Cornel West

Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy, Harvard Divinity School

Cornel West is a prominent and provocative democratic intellectual. He is Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University and holds the title of Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He has also taught at Union Theological Seminary, Yale, Harvard, and the University of Paris. West graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton. He has written over 20 books and has edited 13. Though he is best known for his classics, Race Matters and Democracy Matters, and for his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, his most recent releases, Black Prophetic Fire and Radical King, were received with critical acclaim.

West is a frequent guest on Real Time with Bill Maher, The Colbert Report, CNN, C-SPAN and Democracy Now! He made his film debut in The Matrix Reloaded, and he was a commentator, along with Ken Wilbur, on the official trilogy released in 2004. He also has appeared in over 25 documentaries and films including Examined Life, Call + Response, Sidewalk, and Stand. Last but certainly not least, he has made three spoken word albums including Never Forget, collaborating with Prince, Jill Scott, Andre 3000, Talib Kweli, KRS-One, and the late Gerald Levert. His spoken word interludes were featured on Terence Blanchard’s Choices, which won the Grand Prix Award in France for Best Jazz Album in 2009; The Cornel West Theory’s Second Rome; Raheem DeVaughn’s Grammy-nominated Love & War: MasterPeace; and most recently on Bootsy Collins’ Tha Funk Capital of the World.

In short, West has a passion to invite a variety of people from all walks of life into his world of ideas 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.

Robert P. George

McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, Princeton University

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He is also the Herbert W. Vaughan Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, and has on several occasions been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. In addition to his academic service, George has served as Chairman of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom. He previously served on the President’s Council on Bioethics (2002-2009), and as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights (1993-1998). He has also been the US member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Science and Technology. He is a former judicial fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award.

George is author of Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality (Oxford University Press, 1993), In Defense of Natural Law (Oxford University Press, 1999), The Clash of Orthodoxies (ISI, 2001) and Conscience and Its Enemies (ISI, 2013). George’s articles and review essays have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the Review of Politics, the Review of Metaphysics, and the American Journal of Jurisprudence. He has also written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, First Things, the Boston Review, and the Times Literary Supplement.

A graduate of Swarthmore College, George holds degrees in law and theology from Harvard and the degrees of D.Phil., B.C.L., and D.C.L. from Oxford University. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa at Swarthmore and received a Frank Knox Fellowship from Harvard for graduate study in law and philosophy at Oxford. He holds honorary doctorates of law, letters, ethics, science, divinity, humane letters, law and moral values, civil law, and juridical science.