Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

A distinctive
feature of social and
cultural life at CMC

 

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Alumni and Parents:
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Mon, February 9, 2026
Dinner Program
Mark Lilla

The subtle relationship between the ideas of freedom and equality is a central theme in Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Less appreciated are Tocqueville’s thoughts about the relationship between equality as an idea and as material reality. Yet his book opens with the assertion that material equality in the face of nature is the “generating fact” of the American regime. Mark Lilla will explore the significance of material equality in Tocqueville’s thinking and the implications of growing inequality in American society today.

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Born in Detroit, Michigan, Mark Lilla was educated at the University of Michigan and Harvard University. After holding professorships at New York University and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, he joined Columbia University in 2007 as Professor of the Humanities wherein he specializes in intellectual history, with a particular focus on Western political and religious thought. His courses include The Modern Self, Enlightenment and Its Critics, and Themes in Intellectual History. 

Lilla has been awarded fellowships by the Russell Sage Foundation, the Institut d’Etudes Avancées (Paris), the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and the American Academy in Rome. In 1995 he was inducted into the French Order of Academic Palms. 
 
Lilla is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Liberties, and publications worldwide. His books include The Stillborn God, The Reckless Mind, The Shipwrecked Mind, and most recently Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know (2024). 

Professor Lilla’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Open Academy at CMC.

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Tue, February 10, 2026
Dinner Program
Erich Hatala Matthes

Erich Hatala Matthes, professor of philosophy at Wellesley College, will explore ways that the aesthetic character of places—inviting, strange, threatening, familiar, comforting, creepy, seedy, sinister, somber, serene, etc.—can impact moral, prudential, and political norms that operate in those spaces. This will in turn lead to questions about how we should approach our power to shape the aesthetic character of places.

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Erich Hatala Matthes is Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Wellesley College, where he has taught for 13 years. He is the author of two books with Oxford University Press: Drawing the Line: What to Do with the Work of Immoral Artists From Museums to the Movies (2022) and What to Save and Why: Identity, Authenticity, and the Ethics of Conservation (2024). His research and teaching cover a wide range of topic on the ethics, politics, and aesthetics of cultural heritage, art, and the environment.

Professor Matthes's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at CMC.

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Wed, February 11, 2026
Dinner Program
Steve Sabicer

Steve Sabicer, food writer and former butcher shop owner, draws on a life lived across farms and cities, boardrooms and butcher blocks, to examine what modern humans have gained—and lost—in our relationship with food and nature. Through stories from the butcher counter, urban agriculture, and observations of omnivores in the wild, Sabicer explores how adaptability, craft, and intention shape our food systems—and our humanity—challenging us to rethink efficiency, resilience, and what it truly means to connect, reconnect, and thrive.

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Steve Sabicer is a writer, entrepreneur, and the creator of The Enlightened Omnivore, a weekly Substack newsletter and podcast exploring food, craft, and ecology in a rapidly changing world. 

More than a decade ago, he left a successful Fortune 500 career to apprentice as a butcher, eventually helping grow Electric City Butcher into one of Food & Wine magazine’s Top 100 butcher shops by sourcing exclusively from California farms practicing regenerative agriculture.

Sabicer is a graduate of Pomona College and has been featured in Food & Wine, FoodBeast, the Los Angeles Times, and the Orange County Register. He moved ten times before finishing high school and has traveled to more than forty countries. He now lives in Claremont, California, with his wife and three children and escapes whenever possible to his cabin in the Mojave Desert.

 

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Mon, February 16, 2026
Dinner Program
Erik Ramanathan P'27

In three years leading U.S. Embassy Stockholm, Ambassador Erik Ramanathan P’27 saw enviable diplomatic wins. Persuading Sweden to send crucial arms to defend Ukraine despite longstanding pacifist prohibitions. Shepherding Sweden into NATO after 210 years of neutrality, buffeted by two years of concerted resistance. And guiding robust security and sustainability investments in the Arctic by a nation long focused on its Baltic south. Trust building in our transatlantic relationship was the essential stock-in-trade. That trust is now deeply imperiled. Has America abandoned Kyiv, empowering Russia’s westward imperialism? Was NATO expansion a waste of Nordic resources when anchor ally America threatens its integrity? Why collaborate on High North military operations, just to have that experience weaponized against Greenland? Ambassador Ramanathan will explore how the lens of his diplomatic journey informs existential questions about what lies ahead not only for the Nordics, but for the international order we have long championed together.

