Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Tal Becker, Ph.D., is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem where he leads educational initiatives on Israel and the Jewish world. In this capacity, he is a leading member of the Institute's "Engaging Israel" series which is the premier educational program on Israel engagement in North America that is working to strengthen and re-imagine the relationship between Israel and World Jewry. 

Becker also serves as the Legal Adviser of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and has been a senior member of the Israeli peace negotiation team in successive rounds of peace negotiations. He has many years of experience as a veteran negotiator on the front lines of many of Israel's most pressing diplomatic, legal, and policy challenges and has also played key roles in behind the scenes for Israel in a wide variety of contexts. 

Among numerous previous positions, Becker has been a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, senior policy advisor to Israel's Minister of Foreign Affairs, a lead negotiator and drafter in the Annapolis peace talks, director of the International Law Department at the Israeli Foreign Ministry, counsel to Israel's UN Mission in New York, and an international law expert for the Israel Defense Forces. 

Becker earned his doctorate from Columbia University and, among numerous scholarly awards, is the winner of the Rabin Peace Prize and the 2007 Guggenheim Prize for best international law book for his book "Terrorism and the State.”

Dr. Becker's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the President's Leadership Fund and the Jewish Studies Sequence at CMC presentation and is part of the "Peace in the Middle East" series. 

David J. Frum is a Canadian-American neoconservative political commentator. A speechwriter for President George W. Bush, Frum later became the author of the first "insider" book about the Bush presidency. He is a senior editor at The Atlantic and also a CNN contributor. 

Over the years, Frum has worked for Canadian publications as well as American ones, including the National Review and the Wall Street Journal. He worked at the American Enterprise Institute after leaving the Bush White House, and also counseled Rudy Giuliani on his presidential bid. 

​Frum received his B.A. and M.A. from Yale University in 1982. He graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1987, where he served as president of the Federalist Society. His first book, Dead Right, was published in 1994 and was hailed by the conservative right as an important piece of ideological literature for the conservative movement.

Mr. Frum's Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the President's Leadership Fund.

Food for Thought: Podcast with David Frum

Ben Tumin is a filmmaker and comedian born, raised, and based in New York. He worked at Amnesty International in Morocco and the community building platform Meetup before forging an independent career in political comedy and filmmaking. His work has been featured in The Daily Beast, Al Jazeera, and The Brian Lehrer Show (WNYC). Tumin is a 2012 graduate of Pomona College where he majored in history.

Mixing information about the refugee crisis with clips from interviews conducted with Scott Cooper, a retired marine working in human rights advocacy, and five young Syrians living in Germany, Tumin takes a different look at the impact of refugee resettlement, particularly from the perspective of national security. Through anecdotes about his grandfather — himself once a refugee — Tumin weaves in his connection to the cause and pieces together what he has learned about himself, his country, and the questions that remain.

Mr. Tumin's talk is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at CMC.

Cheryl L. Dorsey is the president of Echoing Green, a global organization seeding and unleashing next-generation talent to solve the world’s biggest problems. Prior to leading this social impact organization, Dorsey was herself a social entrepreneur and received an Echoing Green Fellowship in 1992 to help launch The Family Van, a community-based mobile health unit in Boston. She later became the first Echoing Green Fellow to head the social venture fund in 2002. 

An accomplished leader and entrepreneur, she has served in two presidential administrations as a White House Fellow and special assistant to the U.S. Secretary of Labor (1997-98); special assistant to the director of the Women's Bureau of the U.S. Labor Department (1998-99); and vice-chair for the President's Commission on White House Fellowships (2009-16). Dorsey serves on several boards including the SEED Foundation, The Bridgespan Group, and, previously, the Harvard Board of Overseers.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard-Radcliffe Colleges, Dorsey received a medical degree from Harvard Medical School and a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School. 

Ms. Dorsey will deliver the opening keynote address for the  2018 Kravis-de Roulet (KDR) Conference. 

