 Deborah N. Archer is the Jacob K. Javits Professor at NYU and Professor of Clinical Law at the NYU School of Law. She also directs the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law, and the Civil Rights Clinic at the NYU School of Law. Archer is a nationally recognized expert in civil rights, civil liberties, and racial justice. In January 2021, she was elected national board president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the first Black person to hold the position in the ACLU’s 101-year history. Before the board presidency of the ACLU, Archer was a member of the ACLU’s executive committee and served as general counsel to the board. She is a former chair of the American Association of Law Schools’ Section on Civil Rights and Section on Minority Groups. For many years, she served on the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board, the body that investigates police misconduct. She was also a member of the board of the New York Civil Liberties Union, where she litigated in the areas of voting rights, employment discrimination, and school desegregation. President Hamilton speaks with Professor Archer about her career as a civil rights attorney and scholar, her projects at NYU , her new role at the ACLU, and her view of the next steps—legal and cultural—toward the dismantling of racism within American institutions and society.

Conversations: Hosted by NYU President Andy Hamilton

08: Professor Deborah Archer

Dr. Céline Gounder, is a clinical assistant professor at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, and a practicing HIV/infectious diseases specialist. Dr. Gounder, who has written for numerous publications, is a CNN medical analyst and frequent expert guest on CNN, the BBC, and other networks. She is also the host and producer of American Diagnosis, a podcast on health and social justice, and Epidemic, a podcast about the COVID-19 pandemic. In early 2015, she spent two months volunteering as an Ebola aid worker in Guinea, and interviews she conducted there became the basis of Dying to Talk, a feature-length documentary she made about the 2014-2015 Ebola epidemic in that country. Dr. Gounder served on President Biden's and Vice President Harris's Transition Covid-19 Advisory Board from November 9, 2020 through January 20, 2021, and it is our honor to welcome her to today’s show.

07: Dr. Céline Gounder

NYU Law School professor Bob Bauer served as White House counsel under Barack Obama and as senior advisor to Joe Biden on his 2020 campaign. He has written extensively on a range of topics including the rule of law, election safeguards, national security, and the power of the presidency. In the early days of President Biden's new administration, President Hamilton talks to Bauer about how the US can and should move forward after a period of fracture perhaps unlike any seen since the Civil War.

06:Bob Bauer

Founder and CEO Antonio Di Meglio (Stern ’20) and Co-founder and Creative Director Echo Chen (Gallatin ’20) are current NYU undergrads who established SeaStraws in 2018 with Sophie Kennedy (CAS ’19) and several other NYU students. SeaStraws provides nationwide distributors and individual restaurants with disposable single-use products that minimize environmental impact. The company’s mission is to transform hospitality through sustainable alternatives. In September 2018, the University announced several sustainability initiatives, including its commitment to eliminate plastic straws in the dining halls—resulting in 1,140,000 fewer plastic straws in the waste stream annually. The SeaStraws team contacted the Office of Student Affairs to offer their products to NYU's dining services, and one month later, SeaStraws became the official straws supplier for all of NYU’s dining halls. The business relationship continues to this day. As of September 2019, SeaStraws has sold over 4.5 million paper straws, preventing the use of over 4,700 pounds of plastic. Visit the Conversations homepage at http://www.nyu.edu/president/conversations or contact us at conversations@nyu.edu.

05 - SeaStraws

 Tim Naftali is NYU's clinical associate professor of history and clinical associate professor of public service, and director of NYU's undergraduate public policy major. He was the founding director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California, where he oversaw the release of 1.3 million pages of presidential documents and nearly 700 hours of Nixon tapes.   Naftali is a regular CNN contributor, offering expertise in national security and intelligence policy, international history, and presidential history. As a TV commentator, he has appeared on more than 30 shows and has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, CNN.com, The Los Angeles Times, Slate, and Foreign Affairs, among others. He has served as a historical consultant on television programs such as ABC’s Designated Survivor, and is the author of numerous books, including One Hell of a Gamble": Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964 (1998) and Impeachment: An American History (2018). Visit the Conversations homepage at http://www.nyu.edu/president/conversations or contact us at conversations@nyu.edu.

04 - Timothy Naftali

 Marion Nestle, NYU’s Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, founded the nation’s first academic food studies program at Steinhardt in 1988, helping to forge an interdisciplinary field that looks at food as a complex social and political issue. As a research-based scientist with a PhD in molecular biology, she has examined the role of food marketing on food choice, obesity, and food safety, and emerged as an eminent public voice in challenging the food industry’s claims about the nutritional value of its products. The author of nine books—most recently Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat— Nestle received the James Beard Leadership Award in 2013 and was named the #2 most influential foodie in America (after Michelle Obama) by Michael Pollan in 2011 Visit the Conversations homepage at http://www.nyu.edu/president/conversations or contact us at conversations@nyu.edu.

03 - Marion Nestle

Anthony Appiah, NYU professor of philosophy and law, was named in Forbes magazine in 2009 as one of the “world’s seven most powerful thinkers” by then-Princeton University President Shirley Tilghman. Appiah’s pioneering philosophy on identity and our individual role in the global community have gained acclaim through his numerous books—including 2007’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, which former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called an “appeal for mutual respect and understanding” that he hoped would be heard “far and wide.” Many will surely know him, quite simply, as “The Ethicist”—which is the title of the weekly New York Times Magazine column in which he answers questions posed by readers facing moral dilemmas. Appiah was born in London, where his parents, Joseph (who would become a member of Ghana’s parliament, an ambassador, and president of the Ghana Bar Association) and Peggy Cripps (a novelist, art collector, scholar, and children’s writer) met. On his father's side, his ancestry is traced to the king of Ashanti, a constitutionally protected state in union with Ghana; his mother's lineage extends back to William the Conqueror. Appiah moved as an infant with his parents to Kumasi, Ghana, where he was raised, and eventually earned his PhD in philosophy at the University of Cambridge in 1982. Since then he has also taught at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Ghana, among other institutions.     Visit the Conversations homepage at http://www.nyu.edu/president/conversations or contact us at conversations@nyu.edu.

02 - Anthony Appiah

 Rubén Blades is one of the most successful artists in the history of Latin music. His Afro-Cuban albums touched with rock, jazz, pan-Latin, and other influences have won 17 Grammy and Latin Grammy Awards. As an actor, he has starred in the AMC television series Fear the Walking Dead, and has worked with directors including Robert Redford, Spike Lee, and Ridley Scott. Away from the arts, Blades is equally active, holding degrees in political science and law from the University of Panama, and an LLM from Harvard Graduate Law School. In 1994, he ran for president of the Republic of Panama, coming in third place, and later served as Panama’s minister of tourism from 2004–2009. Blades has been a UN World Ambassador Against Racism, and was recipient of ASCAP's Harry Chapin Humanitarian Award.   Visit the Conversations homepage at http://www.nyu.edu/president/conversations or contact us at conversations@nyu.edu.

01 - Ruben Blades

In these conversations, President Andy Hamilton interviews NYU faculty, students, and alumni who are using their intellectual gifts, determination, and creativity to make a profound difference in our world. With each guest, he pulls back the curtain to learn the origins of their inspiration, the current focus of their work, and their vision for the future.

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Conversations: Hosted by NYU President Andy Hamilton

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