Xavier (Xav) de Souza Briggs is an award-winning educator and researcher as well as an experienced leader in philanthropy and government. He served for six years as vice president of the Ford Foundation, leading its work on inclusive economies and markets and, following a reorganization, launching its U.S. Programs division. For 2020, he is a distinguished visiting professor of public service, business, and sociology at New York University.

Earlier in his career, Xav was professor of sociology and urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a faculty member at Harvard’s Kennedy School. He has led groundbreaking research in economic opportunity, democracy and governance, and racial and ethnic diversity and segregation. His most recent book is Moving to Opportunity: The Story of an American Experiment to Fight Ghetto Poverty.

In government, he served as a senior policy adviser under Presidents Obama and Clinton, most recently as associate director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Xav holds an engineering degree from Stanford University, an MPA from Harvard, and a PhD in sociology and education from Columbia University. He was a Rotary Scholar at the Federal University of Bahia in Brazil.

Taffye Benson Clayton is the inaugural Vice President and Associate Provost for Inclusion and Diversity at Auburn University.  She serves as the designated executive administrator for coordinating the university’s diversity and inclusion strategy and is the principal advocate and adviser to the president, provost and senior university leadership on issues of diversity and inclusion.

She also serves as convener of the Chief Diversity Officer Cabinet, an institutional body connecting diversity liaisons from units across the campus. Clayton and her team are tasked with expanding Auburn’s diversity and inclusion footprint within the institution and nationally.

She is a member of the Board of Directors for the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education and is co-chair of the Membership Committee.  She sits on the Diversity and Inclusion Executives Council of The Conference Board — a global, independent business membership and research organization serving 1,200 public and private corporations — and recently became a member of its Executive Committee for the Council. Clayton also serves on the Executive Committee of the Commission on Access, Diversity and Equity (CADE) of the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities (APLU).

Ronald A. Crutcher is a national leader in higher education who became President of the University of Richmond in 2015. He previously served as President of Wheaton College for ten years. He was the founding Chair of the Leadership Council for LEAP (Liberal Education and America’s Promise), the Association of American Colleges & Universities’ national campaign to demonstrate the value of liberal education. He writes and speaks widely on the value of liberal education, the democratic purposes of higher education, diversity, inclusion and thriving, and free expression on college campuses.

He also serves on the boards of the American Council on Education and the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Crutcher is also a Professor of Music and a distinguished classical musician. He is a former member of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and several other orchestras, and currently serves on the board of the Richmond Symphony.

For almost forty years, he has performed in the U.S. and Europe as a member of The Klemperer Trio.

Robert P. George holds Princeton’s McCormick Professorship of Jurisprudence and is Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

He has served as Chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the President’s Council on Bioethics. He was a Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award. George holds the degrees of J.D. and M.T.S. from Harvard University and the degrees of D.Phil., B.C.L., D.C.L., and D.Litt. from Oxford University.

He is a recipient of the U.S. Presidential Citizens Medal, the Honorific Medal for the Defense of Human Rights of the Republic of Poland, the Canterbury Medal of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, and the Irving Kristol Award of the American Enterprise Institute. His most recent book is Conscience and Its Enemies.

Diane F. Halpern is the Dean of Social Sciences, Emerita at the Minerva Schools at Keck Graduate Institute and Professor of Psychology, Emerita at Claremont McKenna College. She has served as the president of the American Psychological Association and the Society for Teaching of Psychology.

Halpern has published hundreds of articles and many books including: Thought and Knowledge, Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities (4th ed.), and Women at the Top (co-authored with Fanny Cheung). She  also created the Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment which allows test takers to demonstrate their ability to think about everyday topics using both constructed response and recognition formats.

Halpern has won many awards for her teaching and research, including the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science; the Arthur W. Staats Lecture on Unifying Psychology Award from the American Psychological Association; the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Western Psychological Association; and the California State University’s State-Wide Outstanding Professor Award.

Glenn C. Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University. He holds a B.A. in Mathematics from Northwestern University  and a Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

As an academic economist, he has published mainly in the areas of applied microeconomic theory, game theory, industrial organization, natural resource economics and the economics of race and inequality.  He has been elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Econometric Society, Member of the American Philosophical Society, Vice President of the American Economics Association and President of the Eastern Economics Association.

As a prominent social critic and public intellectual, writing mainly on the themes of racial inequality and social policy, he has published over 200 essays and reviews in journals of public affairs in the U.S. and abroad. Loury’s books include One by One From the Inside Out: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America (winner of the American Book Award and the Christianity Today Book Award); The Anatomy of Racial Inequality; Race, Incarceration and American Values; and Ethnicity, Social Mobility and Public Policy: Comparing the US and the UK.

Lynn Pasquerella was appointed President of the Association of American Colleges and Universities in 2016, after serving as the eighteenth President of Mount Holyoke College from 2010-2016. Pasquerella was the provost at the University of Hartford, from 2008 to 2010. She previously served as Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Rhode Island, where she began her career as an ethics professor in 1985.

A philosopher whose work has combined teaching and scholarship with local and global engagement, Pasquerella is committed to championing liberal education, access to excellence in higher education, and civic engagement. She has written extensively on medical ethics, metaphysics, public policy, and the philosophy of law and is the host of Northeast Public Radio’s The Academic Minute.

Pasquerella is a member of the advisory board of the Newman’s Own Foundation, and sits on the board of the Lingnan Foundation and the National Humanities Alliance. She is also President of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. She is a graduate of Quinebaug Valley Community College, Mount Holyoke College, and Brown University.

Eboo Patel is the Founder and President of Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), a non-profit organization working to make interfaith cooperation a social norm in America. He has spoken on over 150 campuses and served on President Obama’s Inaugural Faith Council. He holds a doctorate in the sociology of religion from Oxford University, where he studied on a Rhodes Scholarship.

Patel was named one of America’s Best Leaders by U.S. News & World Report in 2009. He is the author of Acts of Faith, Sacred Ground, Interfaith Leadership and Out of Many Faiths. He also publishes a regular blog for Inside Higher Ed, “Conversations on Diversity.”

Cornel West is the Class of 1943 Professor of African American Studies Emeritus at Princeton University, and Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy in the Divinity School and the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He has also taught at Union Theological Seminary, Yale University and the University of Paris. He graduated magna cum laude in Near Eastern Studies from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton. He holds more than twenty honorary doctorates.

West has written 20 books and has edited 13. He is best known for his classics Race Matters and Democracy Matters. His memoir is entitled Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. He appears frequently on the Bill Maher Show, CNN, C-Span, and other media outlets.

West made his film debut in The Matrix, and he was the commentator (with Ken Wilbur) on the official trilogy released in 2004. He also has appeared in over 25 documentaries. He has made three spoken word albums including Never Forget, collaborating with Prince, Jill Scott, Andre 3000, Talib Kweli, KRS-One, Bootsy Collins, and Gerald Levert. His spoken word interludes were featured on Terence Blanchard’s Choices (which won the Grand Prix in France for the best Jazz Album of the year of 2009).

West has a passion to communicate to a vast variety of publics in order to keep alive the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. — a legacy of telling the truth and bearing witness to love and justice.