Joseph E. Aoun, a leader in higher education policy and a renowned scholar in linguistics, is the seventh President of Northeastern University.
President Aoun has strategically aligned the University’s research enterprise with three global imperatives—health, security, and sustainability. Northeastern’s faculty focus on interdisciplinary research, entrepreneurship, and transforming academic research into commercial solutions for the world’s most pressing problems. During President Aoun’s tenure, the University has realized a 189 percent growth in external research funding, along with approximately 1,500 patent applications filed by faculty and students.
Watch this New England Aquarium Lecture Series event featuring Cornell William Brooks, distinguished professor, civil rights attorney, ordained minister, and former president and CEO of the NAACP. If humanity has an inborn affinity and perhaps affection for nature—what E.O. Wilson describes as biophilia—humans have a responsibility to the environment. This responsibility may be morally described as “a calling.” This moral calling is not necessarily religious but historical and local. At the very moment when many American cities are being economically revitalized and the global environment is existentially threatened, history morally calls urban residents and suburban neighbors to protect our environment—with a boldly different citizen activism.
Cornell William Brooks is the Hauser Professor of the Practice of Nonprofit Organizations and Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership and Social Justice at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is also Director of The William Monroe Trotter Collaborative for Social Justice at the School’s Center for Public Leadership, and Visiting Professor of the Practice of Prophetic Religion and Public Leadership at Harvard Divinity School. He is the former president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a civil rights attorney, and an ordained minister.
Under his leadership, the NAACP secured 12 significant legal victories, including laying the groundwork for the first statewide legal challenge to prison-based gerrymandering. He also reinvigorated the activist social justice heritage of the NAACP and conceived of and led the 2015 “America’s Journey for Justice” march from Selma, Alabama, to Washington, D.C., over 40 days and 1,000 miles.
Professor Brooks holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and a Master of Divinity from Boston University’s School of Theology, where he was a Martin Luther King, Jr. Scholar. He is a fourth-generation ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
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