at Moscow State University in the summer of 1979, and interned with the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California.

In 1981, she received a PhD from the School of International Studies at the University of Denver.

In 1981, at age 26, she received her Ph.D. in political science from the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver.

She worked at the State Department under the Carter administration and served on the National Security Council as the Soviet and Eastern Europe affairs advisor to President George H. W. Bush during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and German reunification from 1989 to 1991.

Rice later pursued an academic fellowship at Stanford University, where she later served as provost from 1993 to 1999.

On December 17, 2000, she joined the Bush administration as President George W. Bush's national security advisor.

In Bush's second term, she succeeded Colin Powell as Secretary of State, thereby becoming the first African-American woman, second African-American after Powell, and second woman after Madeleine Albright to hold this office.

Following her confirmation as secretary of state, Rice pioneered the policy of Transformational Diplomacy directed toward expanding the number of responsible democratic governments in the world and especially in the Greater Middle East.

That policy faced challenges as Hamas captured a popular majority in Palestinian elections, and influential countries including Saudi Arabia and Egypt maintained authoritarian systems (with U.S. backing).

While in the position, she chaired the Millennium Challenge Corporation's board of directors.

A member of the Republican Party, she previously served as the 66th United States secretary of state from 2005 to 2009 and as the 19th U.S. national security advisor from 2001 to 2005.

Rice was the first female African-American secretary of state and the first woman to serve as national security advisor.

Until the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008, Rice and her predecessor, Colin Powell, were the highest-ranking African Americans in the history of the federal executive branch (by virtue of the secretary of state standing fourth in the presidential line of succession).

At the time of her appointment as Secretary of State, Rice was the highest-ranking woman in the history of the United States to be in the presidential line of succession.

Rice was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and grew up while the South was racially segregated.

She obtained her bachelor's degree from the University of Denver and her master's degree from the University of Notre Dame, both in political science.

In March 2009, Rice returned to Stanford University as a political science professor and the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution.

In September 2010, she became a faculty member of the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a director of its Global Center for Business and the Economy.

In her 2017 book, Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom, she writes, "My great-great-grandmother Zina on my mother's side bore five children by different slave owners" and "My great-grandmother on my father's side, Julia Head, carried the name of the slave owner and was so favored by him that he taught her to read."

Rice grew up in the Titusville neighborhood of Birmingham, and then Tuscaloosa, Alabama, at a time when the South was racially segregated.

The Rices lived on the campus of Stillman College.

Rice began to learn French, music, figure skating and ballet at the age of three.

At the age of fifteen, she began piano classes with the goal of becoming a concert pianist.

In January 2020, it was announced that Rice would succeed Thomas W. Gilligan as the next director of the Hoover Institution on September 1, 2020.

She is on the Board of Directors of Dropbox and Makena Capital Management, LLC.

Rice was born in Birmingham, Alabama, the only child of Angelena (née Ray) Rice, a high school science, music, and oratory teacher, and John Wesley Rice Jr., a high school guidance counselor, Presbyterian minister, and dean of students at Stillman College, a historically black college in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Her name, Condoleezza, derives from the music term, ). Rice has roots in the American South going back to the pre-Civil War era, and some of her ancestors worked as sharecroppers for a time after emancipation. Rice discovered on the PBS series Finding Your Roots that she is of 51% African, 40% European, and 9% Asian or Native American genetic descent, while her mtDNA is traced back to the Tikar people of Cameroon.