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Erik Ramanathan P’27 served as U.S. Ambassador to the Kingdom of Sweden from December 2021 until January 2025. Ambassador Ramanathan was credentialed in Stockholm in January 2022, just five weeks prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. His tenure in Sweden centered on working with Swedes across all sectors of society as they navigated far-reaching changes accompanying the reversal of over 200 years of military non-alignment, the decision and challenging accession process to join NATO, and new understandings of autocratic threats to the democratic values and trade and investment norms that undergird their vibrant economy and way of life.

Leveraging key legislative tools like the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS and Science Act, Ambassador Ramanathan led efforts to ensure the U.S. and Sweden worked hand-in-hand to address challenges and opportunities in climate sustainability and green transition, emerging technology, pandemic and supply chain resilience, and other geopolitical complexities that require greater cross-border coordination and cross-sector collective action than ever before. U.S-Swedish technological and defense cooperation flourished, while bilateral trade in goods and services and Swedish direct investment in the U.S. both roughly doubled in three years, creating over 200,000 new American jobs.

Since returning from Stockholm in January 2025, Ambassador Ramanathan has been a keynote speaker, media commentator, and strategic consultant to multinational public and private enterprises navigating fast-changing geopolitics and global security challenges. He serves on the International Policy Advisory Council of the Center for American Progress, guiding global-facing policy development and education for one of America’s leading nonpartisan think tanks.

Prior to his diplomatic service, Ambassador Ramanathan was a long-time strategic leader and change agent on a portfolio of six institutional boards of directors. He most prominently served as Chairman of Heluna Health, a trailblazing national nonprofit that has been advancing public health for over 50 years. Before that, he was Senior Vice President and General Counsel of ImClone Systems, a Nasdaq-100 biotechnology firm. His academic and teaching experience includes four years as Executive Director of the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession, the world’s leading research program and think tank on the evolving global legal profession.

Ambassador Ramanathan has a passionate interest in empowering and supporting others to thrive at scale, whether it be through health care and community wellness, human rights advocacy, or inspiring military and civilian service veterans to start a career in public service. He has been a prominent LGBT+ community leader and change agent for more than three decades and is the recipient of honors including the Global Vision Award. Among numerous non-profit and public service roles, he has long chaired the board of Immigration Equality, guiding its rapid growth into a highly effective national legal services and advocacy organization for LGBT+ and HIV+ immigrants and refugees.

A native of rural western New York, Ambassador Ramanathan earned a B.A. in behavioral biology with highest honors at Johns Hopkins University and a J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School. 

Ambassador Ramanathan is the featured speaker for Family Weekend 2026.

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Tue, February 17, 2026
Lunch Program
Philip Wallach, in a moderated conversation

According to a recent poll, fewer than one in five Americans approve of the way Congress is handling its job. With modern Congress largely absent from many prominent policy debates, recent Congresses have been among the least productive in American history in terms of legislation enacted. Political pundits, scholars, and even members of Congress themselves are increasingly saying that Congress is an irreparable institution that rarely does its job. The scope and scale of Congressional power are undoubtedly waning. In this moderated conversation, Philip Wallach, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and Scott Sloop '26 will discuss the changing role of Congress, the causes of its decline, why Americans should care, and what lawmakers can do to strengthen the legislative branch and restore the vitality of American democracy.

 

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Philip Wallach is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he studies America’s separation of powers, with a focus on regulatory policy issues and the relationship between Congress and the administrative state.

In his latest book Why Congress (Oxford University Press, 2023), Wallach defends the centrality of Congress in America’s constitutional system, traces the roots of current dysfunction, and suggests how the institution might be restored.

Before joining AEI, Wallach was a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, where he authored To the Edge: Legality, Legitimacy, and the Responses to the 2008 Financial Crisis (Brookings Institution Press, 2015). He was later affiliated with the R Street Institute and served as a fellow with the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress in 2019.

Wallach’s scholarly and popular work has been published widely, including in the publications of the Brookings Center on Regulation and Markets, Studies in American Political DevelopmentFortuneNational AffairsNational Review, Law & Liberty, Los Angeles Times, RealClearPolicy, the Bulwark, the Hill, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. A frequent conference participant, he has lectured at William & Mary, the University of Oregon, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, and the University of Michigan, among others.

Wallach received a master’s and doctorate in politics from Princeton University and a bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University’s College of Social Studies.

(Source: AEI)

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Tue, February 17, 2026
Dinner Program
Danielle Allen

Danielle Allen, professor of political philosophy, ethics, and public policy at Harvard University, draws an arc from the American founding to the present to explore how the original vision of the Declaration of Independence can serve us still, even as we also recognize and remedy its imperfections.