View Video: YouTube with Cheryl Dorsey

B. Cole holds an MSc from the London School of Economics and has worked as a community facilitator and strategist for more than 15 years. Drawing on her experience as a consultant, Cole launched the Brown Boi Project in 2010. Cole introduced the term “masculine of center,” which is now being used to forward understanding of the incredible breadth of masculinity within the queer community. A Black Male Achievement Echoing Green Fellow, Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar, and recipient of the Spirit of Delores Huerta Award, Cole has worked across the U.S. and internationally on issues of leadership development and building social capital for young people of color.

B. Cole's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Center for Writing and Public Discourse, the Kravis Leadership Institute, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. 

Marianne Haver Hill supervises a team that works with more than 500 stakeholder groups in the implementation of Propel LA which includes seven large goals around investing in people and workforce development, promoting trade and industry clusters, accelerating innovation, creating a business-friendly environment, supporting infrastructure development, enhancing global connectedness, and supporting livable communities.

Previously, Hill served from 1987 - 2016 as the President and CEO of MEND—Meet Each Need with Dignity, the largest and most comprehensive poverty relief agency in the San Fernando Valley. Under her leadership, MEND grew from serving an average of 2,000 needy clients each month to helping an average of 37,000 applicants monthly, utilizing a volunteer work force of more than 5,000 and a staff team of 34 individuals. In July 2012, MEND was named the California Nonprofit of the Year by the Governor’s Office for Volunteering and Service. 

Hill is the recipient of the 2017 Valley Economic Alliance Valley of the Stars Leadership Award, the 2013 Center for Nonprofit Management Leadership Impact Award, the 2008 California Association of Nonprofits Excellence in Leadership Award, and several other commendations. She has been an adjunct instructor in nonprofit management at the USC Price School of Public Policy.

View Video: YouTube with Marianne Haver Hill

Food for Thought: Podcast with Marianne Haver Hill

Coming of age as the son of a Baptist pastor in rural Arkansas, Garrard Conley was terrified and conflicted by his sexuality; he had never even met another gay person. At age nineteen, his worst fear came true when he was outed to his parents. They gave him an ultimatum: he could either be shipped to a “conversion therapy” facility in a hope to “cure” him of his homosexuality, or he would lose his family, his friends, and his God. He chose the facility, a decision that would lead him through a brutally institutional Twelve-Step Program. He was supposed to emerge cleansed of impure urges, stronger in his Christian faith, and—most importantly—heterosexual. Instead, Conley developed the strength to search for his true identity and to forgive his family.

Conley’s bestselling memoir, Boy Erased, traces the complex relationships between identity, faith, and community. A humane, poetic glimpse at a world hidden to many, Conley shows all sides of his family—good and bad—with courage and compassion, even as he depicts his own story of survival.

Boy Erased thrust Conley onto the national stage as the public gained increasing awareness of conversion therapy facilities. It is currently being adapted as a film by Focus Features with Joel Edgerton directing. A popular speaker, he lectures at schools and venues across the country on radical compassion, writing through trauma, and what it means to grow up gay in the South. He has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and Elizabeth Kostova Foundation Writers’ Conferences and has facilitated classes for Catapult, Sackett Street Writers Workshop, and the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown. He is also currently the memoir instructor for GrubStreet’s Memoir Incubator program. His work can be found in TIME, VICE, CNN, BuzzFeed, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Huffington Post, among other places, and he was recently named a Lambda Award Finalist for memoir/autobiography. 

Photo credit: Colin Boyd Shafer

Sean Hagan P'20 is general counsel and director of the legal department at the International Monetary Fund. In this capacity, Hagan advises the Fund’s management, executive board, and membership on all legal aspects of the Fund’s operations, including its regulatory, advisory and lending functions. Hagan has published extensively on both the law of the Fund and a broad range of legal issues relating to the prevention and resolution of financial crisis, with a particular emphasis on insolvency and the restructuring of debt, including sovereign debt.

