A MacArthur “Genius” Fellow and recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal, Professor Fryer received tenure at Harvard University at age 30. A professor of economics, he conducts meticulous research on education reform, social interactions, and police use of force. Jason Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. For over 20 years, he has written opinion pieces on politics, economics, education, immigration, and race. Mr. Riley is a recipient of the 2018 Bradley Prize, a frequent public speaker, and the author of several books, including most recently The Affirmative Action Myth: Why Blacks Don’t Need Racial Preferences to Succeed.
Riley and Fryer delivered these remarks at the 2025-2026 series of the Levy Forum for Open Discourse. The Levy Forum is a speaker series hosted at the Palm Beach Synagogue, sponsored by ACTA board member Paul Levy and ACTA. The goal of these events is to promote the epistemic virtues that ACTA seeks to promote on university campuses across the country, such as curiosity, objectivity, and wisdom.
Professor Giordano sits down with Steve McGuire of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni to expose the catastrophic collapse in academic preparedness across America’s education system. Using UC San Diego’s alarming new data showing freshmen unable to add single digit numbers, round to the nearest hundred, or subtract fractions, this episode examines how decades […]
ACTA’s Hero of Intellectual Freedom award was presented to Pano Kanelos, Founding President of the University of Austin. Dr. Kanelos served as the inaugural president of UATX from 2021 to 2024 and then as chancellor until Fall 2025. Under his leadership, UATX devoted itself to showing how higher education can be rescued from the illiberalism […]
Join Dr. Karen Weaver and special guest Armand Alacbay, Chief of Staff and Vice President for Government Relations at the American Council for Trustees and Alumni for a timely exploration of the Big Ten’s headline-making $2.4 billion private equity deal with UC Investments. Learn why top universities like Michigan and USC are hitting pause, how […]
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