(Photo credit: Melissa Blackall_PrimaryHR)

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Danielle Allen is James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University. She is also director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at the Harvard Kennedy School and director of the Democratic Knowledge Project, a research lab focused on civic education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. A professor of political philosophy, ethics, and public policy, she is also a seasoned nonprofit leader, democracy advocate, tech ethicist, and distinguished author. She is a contributing columnist at The Atlantic Magazine, winner of the 2025 Barry Prize, and was the 2020 winner of the Library of Congress’ Kluge Prize, which recognizes scholarly achievement in the disciplines not covered by the Nobel Prize. She received the Prize “for her internationally recognized scholarship in political theory and her commitment to improving democratic practice and civics education.”

Across nearly three decades in higher ed, Danielle has worked to make the world better for young people. She won the Quantrell award for excellence in undergraduate teaching at the University of Chicago, where she also served as Dean of the Division of Humanities (2004-7); she chaired the board of the Mellon Foundation (2015-19), as that foundation expanded the range of institutions in which it invests; she wrote for the Washington Post from 2008-2024, with a column on constitutional democracy; and she has developed a public policy portfolio on issues from cannabis legalization and public health policy to democracy renovation, civic education, and sound governance of and with new technology.

As a scholar, Allen currently concentrates on democracy renovation: studying how to reconnect people to their civic power, experience, and responsibility via civic education and how to redesign our political institutions to improve their responsiveness, increase the accountability of officeholders, and reward the participation of ordinary citizens. Her most recent book, Justice by Means of Democracy, provides the foundation for this work. Her forthcoming book, The Radical Duke, a biography of an 18th century British political reformer, is due out with Liveright/Norton in 2026.

Professor Allen’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by Kravis Lab for Civic Leadership, the Open Academy, the Salvatori Center, and the President's Leadership Fund, all at CMC.

(Photo credit: Melissa Blackall_PrimaryHR)

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Wed, February 18, 2026
Dinner Program
Amy Gallo and Ryan Patel, in conversation

Amy Gallo, contributing editor at Harvard Business Review and author of Getting Along: How to Work with Anyone, and Ryan Patel, global business executive and William F. Podlich Distinguished Fellow at CMC, will explore how women approach conflict and connection in the workplace. They’ll discuss how gender expectations influence communication—and how rethinking disagreement can create more equitable, collaborative environments.

(Photo credit for Ms. Gallo's photo: Stephanie Alvarez Ewens)

Read more about the speaker

Amy Gallo works with individuals, teams, and organizations to help them better collaborate, communicate, and transform their culture to support dissent and debate. She is the best-selling author of Getting Along: How to Work with Anyone (Even Difficult People) and the Harvard Business Review "Guide to Dealing with Conflict." She has published often in Harvard Business Review, where she is a contributing editor. Her writing has been collected in numerous books including on feedback, emotional intelligence, and managing others. 

From 2019 to 2025, Gallo co-hosted HBR's popular Women at Work podcast, examining the struggles and successes of women in the workplace. Gallo has delivered keynotes and workshops at numerous companies and conferences and often appears in media outlets for her perspective on workplace dynamics, conflict, and difficult conversations. Her advice has been featured in multiple news outlets internationally. 

A graduate of Yale College, she holds a master’s in public policy from Brown University. 

Ryan Patel is currently a William F. Podlich Distinguished Fellow at CMC. Patel is an expert in scaling businesses and has served both startups and publicly traded firms. Listed as one of the “Creators to Follow” by LinkedIn Editor in Chief and recognized as a “Top Voice” on Linkedin, Patel is a news commentator board director. Patel also hosts "The Moment with Ryan Patel," featuring conversations with top innovators and executives. 

 This program is co-sponsored by the Financial Economics Institute and Kravis Leadership Institute, both at CMC.

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Thu, February 19, 2026
Lunch Program
Sean Kennedy

Every day, young people enter California’s criminal justice system. Some are caught up in gang affiliations, others simply in areas of high police surveillance. But often the particularities of their social contexts are entirely ignored after being arrested. Sean Kennedy, executive director of the Center for Juvenile Law & Policy at Loyola Law School, works with social forensics teams to bring specific community context information to trial in order to help judges and juries better understand the young defendants in court. Kennedy will explain how the criminal justice system operates for young offenders, and what can be done to address legal inequities for youth from marginalized communities.

(Photo credit: Loyola Law School)

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Sean Kennedy is the executive director of the Center for Juvenile Law & Policy at Loyola Law School. For the past 15 years, he has taught appellate advocacy and the death penalty law seminar at the Law School. In 2013, Kennedy was named Criminal Defense Attorney of the Year by the Los Angeles County Bar Association and received the Fidler Institute Award for Defense Lawyer of the Year from Loyola. He is a recipient of the Public Interest Award by Loyola’s Public Interest Law Foundation. Prior to working in public defense, Kennedy was an associate at Talcott, Lightfoot, Vandevelde, Woehrle & Sadowsky, LLP, where he handled white collar criminal defense cases.

