Deconstructing current trends in education from AI to free speech and more.

Olati Johnson (Moderator): Olatunde Johnson is the Ruth Bader Ginsburg’ 59 Professor of Law at Columbia Law School where she teaches, writes, and provides public commentary about antidiscrimination law, administrative law, courts, democracy, and inequality in the United States. She directs Columbia’s Constitutional Democracy Initiative and co-directs the Center on Constitutional Governance at Columbia Law School. In 2021, she served on the White House Commission on the Supreme Court. In 2023, she received a Columbia University service award for her collaboration on the podcast “Through the Gale” about the role of lawyers after the pandemic and protests of 2020, and for organizing the “Beyond the Casebook” introduction discussion series on inclusive democracy. She has received several awards for her teaching and service including the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching, and Columbia Law School’s Willis L.M. Reese Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 2016. Prior to academia, Professor Johnson served as constitutional and civil rights counsel to Senator Edward M. Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee and as an attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Professor Johnson graduated from Yale University and from Stanford Law School. After law school, she clerked for Judge David Tatel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and for Justice John Paul Stevens on the United States Supreme Court.

Emily Bernard: Emily Bernard is the author of Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine, which was named one of the best books of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews and National Public Radio. Bernard is the winner of the 2020 Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for autobiographical prose. Her previous works include: Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; and Some of My Best Friends: Writings on Interracial Friendship, which was chosen by the New York Public Library as a Book for the Teen Age. Her essays have been reprinted in Best American Essays, Best African American Essays, and Best of Creative Nonfiction. A 2024 Leon Levy Biography Fellow and a 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, Emily is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont.

Peter Fry: Peter's been teaching for the past 32 years, mostly as a secondary English teacher but earlier as both an elementary and middle school teacher. After starting his teaching career at Landon School in Bethesda, MD, Peter spent two years teaching in Morocco at the Casablanca American School, and then at Essex High School in Vermont while he was earning an M.A.T. at UVM. After graduate school, Peter taught English for six years at Western Reserve Academy in Hudson, Ohio, and has been teaching for the last 19 years at Groton School in Massachusetts. In addition to his classroom work, Peter has also coached football, lacrosse, basketball, and squash. Peter's wife, Gretchen Hummon (Silliman '89), is also an educator who currently teaches fifth grade at a public elementary school in Fitchburg, MA.

Andrew Metrick: Andrew Metrick is the Janet L. Yellen Professor of Finance and Management at the Yale School of Management (SOM) and the Director of the Yale Program on Financial Stability. He earned a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard in 1994, and a B.A. in economics and mathematics from Yale in 1989. Prior to joining the Yale faculty in 2008, he held positions in the finance department at Wharton and the economics department at Harvard. In academic year 2009-10, he was on leave at the Council of Economic Advisers in Washington. Upon returning to Yale, he served as the Deputy Dean of SOM from 2010 to 2016. He lives in New Haven with his wife Susie, two cats, and occasionally his son David (Ezra Stiles’24) and daughter Amy (Silliman ’27).

Dan Scheibe: Dan Scheibe grew up on the Wesleyan University campus in Middletown, CT, where both of his parents worked. Having participated in the Teacher Preparation Program at Yale, Dan began a career in education, starting as an English intern at Jakarta International School (his friend and Yale classmate, Jed Esty, had preceded him there). From JIS, Dan went to teach English at Blair Academy in Blairstown, NJ, where he met his wife, Annie Montesano. Leaving Blair to pursue a Master of Divinity degree at Princeton Theological Seminary, Dan spent the next 4 years of his life finishing his M.Div. while managing a vineyard and winery outside of Princeton with Annie. In 1998, Dan joined the faculty at Middlesex School in Concord, MA, becoming the “Coordinator of Spiritual and Ethical Education.” Along the way, he also earned a M.A.L.S from Wesleyan University and, adding an assortment of administrative responsibilities, became Assistant Head of School at Middlesex. In 2012, Dan became the Head of School at Lawrence Academy, a 9-12 boarding and day school in Groton, MA founded in 1793. Dan and Annie have 4 children between the ages of 18-27: Lilly (SY '19), Tad, Peter, and Hans.

Sarah Wood: Dr. Wood is the Director of the Harvard Macy Institute at Harvard Medical School. She is a board-certified pediatrician, curriculum innovator, and educational leader. Her passions include innovative medical education, longitudinal integrated clerkships, and promoting life-long learning and ongoing professional development for health professions educators. Dr. Wood attended Yale University, where she majored in Psychology and graduated Magna Cum Laude with Honors in Psychology in 1989. She completed her MD Degree at Harvard Medical School in 1995 and went on to train at Boston Children’s Hospital for her internship and residency in Pediatrics from 1995-1998. Dr. Wood then served as Chief Resident at Boston Children’s and as a faculty member for Harvard Medical School. Throughout her career in health professions education, Dr. Wood has served as a Clerkship Director, Curriculum Dean, Department Chair, Professor of Pediatrics, Vice Dean for Medical Education, and Interim Dean for the Schmidt College of Medicine at Florida Atlantic University. The medical school at Florida Atlantic, initially a regional campus for the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, was established in 2011 to address healthcare workforce shortages in the region. Dr. Wood worked for over a decade to build and develop the new school’s innovative curriculum, residencies, and partnerships with 10 regional hospital partners. In May of 2023, Dr. Wood returned to Boston to assume leadership of the Harvard Macy Institute and is committed to creating a global community of medical educators and leaders dedicated to transforming health care delivery and education. Dr. Wood has received numerous teaching and leadership awards and is active nationally with the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), the International Association for Health Professions Education (AMEE), the Council on Medical Student Education in Pediatrics (COMSEP), the Consortium of Longitudinal Integrated Clerkships (CLIC), and is a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and a diplomat of the American Board of Pediatrics (ABP). She is a member of the Gold Humanism Honor Society and was a Harvard Macy Scholar in the 2015 Educators Program. Dr. Wood has published and presented her medical education work at local, regional, national, and international conferences, and serves as a medical education consultant around the globe. She has been married to her husband Mark for 26 years, and they are devoted parents to their daughters Alexandra (25) and Lila (22). They love to travel as a family and are foodies, explorers, and oenophiles! Whenever they can escape from work and school, you will find them with family on Cape Cod or hiking and skiing in Telluride, Colorado. Dr. Wood also enjoys walking, listening to podcasts, and looks forward to her yoga class every Sunday.