Directors

Herbert Sandler

Mr. Sandler and his wife Marion founded Golden West Financial Corporation in 1963.  They were Golden West’s Chief Executive Officers and Chairmen of the Board from 1963 until 2006 when the company was sold to Wachovia Corporation. Under the Sandlers’ leadership, Golden West became the second largest thrift institution in the United States and was considered to be one of the best managed financial institutions in the country by many industry observers. Fortune magazine ranked Golden West as the nation’s most admired mortgage services company, and on seven separate occasions named Golden West America’s most admired savings institution. Morningstar, a leading provider of investment research, named the Sandlers CEOs of the Year in 2004.  The Sandlers are currently Presidents of the Sandler Foundation and Chairmen Emeriti of Golden West Financial Corporation.

Paul Steiger

Paul Steiger is the editor-in-chief, president and chief executive of ProPublica.

Mr. Steiger is also the chairman of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based nonprofit organization founded in 1981 to promote press freedom by working for the rights of journalists world-wide. He is a trustee of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, based in Miami, which supports transformative programs in areas including journalism and community development.

Mr. Steiger began his journalism career in 1966 as a reporter in the San Francisco bureau of The Wall Street Journal. In 1968, he moved to the Los Angeles Times as a staff writer and, in 1971, he transferred to that paper’s Washington, D.C., bureau as an economics correspondent. He returned to Los Angeles in 1978 to serve as the Times’ business editor. In 1983, Mr. Steiger rejoined the Journal as an assistant managing editor in New York and became deputy managing editor in 1985. He was appointed managing editor in 1991 and served in that role until May 2007.  Under his leadership, The Wall Street Journal’s reporters and editors won 16 Pulitzer Prizes. He served as editor-at-large of the Journal through year end 2007, when he assumed his present position.

In 2008, Mr. Steiger received the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism from Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. In 2007, he won the National Press Club’s Fourth Estate Award. In 2005, Mr.  Steiger was honored with the "Decade of Excellence" award from the World Leadership Forum in London. Also in 2005, the University of Missouri School of Journalism awarded him a Missouri Honor Medal for distinguished service in journalism. In 2002, Mr. Steiger was selected as the first recipient of the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ Leadership Award. The John E.  Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA honored him with the 2002 Gerald Loeb Award for lifetime achievement. Also in 2002, he was awarded the Columbia Journalism Award, given to honor a "singular journalistic performance in the public interest," and the highest honor awarded by the Columbia University School of Journalism. He was named a 2001-2002 Poynter Fellow by Yale University. The National Press Foundation awarded him the 2001 George Beveridge Editor of the Year Award. He was a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board from 1998 to 2007, serving as chairman in his final year. Mr. Steiger personally won three Gerald Loeb Awards and two John Hancock awards for his economics and business coverage. He is co-author of the book, "The ‘70s Crash and How to Survive It," published in 1970.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities and the Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

Professor Gates is also Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford African American Studies Center, the first comprehensive scholarly online resource in the field of African American Studies and Africana Studies. He is co-editor with K. Anthony Appiah of the encyclopedia Encarta Africana published on CD-ROM by Microsoft (1999), and in book form by Basic Civitas Books under the title Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (1999). His most recent books are America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans (Warner Books, 2004), African American Lives, co-edited with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (Oxford, 2004), and The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin, edited with Hollis Robbins (W. W. Norton, 2006).

In 2006, Professor Gates wrote and produced the PBS documentary also called "African American Lives," the first documentary series to employ genealogy and science to provide an understanding of African American history. He also wrote and produced the documentaries "Wonders of the African World" (2000) and "America Beyond the Color Line" (2004) for the BBC and PBS, and authored the companion volumes to both series. Professor Gates is currently at work on a sequel to "African American Lives."

Professor Gates is the author of several works of literary criticism, including Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the "Racial" Self (Oxford University Press, 1987); and The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism(Oxford, 1988), winner of the American Book Award in 1989. He authenticated and facilitated the publication, in 2002, of The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts, the only known novel by a female African American slave and possibly the first novel by an African American woman. He is the co-author, with Cornel West, of The Future of the Race (Knopf, 1996), and the author of a memoir, Colored People (Knopf, 1994), that traces his childhood experiences in a small West Virginia town in the 1950s and 1960s.

Professor Gates has edited several influential anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (W. W. Norton, 1996); and the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers (Oxford, 1991). In addition, Professor Gates is editor of Transition magazine, an international review of African, Caribbean, and African American politics. An influential cultural critic, Professor Gates’s publications include a 1994 cover story for Time magazine, numerous articles for the New Yorker, and in September 2004, a biweekly guest column in The New York Times.

Professor Gates earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in English literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge, and his B.A. summa cum laude in English language and literature from Yale University in 1973. Before joining the faculty of Harvard in 1991, he taught at Yale, Cornell, and Duke. His honors and grants include a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" (1981), the George Polk Award for Social Commentary (1993), Time magazine’s "25 Most Influential Americans" list (1997), a National Humanities Medal (1998), election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1999), the Jefferson Lecture (2002), and a Visiting Fellowship at the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (2003-2004). He has received 44 honorary degrees.

Professor Gates served as Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard from 1991 to 2006.

