Speaker Biographies

John Agresto is president emeritus of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and president of John Agresto and Associates, an organization dedicated to educational reform. While president of St. John’s, Mr. Agresto actively worked in designing and supporting its "Great Books" program. He has been a leading proponent of the value of a liberal arts education, lecturing and writing on its nature and benefits for many years. Before assuming his position at St. John’s, he served as president of the Madison Center in Washington, DC, and as assistant chairman, deputy chairman, and acting chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities for seven years. Mr. Agresto is the author of several books, including The Humanist as Citizen: Essays on the Uses of the Humanities(University of North Carolina Press, 1981) and The Supreme Court and Constitutional Democracy (Cornell University Press, 1984).

Stephen H. Balch is founder and president of the National Association of Scholars, America’s largest and most active membership organization of scholars committed to higher education reform. He was a member of the government faculty at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York for fourteen years. He is a member of the board of directors of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and has played a central role in the founding of four other higher education reform organizations. Mr. Balch is the author of a variety of articles on reopening the campus marketplace of ideas and is a leader in the national movement to foster greater intellectual pluralism through the creation of new academic programs.

Paul A. Cantor is the Clifton Waller Barrett Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He was assistant professor of English at Harvard University from 1971 to 1976. He served on the National Council on the Humanities from 1992 to 1999. He is the author of Shakespeare’s Rome: Republic and Empire (Cornell University Press, 1976), Creature and Creator: Myth-making and English Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 1984), and the Hamlet volume in the Cambridge Landmarks of World Literature series (1989; 2004). His book Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001) was named one of the best nonfiction books of the year by the Los Angeles Times. Mr. Cantor is a regular contributor to national journals such as The Weekly Standard, Reason, and the Claremont Review of Books.

James W. Ceaser is a professor of politics at the University of Virginia, where he has taught since 1976. He has written several books on American politics and political thought, including Presidential Selection: Theory and Development (Princeton University Press, 1979), Liberal Democracy and Political Science (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), Reconstructing America: The Symbol of America in Modern Thought (Yale University, 1997), and Nature and History in American Political Development: A Debate (Harvard University Press, 2006). Mr. Ceaser has held visiting professorships at the University of Florence, the University of Basel, Oxford University, the University of Bordeaux, and the University of Rennes. He is a frequent contributor to the popular press, and he often comments on American politics for the Voice of America.

Frederick M. Hess is a resident scholar and director of education policy studies at AEI. His many books include Common Sense School Reform (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), No Child Left Behind: A Primer (Peter Lang, 2006), Educational Entrepreneurship (Harvard Education Press, 2006), and No Remedy Left Behind: Lessons from a Half-Decade of NCLB (coedited with Chester E. Finn Jr.; AEI Press, 2007). His publications have appeared in numerous outlets, including Harvard Educational Review, Teachers College Record, Education Week, Phi Delta Kappan, Education Next, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. Mr. Hess currently serves on the review board for the Broad Prize in Urban Education and as a member of the research advisory board for the National Center on Educational Accountability. He is a former high school social studies teacher and former professor of education and government at the University of Virginia.

April Kelly-Woessner is an associate professor of political science and department chair at Elizabethtown College. Ms. Kelly-Woessner specializes in public opinion, political behavior, survey research, and statistics. As a member of the International Society of Political Psychology, Ms. Kelly-Woessner regularly presents research at international conferences. Her most recent work, "Raiders of the Lost Vote: A Theory Driven Model of Ballot Invalidation in Florida’s 2000 Election," examines the difference between cognitive errors and mechanical errors in voting. The article is forthcoming in Politics and Policy.

Daniel Klein is a professor of economics at George Mason University. Mr. Klein has published research on policy issues including toll roads, urban transit, auto emission, credit reporting, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). He has also written on spontaneous order; the discovery of opportunity; the demand and supply of assurance; why government officials believe in the goodness of bad policy; and the relationship between liberty, dignity, and responsibility. Klein is the chief editor of Econ Journal Watch, an online journal dedicated to economic criticism from a Smith-Hayek viewpoint. He is the coauthor of Curb Rights: A Foundation for Free Enterprise in Urban Transit (Brookings Institution Press, 1997), editor of Reputation: Studies in the Voluntary Elicitation of Good Conduct (University of Michigan Press, 1997), and editor of What Do Economists Contribute? (Macmillan, 1999). He has coauthored a website on the FDA and coedited The Half-Life of Policy Rationales: How New Technology Affects Old Policy Issues (New York University Press, 2003). He also is affiliated with the Ratio Institute as an academic advisor and associate fellow.