Prior to his tenure at the IMF, Hagan was in private practice, first in New York and subsequently in Tokyo. He received his Juris Doctor from the Georgetown University Law Center and also received a Masters of Science in International Political Economy from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

View Video: YouTube with Sean Hagan P'20

Food for Thought: Podcast with Sean Hagan P'20

Archana Sahgal '99 is a former Obama White House official and CMC alumna. She works at the intersection of politics and movement building to create social change. Sahgal’s network has helped her navigate the opportunities and challenges along the way. 

Sahgal has spent two decades designing and executing strategies for achieving policy reform and social change within the philanthropic, nonprofit, and public sectors. She served in the Obama White House as senior associate director for public engagement where she led stakeholder engagement with organized labor and progressive advocates around President Obama's policy priorities. She also served at the U.S. Department of Commerce as director of advisory committees and industry outreach where she oversaw the President's Export Council, President's Advisory Committee on Doing Business in Africa, U.S. Travel and Tourism Advisory Board, and over a dozen other advisory committees. Most recently she served as senior advisor at the Democracy Alliance, one of the country’s largest drivers of activist progressive philanthropy where she led the investment strategy to protect democratic norms and principles in this new political era. 

Sahgal also worked with other foundations and philanthropic efforts across the country including The San Francisco Foundation, Rosenberg Foundation, Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy, Proteus Fund, The Progressive Era Project, and George Soros' Open Society Foundations directing over $15 million in resources to push for immigration reform. Sahgal also built The Civic Engagement Fund, the first ever fund supporting Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian communities. Her work has also been profiled in the New York Times, Teen Vogue, Buzzfeed, and WNYC. She served on the board of directors of the Korematsu Institute, Californians for Justice, and South Asian American Leaders of Tomorrow (SAALT). 

Sahgal received her B.A. from Claremont McKenna College (’99) and J.D. from University of California Davis School of Law. She is a member of the State Bar of California. 
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Ms. Sahgal's talk is co-sponsored by Women's Leadership Alliance, Kravis Leadership Institute, Berger Institute, and Robert Day Scholars and is part of the "Behind the Veil: Women, Race, Leadership, and Social Change in the Nonprofit Sector” (“BTV”) speaker series. BTV explores leadership models and perspectives by harnessing the power of first-person narrative and storytelling by nonprofit CEOs on the front lines of social change.  To register for the Women and Leadership Workshop, including the lunch keynote, please visit the online registration page

N. Gregory Mankiw is the Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics at Harvard University. As a student, he studied economics at Princeton University and MIT. As a teacher, he has taught macroeconomics, microeconomics, statistics, and principles of economics. He even spent one summer long ago as a sailing instructor on Long Beach Island.

Mankiw is a prolific writer and a regular participant in academic and policy debates. His research includes work on price adjustment, consumer behavior, financial markets, monetary and fiscal policy, and economic growth. His published articles have appeared in academic journals, such as the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, and Quarterly Journal of Economics, and in more widely accessible forums, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.

He has written two popular textbooks—the intermediate-level textbook Macroeconomics (Worth Publishers) and the introductory textbook Principles of Economics (Cengage Learning); the latter has sold over two million copies and has been translated into twenty languages.

In addition to his teaching, research, and writing, Mankiw has been a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, an adviser to the Congressional Budget Office, and the Federal Reserve Banks of Boston and New York, and a member of the ETS test development committee for the advanced placement exam in economics. From 2003 to 2005 he served as chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers.

Professor Mankiw's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Financial Economics Institute (FEI) at CMC. 

View Video: YouTube with N. Gregory Mankiw

Thomas Miller is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, DC where he studies health care policy, including regulatory barriers to choice and competition, market-based alternatives to the Affordable Care Act, health care litigation, and the political economy of health care reform. As a former senior health economist for the Joint Economic Committee in Congress, Miller was previously a trial attorney and a journalist. Miller has testified before Congress on the uninsured, health care costs, Medicare cost sharing, high-risk pools, health care competition, health insurance tax credits, and the individual mandate.

