He received a bachelor's degree in ancient Greek from the University of Pittsburgh, where he was admitted into Phi Beta Kappa.
[6] He was also credited with a successful effort to build a new football stadium at Louisville which was largely funded through alumni donations; hiring Rick Pitino to coach the school's basketball team; and helping to improve the quality of the student body, as indicated by the test scores of the freshmen who enrolled at the university.
[2] The move to Tennessee increased his annual compensation to a total of $733,550, including bonuses, which reportedly made him second-highest-paid president of a U.S. public university.
[7] The first allegations were made in June of that year when Knoxville, Tennessee, news media reported that the university had paid for his personal travel on a university-owned airplane.
[5][9][11] Officials in Connecticut deemed the Hyundai payments to be a violation of the state's ethics laws, but could not prosecute because of the statute of limitations.
[13] Initially he asked for about $420,000 and at one time claimed that he was owed as much as $1.7 million, but eventually received $175,000 after reaching a settlement with the university in January 2009.
[14][15][16] Since his departure from the University of Tennessee, Shumaker's professional activities have included assisting nonprofit organizations as a fund-raising consultant[12] and working on rebuilding the higher education system of Afghanistan.
[17] In July 2013 he began a new assignment with the International Rescue Committee, a New-York based non-profit organization, as chief of party for its five-year $160 million Pakistan Reading Project, which is funded by USAID.
[9][19] In January 1996, after his move to the University of Louisville, Shumaker married Kentuckian Lucy Craig Steilberg.