Noretta Koertge is a professor emeritus of the department of history and philosophy of science at Indiana University. Throughout the 1970s, she established herself as a leading scientific methodologist. She published a famous paper on Galileo in the Journal of the History of Ideas in 1977. Ms. Koertge also focused on the ethics of introducing Western science and technology into developing countries and the scientific and philosophical perspectives on homosexuality. This work led her into the growing debates about multiculturalism, postmodernism, and academic feminism. Ms. Koertge became a leading defender of scientific rationality in the 1990s. She published two substantial contributions to what are now known as "the culture wars"—Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women’s Studies (Basic Books, 1994) and A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths about Science (Oxford University Press, 1998). From 1999 to 2004, she was editor-in-chief of Philosophy of Science. Ms. Koertge was elected a fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

S. Robert Lichter is a professor of communications at George Mason University and director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, where he conducts scientific studies of the news and entertainment media and the Statistical Assessment Service. Mr. Lichter has written numerous books and articles on the media. His most recent books include Peepshow: Media and Politics in an Age of Scandal (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) and It Ain’t Necessarily So: How Media Make and Unmake the Scientific Picture of Reality (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001). His research has been published in scholarly journals such as Nature, The Journal of the American Medical Association, the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Communication, and in popular outlets such as the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, the Los Angeles Times and Forbes Media Critic. He has served as an expert witness and testified before Congress on media content and effects.

Greg Lukianoff is president of the Foundation of Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). Mr. Lukianoff has been with FIRE since 2001, when he was hired as the first director of legal and public advocacy. Before joining FIRE, Mr. Lukianoff practiced law in northern California. He has published articles in the Stanford Technology Law Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Fraternal Law, Inside Higher Ed, the Boston Globe, and the New York Post, and he is a regular columnist for the Daily Journal of Los Angeles and San Francisco. Mr. Lukianoff is a frequent guest on local and national syndicated radio programs; has represented FIRE on national television shows, including The O'Reilly Factor, The Abrams Report, Hannity & Colmes, and Buchanan and Press; and has testified before the U.S. Senate about free speech issues on U.S. campuses. Mr. Lukianoff is a coauthor of FIRE’s Guide to Free Speech on Campus.

Robert Anthony Maranto is an associate professor of political science at Villanova University. His research mainly focuses on education reform and civil service reform. Mr. Maranto is currently an associate scholar at the Goldwater Institute and the Commonwealth Foundation. He has held positions at multiple institutions, including the University of Virginia, the Federal Executive Institute, and the Brookings Institution. He has published multiple books on education, including A Guide to Charter Schools: Research and Practical Advice to Educators (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). Mr. Maranto has also published in multiple journals, including the American Journal of Education and the Policy Studies Journal.

Jeremy D. Mayer is an associate professor at the George Mason School of Public Policy. He specializes in presidential elections, public opinion, racial politics, and foreign policy. He has published widely on American politics, and his book Running on Race: Racial Politics in Presidential Campaigns 1960–2000 (Random House, 2002) was selected by Washington Monthly as one of the best political books of 2002. He is the author of the forthcoming Wired Politics: Journalism and Governance and is working on a new book examining public opinion on the Middle East in the United States. Mr. Mayer is the recipient of the 2002 Rowman & Littlefield Award for Innovative Teaching in Political Science.

John H. McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a weekly columnist for the New York Sun, and an associate professor of linguistics at the University of California–Berkeley. His academic specialty is language change and language contact. He is the author of The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language (Times Books, 2001), on how the world’s languages arise, change, and mix. He is also the author of Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care (Gotham Books, 2003). He has written a book on dialects and black English, The Word on the Street: Fact and Fable about American English (Plenum, 1998), and three books on Creole languages. The Teaching Company released his 36-lecture audiovisual course Story of Human Language in 2004. Beyond his work in linguistics, he is the author of Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America (Free, 2000), an anthology of race writings; Authentically Black (Gotham Books, 2003); and Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America (Gotham Books, 2006). His academic linguistic book Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language Grammars will be published in 2007 by Oxford University Press.

Anne D. Neal is president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a national education nonprofit organization dedicated to academic freedom, excellence, and accountability. She is a lawyer and served as president of the Harvard Journal on Legislation while in law school. Ms. Neal has served as general counsel for the National Endowment for the Humanities and as a First Amendment and communications lawyer with the law firms Rogers & Wells and Wiley, Rein & Fielding.

William O’Donohue is the Nicholas Cummings Professor of Organized Behavioral Healthcare Delivery, an adjunct professor of philosophy, and an adjunct professor of psychiatry at the University of Nevada, Reno. His main research areas include behavioral health care delivery, male sexual misbehavior, behavior therapy, and philosophy of psychology. He has worked on many books on human sexuality, behavior, and treatment, including Learning and Behavior Therapy (Allyn and Bacon, 1997) and Handbook of Behaviorism (Academic Press, 1998). Mr. O’Donohue has also published articles in multiple journals, including the Journal of Psychotherapy Practice and Research, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, and Behavior and Philosophy.

James Piereson is president of the William E. Simon Foundation, a private grant-making foundation based in New York City. He is also a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where he is director of the Center for the American University. Mr. Piereson was previously executive director and trustee of the John M. Olin Foundation from 1985 until the end of 2005 when, following longstanding plans, the foundation disbursed its remaining assets and closed its doors. He previously served on the political science faculties of Iowa State University, Indiana University, and the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught courses in the fields of U.S. government and political theory. Mr. Piereson is the author of Political Tolerance and American Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 1982) and Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism (Encounter, 2007).

