Elliot Gerson - Elliot Gerson is executive vice president for Seminars and Public Programs at the Aspen Institute. Gerson is responsible for the Aspen Institute's seminars, including the Executive Seminar, topical and custom seminars, and those offered in Socrates programs. He also manages the Institute's public programs, including the Aspen Ideas Festival and the World Biomedical Forum.
As American secretary of the Rhodes Trust, he manages the US Rhodes Scholarships. He is also a founding trustee of the Mandela Rhodes Foundation Trust, which focuses on African higher education and leadership; a director of the International Biomedical Research Alliance, affiliated with the National Institutes of Health; and director of a Kabul-based logistics, security, and construction company focused on the reconstruction and redevelopment of Afghanistan.
He was a US Supreme Court clerk and has practiced law, held executive positions in state and federal government and in a presidential campaign, served as president of leading insurance and health care companies, and served on many nonprofit boards, especially in the arts and humanities.
Jack Kemp - Jack Kemp is Founder and Chairman of Kemp Partners, a strategic consulting firm which seeks to provide clients with strategic counsel, relationship development, and marketing advice in helping them accomplish business and policy objectives.
From January 1993 until July 2004 he was co-director of Empower America, a Washington, D.C.-based public policy and advocacy organization he co-founded with William Bennett and Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick.
Mr. Kemp received the Republican Party's nomination for Vice President in August of 1996 and since then has campaigned nationally for reform of taxation, Social Security and education.
Prior to founding Empower America, Mr. Kemp served for four years as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. He was the author of the Enterprise Zones legislation to encourage entrepreneurship and job creation in urban America and continues to advocate the expansion of home ownership among the poor through resident management and ownership of public and subsidized housing.
Before his appointment to the Cabinet, Mr. Kemp represented the Buffalo area and western New York for 18 years in the United States House of Representatives from 1971-1989. He served for seven years in the Republican Leadership as Chairman of the House Republican Conference.
Before his election to Congress in 1970, Mr. Kemp played 13 years as a professional football quarterback. He was captain of the San Diego Chargers from 1960-1962. He was also the captain of the Buffalo Bills, the team he quarterbacked to the American Football League Championship in 1964 and 1965, when he was named the league's most valuable player.
He co-founded the American Football League Players Association and was five times elected president of that Association. In 2005 Mr. Kemp was recognized by Sporting News as one of the Top 50 Best All Time Quarterbacks.
David M. Kennedy - David M. Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History at Stanford University, where he teaches 20th-century U.S. history, American political and social thought, American foreign policy, American literature, and the comparative development of democracy in Europe and America.
A scholar whose work integrates economic and cultural analysis with social and political history, he received the Pulitzer Prize for his book Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945. His other books include Over Here: The First World War and American Society, The American People in the Depression, and Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger.
He is a co-author of the textbook The American Pageant: A History of the Republic, now in its 13th edition.
Michael Sandel - Michael J. Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he has taught political philosophy since 1980.
He is the author of Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge University Press, 1982, 2nd edition, 1997; translated into eight foreign languages), Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1996), Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics (Harvard University Press, 2005), and The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering (Harvard University Press, 2007).
His writings also appear in general publications such as The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and The New York Times.
Former Congressman Jack Kemp, historian David Kennedy, Harvard professor Michael Sandel and Aspen Institute vice president Elliot Gerson weigh the value of dissent and the efforts of such past patriots as Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.
