Alumni Invited to Attend Head of School’s

Annual Conversation Series on Free Speech

There are three installments remaining in the Head of School’s Annual Conversation Series on Free Speech. Alumni are cordially invited to attend. The first installment on October 22^nd featured a conversation between Professor Julian Zelizer, the series moderator, and Kwame Anthony Appiah (at right).

For a recap, please see this edition’s reprint of the Record article, “Ethicist Appiah Interviewed in Conversation Series on Free Speech."

The remaining events in the series are as follows:

December 9, 2024:  Nadine Strossen is the John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law Emerita at New York Law School and past president of the American Civil Liberties Union (1991-2008). She is a senior fellow with FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education) and a leading expert and frequent speaker/media commentator on constitutional law and civil liberties, having testified before Congress on multiple occasions. Professor Strossen serves on the advisory boards of the ACLU, Academic Freedom Alliance, Heterodox Academy, National Coalition Against Censorship, and the University of Austin.

February 10, 2025:  John McWhorter is associate professor in the Slavic Department at Columbia University and a New York Times opinion columnist. He has taught the seminar "Language in America," a study of American linguistic history that considers Native American languages, immigrant languages, creole languages, American Sign Language, Black English and other speech varieties -- their development, interactions, and preservation. Professor McWhorter has also taught the seminar "Language Contact," which focuses specifically on the mixture of language in North America, and studies the development of creoles, pidgins, koines, "vehicular" languages, and nonstandard dialects. He also teaches various other courses for the Linguistics Program and Music Humanities for the Core Curriculum program. Professor McWhorter is an author of more than 20 books including The Power of Babel:  A Natural History of Language, Losing the Race: Self Sabotage in Black America and Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue:  The Untold History of English. In 2016 he published Words on the Move:  Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally), while in 2021 he published Nine Nasty Words and Woke Racism.  He also writes a weekly column for The New York Times and hosts the language podcast Lexicon Valley.

May 7, 2025:  Joseph Kahn is the executive editor of The New York Times. He oversees all aspects of The Times’s global newsroom and news report. Before becoming executive editor in June 2022, Mr. Kahn had served as managing editor since 2016. In that role, he led The Times’s push to become a fully digital-first news operation, build a global news operation, transform the newsroom’s culture to be more diverse and inclusive, and encourage new forms of storytelling. A two-time Pulitzer winner, Mr. Kahn has a long track record of both producing and helping journalists produce their most ambitious and courageous work. Early in his tenure as executive editor, Mr. Kahn identified his priorities of maintaining editorial independence in an age of polarization, continuing to chart an ambitious path for The Times, and upholding a commitment to build a diverse workforce.

The series moderator, Professor Julian Zelizer, is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He is a New York Times best-selling author, CNN political analyst, regular guest on NPR’s "Here and Now," guest host on POTUS Sirius XM, and columnist for Foreign Policy. He is the award-winning author and editor of 26 books including, The Fierce Urgency of Now:  Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society, the winner of the D.B. Hardeman Prize for the Best Book on Congress; Fault Lines:  A History of the United States Since 1974 (co-authored); and Burning Down the House:  Newt Gingrich, The Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party. The New York Times named the book as an Editor's Choice and one of the 100 Notable Books in 2020. His most recent books are Abraham Joshua Heschel:  A Life of Radical Amazement; The Presidency of Donald J. Trump:  A First Historical Assessment (editor); Myth America:  Historians Take on the Biggest Lies and Legends About Our Past (co-edited with Kevin Kruse); and Our Nation at Risk:  Election Security as a National Security Issue (co-edited with Karen Greenberg). He is currently working on a new book about the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the 1964 Democratic Convention entitled ‘Is this America?’:  Reckoning with Racism at the 1964 Atlantic City Democratic Convention. In January 2025, Columbia Global Reports will publish his book, In Defense of Partisanship. Professor Zelizer, who has published over 1,200 op-eds, has received fellowships from the Brookings Institution, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the New York Historical Society, and New America.

For updated event information, visit the alumni events page: https://www.horacemann.org/alumni/events

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