Carroll has been a Shorenstein Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a Fellow at the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at the Harvard Divinity School. He was a trustee of the Boston Public Library, a member of the Advisory Board of the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life at Brandeis University, and a member of the Dean's Council at the Harvard Divinity School. Carroll is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was a member of the Academy's Committee on International Security Studies. He worked on his 2006 history of the Pentagon, "House of War", as a Scholar-in-Residence at the Academy. He is an Associate of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. Carroll was the Richman Visiting Professor at Brandeis University, the MacDonald Family Visiting Professor at Emory University, Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Suffolk University in Boston, and Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at New York University, where he wrote his most recent novel 'The Cloister' (2017)