Alex Ross has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1993, and became the magazine’s music critic in 1996. He writes about classical music, covering the field from the Metropolitan Opera to the downtown avant-garde, and has also contributed essays on pop music, literature, twentieth-century history, and gay life. His first book, “The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century,” a cultural history of music since 1900, won a National Book Critics Circle award and the Guardian First Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. 

Mr. Ross's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at CMC.

Photo credit: David Michalek

Founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine, monthly columnist for Scientific American, and presidential fellow at Chapman University, Michael Shermer, Ph.D., is the author of New York Times bestsellers Why People Believe Weird Things,The Believing Brain, Why Darwin Matters, The Science of Good and Evil, and The Moral Arc. 

Shermer regularly contributes opinion editorials, essays, and reviews to: the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Science, Nature, and other publications. He appeared on such shows as The Colbert Report, 20/20, Dateline, Charlie Rose, Oprah, and Larry King Live. He has been interviewed in numerous documentaries aired on PBS, A&E, Discovery, The History Channel, The Science Channel, and The Learning Channel. Shermer was the co-host and co-producer of the 13-hour Family Channel television series, Exploring the Unknown. His two TED talks, seen by millions, were voted in the top 100.

Shermer received his B.A. in psychology from Pepperdine University, M.A. in experimental psychology from California State University, Fullerton, and his Ph.D. in the history of science from Claremont Graduate University. He has been a college professor since 1979, also teaching at Occidental College, Glendale College, and Claremont Graduate University, where he taught a transdisciplinary course for Ph.D. students on evolution, economics, and the brain.

Ronald Klain has devoted many years to public service, most recently as White House Ebola Response Coordinator (2014-15). Earlier, Klain served as a senior White House aide to President Obama responsible for implementing the Recovery Act, and as chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden from 2009 to 2011. He has also served as chief of staff for Vice President Al Gore, chief of staff and counselor to Attorney General Janet Reno, staff director of the Senate Democratic Leadership Committee, and chief counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Klain was also associate counsel to President Clinton in charge of judicial selection.Through his work on the Judiciary Committee and in the Executive Branch, Klain has played a role in the selection or confirmation of eight Supreme Court Justices. He began his legal career as a law clerk to Justice Byron White, for the Supreme Court’s 1987 and 1988 terms.

Klain gained national notice as general counsel for the Gore Recount Committee in 2000, in recognition of which he was selected as one of National Law Journal's "Lawyers of the Year," and featured in HBO's film "RECOUNT."  He has worked on seven presidential campaigns, serving as a top debate preparation advisor to Presidents Obama and Clinton, and Democratic Presidential nominees Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton. 

Klain now serves as executive vice president and general counsel of Revolution LLC, an investment firm launched by AOL Co-Founder Steve Case in 2005. Prior to joining Revolution, Klain spent four years as a partner and National Practice Group Chair at O'Melveny & Myers LLP, where his practice focused on constitutional and commercial litigation, competition-related litigation in the technology sector, redistricting and election law, and corporate transactions.

Klain is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review, won the Sears Prize for highest grade average in 1985, and serves as al lecturer in law. He was a summa cum laude graduate of Georgetown University, where has served since 2011 as an adjunct professor.         

Mr. Klain is the featured speaker for CMC’s 2018 Family Weekend.

View Video: YouTube with Ronald Klain P'20

Food for Thought: Podcast with Ronald Klain P'20

Multiple private corporate entities vie for our attention and serve as catalysts both for powerful grassroots movements and for debilitating echo chambers. With more and more Americans receiving their news from these sites, private companies have amassed the ability to algorithmically alter our moods, opinions, and even conceptions of the world around us.

The Claremont Radius along with The Student Life and The Claremont Independent will explore the ethics and potential of this new era of information and human communication. Through a collaborative effort, these student groups aim to provide a comprehensive discussion of the issues relevant not only to markets, politics, and livelihoods, but also to personal lives, at the mercy of tweets.

The panelists will cover many related topics including the importance of face to face communication, the potential and danger of online politics, the role of corporations in influencing both social and political movements through these channels, and the changing nature of information, politics, and our daily lives.