Richard E. Redding is a professor of law and the director of the law and psychology program at Villanova University School of Law. Following law school, he clerked for the Honorable Michael W. Farrell at the District of Columbia Court of Appeals and practiced law for several years in Virginia. Mr. Redding holds an appointment as research professor of psychology at Drexel University. His research interests focus on criminal law, children and the law, juvenile justice, mental health law, the use of social science in law and public policy, and sociopolitical biases in social science. He has published three books and over 75 articles and book chapters on these and related topics. Mr. Redding is a fellow of the American Psychological Association. He serves on the editorial boards of a number of journals, and has been a visiting scholar at foreign and American universities and think tanks.

Stanley Rothman is emeritus Mary Huggins Gamble Professor of Government at Smith College and the director of the Center for the Study of Social and Political Change. He is the author or coauthor of 15 books, including European Society and Politics (Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), Roots of Radicalism: Jews, Christians, and the New Left (Oxford University Press, 1982), and The Media Elite (Adler & Adler, 1986). His more recent books include American Elites (Yale University Press, 1996), Hollywood’s America: Social and Political Themes in Motion Pictures (Westview, 1996), Environmental Cancer: A Political Disease? (Yale University Press, 1999) and The Least Dangerous Branch? The Consequences of Judicial Activism (Praeger, 2002). The major focus of his work in recent years has been on elites and elite conflict in the United States as part of a project concerned with the analysis of social and political change.

Charlotta Stern is an assistant professor at the Swedish Institute for Social Research. She has studied how social networks influence the recruitment into and the diffusion of social movement organizations and the influence of social networks on welfare outcomes. Stern has also studied gender differences between women and men with regard to career outcomes. At present, Stern is involved in two projects about policy views of academics. One is based on data about American social scientists, in collaboration with Daniel Klein. The other study is based on data about Swedish social scientists.

Sandra Stotsky is a professor of education reform and holds the 21st Century Chair in Teacher Quality in the department of education reform at the University of Arkansas. From 2003 to 2005, she was a research scholar at Northeastern University, and from 1999 to 2003, she was senior associate commissioner at the Massachusetts Department of Education. During that period, she directed complete revisions of the state’s licensing regulations for teachers, administrators, and teacher training schools, the state’s tests for teacher licensure, and the state’s PreK–12 standards for mathematics, history and social science, English language arts and reading, science and technology/engineering, early childhood (preschool), and instructional technology. She is editor of What’s at Stake in the K–12 Standards Wars: A Primer for Educational Policy Makers (Peter Lang, 2000) and author of Losing Our Language (Free, 1999; Encounter, 2002). In May 2006, she was appointed to the President’s National Mathematics Advisory Panel.

Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at AEI. She has been a professor of philosophy at Clark University since 1981. Ms. Sommers specializes in ethics and contemporary moral theory and has published many scholarly articles in such journals as The Journal of Philosophy and The New England Journal of Medicine. She edited Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life: Introductory Readings in Ethics (Harcourt Brace, 1985), one of the most popular ethics textbooks in the country. Ms. Sommers became known to the wider public as the author of Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (Touchstone, 1994). Her book The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men (Touchstone, 2000) received widespread attention and praise and was excerpted for a cover story in The Atlantic Monthly. It was included in the New York Times’ "Notable Books of the Year." Her most recent book, One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture is Eroding Self-Reliance (St. Martin’s, 2005), coauthored with Sally Satel, M.D., has received a great deal of attention and critical acclaim. Ms. Sommers’s articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, USA Today, National Review, The New Republic, and The Weekly Standard.

Stuart S. Taylor Jr. is a weekly opinion columnist for National Journal and a contributing editor of Newsweek, writing about legal and policy issues of national and international importance. He is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He practiced law at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering from 1977 to 1980. Mr. Taylor joined the New York Times in 1980 as a legal affairs reporter and covered the Supreme Court from 1986 to 1988. Mr. Taylor moved to American Lawyer Media in 1989 and to National Journal in 1997. He has won various journalism awards and appeared on all major television networks.

Matthew C. Woessner is an assistant professor of public policy at Pennsylvania State University Harrisburg, where he pursues teaching and research interests in American politics. His specializations include political behavior, constitutional law, constitutional history, and research methodology. Mr. Woessner’s research has appeared in PS: Political Science & Politics, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Politics and Policy, the Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice and the International Journal of Police Science & Management. Mr. Woessner currently serves on the Penn State Harrisburg faculty senate and Capital College Teacher Assistant Program. In addition to his other duties, Mr. Woessner advises the Penn State Harrisburg College Democrats and College Republicans.

Peter W. Wood is executive director of the National Association of Scholars. He is the author of A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now (Encounter, 2007) and Diversity: The Invention of a Concept (Encounter, 2003), which won the Caldwell Award for Leadership in Higher Education from the John Locke Foundation. He previously served as provost of The King’s College in New York City and as associate provost and president’s chief of staff at Boston University, where he was also a tenured member of the anthropology department. His essays on American culture have appeared on National Review Online and in Partisan Review, FrontPage Magazine, Minding the Campus, the Claremont Review of Books, The American Conservative, Society, and other journals.

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