Alberto Ibargüen

Alberto Ibargüen is president and CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Ibargüen is the former publisher of The Miami Herald and of El Nuevo Herald. During his tenure, The Miami Herald won three Pulitzer Prizes and El Nuevo Herald won Spain’s Ortega y Gasset Prize for excellence in journalism.

He studied at Wesleyan University and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Between college and law school, he served in the Peace Corps in Venezuela ’s Amazon Territory and in Colombia . He practiced law in Hartford , Connecticut until he joined The Hartford Courant, then Newsday in New York before moving to Miami .

Ibargüen is chairman of the board of the Newseum in Washington, D.C., a museum dedicated to free speech and free press. He is a member of the board of PepsiCo and of the Council on Foreign Relations and is on the Trustees’ Council of the National Gallery of Art. Over the years, he has served on the boards of arts, education and civic organizations, including Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Wesleyan University and Smith College . He served as board chair of PBS and of the Florida Philharmonic Orchestra.

For his work to protect journalists in Latin America as part of the Inter American Press Association, Ibargüen received a Maria Moors Cabot citation from Columbia University and George Washington University awarded him an honorary Doctor of Letters.

James A. Leach

James A. Leach is the Director of the Institute of Politics of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Prior to his appointment, Leach taught at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University where he was John L. Weinberg Visiting Professor of Public and International Affairs. Before joining the Princeton faculty he served 30 years as a representative in Congress where he chaired the Banking and Financial Services Committee, the Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs, and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China.

Legislation Leach authored spanned the gamut from creation of an international AID’s Trust Fund to debt relief for the world’s poorest countries; from authorization of an IMF quota increase to making the Peace Corps an independent federal agency; from requiring the federal government to use soy ink to prohibiting internet gambling; from restraining federal employee growth to redressing certain Holocaust asset losses.

The legislation he is perhaps best known for is Gramm-Leach-Bliley which is considered one of the seminal pieces of banking legislation of the 20th century, second in import only to the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

After attending Princeton, the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins, and the London School of Economics, Leach entered the United States Foreign Service and served as a delegate to the Geneva Disarmament Conference and the U.N. General Assembly. In 1973, Leach resigned his commission in protest of the Saturday Night Massacre when Richard Nixon fired his Attorney General, Eliot Richardson, and the independent counsel investigating the Watergate break-in, Archibald Cox.

After returning to Iowa to head a family business, Leach was elected in 1976 to Congress where he came to be a leader of a small band of moderate Republicans. He chaired two national organizations dedicated to moderate Republican causes – the Ripon Society and the Republican Mainstream Committee. He also served as president of the largest international association of legislators – Parliamentarians for Global Action.

Leach serves on the board of several public companies and three non-profit organizations – the Century Foundation, the Kettering Foundation, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and formerly served as a trustee of Princeton University.

Leach holds eight honorary degrees and has received decorations from two foreign governments. He is the recipient of the Wayne Morse Integrity in Politics Award, the Woodrow Wilson Award from Johns Hopkins, the Adlai Stevenson Award from the United Nations Association, and the Edger Wayburn Award from the Sierra Club. A three-sport athlete in college, Leach was elected to the Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma, and the International Wrestling Hall of Fame in Waterloo, Iowa.

Leach resides in Iowa City and Cambridge with his wife Elisabeth (Deba), son Gallagher, and daughter Jenny.

Rebecca Rimel

Rebecca Rimel is president and CEO of The Pew Charitable Trusts.

Prior to joining Pew, Rebecca Rimel had built an exemplary career in health care, specifically in the field of nursing. From 1981 through 1983, she was assistant professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Virginia Hospital, making her the first nurse to hold a faculty position in the university’s medical school. Along with additional teaching and practitioner positions at the University of Virginia Hospital, she was head nurse of the medical center’s emergency department.

Ms. Rimel began her tenure at The Pew Charitable Trusts in 1983 as health program manager. She became executive director in 1988 and accepted her current position as president and CEO in 1994.

In addition to her work at Pew, Rebecca Rimel serves on the Deutsche Bank Scudder Funds board and the PNC Bank advisory board. She is also trustee emeritus of Monticello (the Thomas Jefferson Foundation); a fellow of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia; and a member of the American Philosophical Society along with its prestigious Wistar Association.

Ms. Rimel received her Bachelor of Science, with distinction, from the University of Virginia School of Nursing (1973), and earned a Master of Business Administration from James Madison University in 1983.

Journalism Advisory Board

Jill Abramson, a managing editor of The New York Times

Martin D. Baron, the editor of The Boston Globe

David Boardman, the executive editor of the Seattle Times

Robert A. Caro, historian and biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson

John S. Carroll, the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and the Baltimore Sun

L. Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal

David Gergen, professor of public service at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and director of its Center for Public Leadership

Shawn McIntosh, the director of culture and change at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Ellen Miller, the executive director of The Sunlight Foundation

Gregory L. Moore, the editor of The Denver Post

Priscilla Painton, the new editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster

Allan Sloan, a senior editor at large for Fortune magazine

Kerry Smith, the senior vice president for editorial quality of ABC News

Cynthia A. Tucker, the editor of the editorial page of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution