The heart of the CIC Visiting Fellows program is the roster of 125 professionals across various disciplines who can engage students, faculty, and community members in explorations of important yet complex topics, such as climate change, poverty, criminal justice and policing, and American civic engagement. Fellows share a dedication to fostering the professional and intellectual development of the next generation of leaders— exemplified by their eagerness to spend time on CIC member campuses speaking in classes, meeting with community members, and mentoring students.
CIC Visiting Fellows have continued to produce new work and make noteworthy achievements, despite the pandemic.
- Long-time Fellow and Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist David Shipler published two intriguing reports on his blog, The Shipler Report: one on food insecurity in America focused on childhood malnutrition and another on the June 2021 Geneva summit between Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin. Another Fellow interested in food insecurity, poet and agricultural expert Hiram Larew, uses webinars and roundtables to mobilize poets to help bring attention to the issue.
- The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the U.S. criminal justice system and is headed by Fellow Carroll Bogert, won several awards this spring. In June, the Marshall Project won a Pulitzer Prize in national reporting for Mauled, an investigation on lifelong injuries caused by police dog bites. In May, the Marshall Project was honored with 2021 Deadline Club Awards (presented by the New York City chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists) for two projects, including the 2020 documentary, Anatomy of Hate, which tells the powerful story of how three Muslim American students were killed in 2015. The Marshall Project also is working on new initiatives that examine COVID-19 infections in state and federal prisons.
- In June, composer and Fellow Paul Dresher joined with several other musicians to live stream a concert, “With Friends Like These,” featuring multi-instrument improvisation.
- Fellow Mike Hingson, blind since birth, whose book about how his seeing-eye dog guided him to safety from the 78th floor of the World Trade Center on 9/11, began spearheading a campaign to make websites accessible to the visually impaired.
- In June, Fellow Jane Best was highlighted in The Economist, in the obituary of the friend with whom she co-founded the nonprofit God’s Love We Deliver in the mid-1980s to bring home-cooked meals to victims of AIDs. Today the nonprofit organization relies on 17,000 volunteers in metropolitan New York to feed 2.5 million impoverished residents on an annual budget of $23 million.
- Across the Atlantic, Elizabeth Day, a British writer and host of the podcast How to Fail, recently published two new books: a novel, Magpie, and a nonfiction work,
Failosophy: A Handbook for When Things Go Wrong. The Stylist said of the latter, “Elizabeth Day has revolutionized the way we see failure,” and the Sunday Times reported
Failosophy as a “top five best seller.” Day is an award-winning writer and broadcaster who also works as a columnist for You magazine. - Louise Dube, a recent addition to the roster of Visiting Fellows, heads iCivics, a nonprofit educational movement started by former U.S. Supreme Court judge Sandra Day O’Connor in 2009 in order to reintroduce civics courses to American K–12 schools. A recent interview given by Dube to The Fulcrum focused on creating school environments where controversial issues such as critical race theory can be discussed in a civil manner. Today iCivics reaches 7.6 million students in all 50 states.
- Julius Krein is the newest addition to the roster. Formerly a hedge fund analyst, Krein is founder and editor of American Affairs, a quarterly journal that examines U.S. industrial policy and political economy from a conservative perspective. He has lectured at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford University and has appeared on FOX News, MSNBC, and CNN.