Tia McNair

Tia Brown McNair is the vice president in the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Student Success at Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) in Washington, DC.  She oversees both funded projects and AAC&U’s continuing programs on equity, inclusive excellence, high-impact educational practices, and student success, including AAC&U’s Network for Academic Renewal series of yearly working conferences.  McNair also directs AAC&U’s Summer Institute on High-Impact Educational Practices and Student Success.

McNair serves as the project director for several AAC&U initiatives: “Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation,” “Committing to Equity and Inclusive Excellence: Campus-Based Strategies for Student Success,” and Purposeful Pathways: Faculty Planning and Curricular Coherence.” She directed AAC&U’s projects on “Advancing Underserved Student Success through Faculty Intentionality in Problem-Centered Learning,” “Advancing Roadmaps for Community College Leadership to Improve Student Learning and Success,” and “Developing a Community College Roadmap. McNair chaired AAC&U’s Equity Working Group that was part of the General Education Maps and Markers (GEMs) project that represented a large-scale, systematic effort to provide “design principles” for 21st-century learning and long-term student success. She is the lead author of the book, Becoming a Student-Ready College: A New Culture of Leadership for Student Success (July 2016). McNair is a co-author on the publication, “Assessing Underserved Students’ Engagement in High-Impact Practices”.

Prior to joining AAC&U, McNair served as the assistant director of the National College Access Network (NCAN) in Washington, DC. McNair’s previous experience also includes serving as a social scientist/assistant program director in the Directorate for Education and Human Resources at the National Science Foundation (NSF), director of University Relations at the University of Charleston in Charleston, West Virginia; the statewide coordinator for the Educational Talent Search Project at the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission; and the interim associate director of Admissions and Recruitment Services at West Virginia State University. She has served as an adjunct faculty member at several institutions where she taught first-year English courses.

McNair earned her bachelor’s degree in political science and english at James Madison University and holds an M.A. in English from Radford University and a doctorate in higher education administration from George Washington University.