Roslyn Artis is the president of Benedict College. She is the first female president to hold that position and was previously the first female president of Florida Memorial University. Artis is a member of the National Board of Directors for the United Negro College Fund, an educational advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, and a member of the Presidents’ Advisory Board for Title III Administrators and the Educational Testing Service Presidents’ Advisory Council. Artis is a member of the National Black MBA Advisory Council. She is a prolific speaker and advocate for educational access whose work has been repeatedly recognized on the local, state and national scale. Indeed, just within the last few months, her leadership of Benedict College during the COVID crisis, balancing equity and public health concerns, has been praised as a model that others around the country should look towards. President Artis has a BA and JD from West Virginia University, and a PhD in Higher Education Leadership and Policy from Vanderbilt University.

Joseph Guarneri is an academic success advisor at the University of Bridgeport. Previously, he served as the assistant director of the PACT program at Mercy College. He is a regular contributor to the HxA Blog, and has also written for Times Higher Ed and Areo. His public facing work and academic research focus on exploring ways colleges and universities can help students flourish. For HxA, he has written multiple essays illustrating the important connections between viewpoint diversity and other forms of diversity, and exploring how people who work in student affairs can support viewpoint diversity.

George Yancey is sociologist at Baylor University, whose work explores ideological diversity, demographic diversity, and the relations between these. He has done extensive work on the religiosity of university faculty and their views towards religion. He has also produced journal articles and books exploring political (in)tolerance within the academy. Regarding racial tensions, he has advocated a ‘mutual accountability’ framework in his books Beyond Racial Gridlock (2006) and Transcending Racial Barriers (2010). He is currently working on a book called Beyond Racial Division: A Unifying Alternative to Colorblindness and Antiracism. A quick and accessible overview of the philosophy behind the mutual accountability approach, and how it differs from some other popular approaches, is available on his Patheos blog.

Musa al-Gharbi is a Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in Sociology at Columbia University, a Mellon-Sawyer Fellow on Trust and Mistrust of Experts with INCITE and the American Assembly, and a Racial Equity Media Fellow with Interfaith Youth Core. His research explores how knowledge is produced, transmitted, evaluated and operationalized, and how people’s thinking is shaped by their social contexts.