The Ford Foundation is an American private foundation with the stated goal of advancing human welfare. Created in 1936 by Edsel Ford and his father Henry Ford, it was originally funded by a US$25,000 gift from Edsel Ford. By 1947, after the death of the two founders, the foundation owned 90% of the non-voting shares of the Ford Motor Company. Between 1955 and 1974, the foundation sold its Ford Motor Company holdings and now plays no role in the automobile company.
Diane Silvers Ravitch is a historian of education, an educational policy analyst, and a research professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Previously, she was a U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education. In 2010, she became "an activist on behalf of public schools". Her blog at DianeRavitch.net has received more than 36 million page views since she began blogging in 2012. Ravitch writes for the New York Review of Books.
Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead is an American novelist. He is the author of eight novels, including his 1999 debut work The Intuitionist; The Underground Railroad (2016), for which he won the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction again in 2020 for The Nickel Boys. He has also published two books of non-fiction. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Genius Grant.
Herbert Ralph Kohl is an educator best known for his advocacy of progressive alternative education and as the author of more than thirty books on education. He founded the 1960s Open School movement and is credited with coining the term "open classroom."
Alma Dale Campbell Brown is the head of global news partnerships at Facebook and a former American television news reporter and anchorwoman. She served as co-anchor of the NBC news program Weekend Today from 2003 to 2007, and hosted the series Campbell Brown on CNN from 2008 to 2010. Brown won an Emmy Award as part of the NBC team reporting on Hurricane Katrina. Since 2013 she has been an education reform and school choice activist.
Anya Kamenetz is an American writer living in Brooklyn, New York City. She is an education correspondent for NPR, a former staff writer for Fast Company magazine, and columnist for Tribune Media Services, and the author of several books.
Phillip Lopate is an American film critic, essayist, fiction writer, poet, and teacher. He is the younger brother of radio host Leonard Lopate.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is an American philosopher, novelist, and public intellectual. She has written ten books, both fiction and non-fiction. She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy of science from Princeton University, and is sometimes grouped with novelists such as Richard Powers and Alan Lightman, who create fiction that is knowledgeable of, and sympathetic toward, science.
Laila Lalami is a Moroccan-American novelist, essayist, and professor. After earning her Licence de lettres degree in Morocco, she received a fellowship to study in the United Kingdom (UK), where she earned an MA in linguistics.
Caroline Minter Hoxby is an American economist whose research focuses on issues in education and public economics. She is currently the Scott and Donya Bommer Professor in Economics at Stanford University and program director of the Economics of Education Program for the National Bureau of Economic Research. Hoxby is a John and Lydia Pearce Mitchell University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. She is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist, and translator, known as 'one of American poetry's central spokespersons for the biosphere' and recognized as 'among the modern masters,' 'writing some of the most important poetry in the world today.' A 2019 elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, her books include numerous award-winning collections of her own poems, collections of essays, and edited and co-translated volumes of world writers from the deep past. Widely published in global newspapers and literary journals, her work has been translated into over fifteen languages.
Joan Breton Connelly is an American classical archaeologist and Professor of Classics and Art History at New York University. She is Director of the Yeronisos Island Excavations and Field School in Cyprus. Connelly was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1996. She received the Archaeological Institute of America Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2007 and held the Lillian Vernon Chair for Teaching Excellence at New York University from 2002 to 2004. She is an Honorary Citizen of the Municipality of Peyia, Republic of Cyprus.
Amy Wilentz is an American journalist and writer. She is a professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches in the Literary Journalism program. She received a 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for her memoir, Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti, as well as a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship in General Nonfiction. Wilentz was the Jerusalem correspondent for The New Yorker, and is a contributing editor at The Nation.
Cynthia Stokes Brown was an American educator-historian.
Deborah Harkness is an American scholar and novelist, best known as an historian and as the author of the All Souls Trilogy, which consists of The New York Times best-selling novel A Discovery of Witches and its sequels Shadow of Night and The Book of Life. Her latest book is Time's Convert, both an origin story of the trilogy’s Marcus Whitmore character, set in the American War of Independence and the French Revolution, and a sequel to the All Souls Trilogy.
David Coleman is an American businessman, currently serving as the ninth president of the College Board, a non-profit organization that designed the SAT exam, SAT Subject Tests, and Advanced Placement (AP) exams. He is often described in the media as "the architect" of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.
Christine Elaine Montross is an American medical doctor and writer. First a published poet and a high school teacher, she later took up medical studies, and became an assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University's Alpert Medical School. She is the recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Nikole Sheri Hannah-Jones is an American investigative journalist, known for her coverage of civil rights in the United States. In April 2015, she became a staff writer for The New York Times. In 2017 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and in 2020 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her work on the controversial 1619 Project. Hannah-Jones is the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at the Howard University School of Communications, where she also founded the Center for Journalism and Democracy.
Joan Friedman became the first woman to serve as a rabbi in Canada in 1980, when she was appointed as an Assistant Rabbi at Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto. Her appointment was followed shortly after by that of Elyse Goldstein as Assistant Rabbi from 1983-1986; Goldstein has been noted as the first female rabbi in Canada, but that is incorrect. Friedman was ordained in 1980 by the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York. Later she was named solo rabbi at B’nai Israel in Laconia, New Hampshire. She also worked as the Jewish chaplain at Colgate University for six years, as a congregational rabbi in Bloomington, Indiana for five years, and on the faculties of Colgate and American Universities. As of 2003, she was the associate chaplain for Jewish and interfaith life and coordinator of the Program in Ethical Reflection at Carleton College. As of 2016, she was Associate Professor of History and Religious Studies and Chair of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the College of Wooster.
Marcia Chatelain is an American academic who serves as a professor of history and African American studies at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. In 2021, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History for her book Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, which also won a James Beard Award.