Professor Kennedy’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the history department at CMC.

(Photo credit: Loyola Law School)

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Thu, February 19, 2026
Dinner Program
Melissa Kearney

Melissa S. Kearney, professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame and a leading economist of family and social policy, will discuss the forces behind America’s declining birth rates and changing family structure. Drawing on her book The Two-Parent Privilege, Kearney examines how long-term shifts in marriage, fertility, and economic security are reshaping opportunity for children and the future of the U.S. workforce. As fewer Americans form and sustain two-parent households and as more young adults delay or forgo having children, the consequences reach far beyond individual families and affect inequality, workforce readiness, and the nation’s long-term economic prospects. Kearney’s talk will explore why family structure has become one of the most consequential and often overlooked drivers of America’s economic future.

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Melissa S. Kearney is the Gilbert F. Schaefer Professor of Economics at the University of Notre Dame and director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group. She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Her research focuses on poverty, inequality, social policy, and the economics of families and fertility.

Kearney is the author of The Two-Parent Privilege (University of Chicago Press, 2023), named a Best Book of the Year by The Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker. 

She holds a B.A. in economics from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in economics from MIT.

Professor Kearney's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Lowe Institute of Political Economy at CMC.

(Source: University of Notre Dame)

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Fri, February 20, 2026
Lunch Program
Cristian Eduardo and Yazmin Vafa

With sex trafficking at the forefront of many political conversations, misconceptions about the nature of demand, profit, and power often surround public perception of sexual exploitation and the commercial sex trade. Drawing on survivor experiences and the recently released report that examines purchasers of commercial sex, “Buyers Unmasked,” this Athenaeum panel explores the demographics that are overrepresented in the sex trade. Yazmin Vafa, director of Rights4Girls, and survivor-advocate Cristian Eduardo shine a light on these important issues, helping answer the question: Who fuels the sex trade and at what cost?

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Cristian Eduardo is a prominent advocate, speaker, and educator dedicated to advancing the rights of immigrants, 2SLGBTQ+ individuals, and those affected by human trafficking. As a queer immigrant from Mexico, a survivor of human trafficking, and a person living with HIV, his advocacy is profoundly shaped by his lived experience, fueling his fight against hate and stigma across all sectors. Eduardo serves as a member of the U.S. Advisory Council on Human Trafficking, where he leverages his expertise to advise the President’s Interagency Task Force on federal anti-trafficking policies. His work centers on ensuring these policies are survivor-led, trauma-informed, and focused on holistic recovery. Eduardo partners with non-profit organizations and legislative stakeholders nationwide, providing training and technical assistance at the intersection of human trafficking, immigration, the 2SLGBTQ+ community, and trauma related mental health challenges. Eduardo is a Survivor Leader at New Yorkers for the Equality Model, co-chair of the New York State Anti-Trafficking Coalition, and serves on various advisory boards and committees, including the Interagency Task Force on Human Trafficking. Additionally, he is a key collaborator in HIV prevention efforts, serving on the NYC HIV Planning Group to inform the city’s Integrated HIV Prevention and Care Plan. Eduardo has received numerous honors, including the Advocate of New York City award from the NYC Office to End Gender-Based Violence, the 2023 NJ Freedom Award, and the 2025 Liberator Award Survivor of the Year.

Yasmin Z. Vafa is co-founder and Executive Director of Rights4Girls, a national human rights organization dedicated to ending gender-based violence against young women and girls in the U.S. An award-winning human rights lawyer and advocate, Vafa's work focuses on the intersections of race, gender, violence, and the law. She has successfully advocated for several laws at the federal and state levels, testified before the U.S. Senate, state legislatures, and international human rights bodies, and co-authored multiple reports detailing the over-criminalization of girls and young women of color, particularly, survivors of sexual violence.  Vafa and her work have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio, ABC News, and more. She currently serves on the U.S. Advisory Committee on the Sex Trafficking of Children and Youth, serves as adjunct faculty for the National Judicial Institute on Child Sex Trafficking— an intensive judicial training she co-designed and leads with the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, and previously served on both the Department of Justice National Girls' Initiative Advisory Committee as well as the DOJ National Task Force on the Use of Restraints on Pregnant Women and Girls Under Correctional Custody. She has received numerous awards for her work including the Lois Haight Award for Excellence and Innovation for her legislative advocacy from Congress. 

This conversation will be moderated by Vivienne Arndt '28 and introduced by Macy Puckett Scripps '28.

This program is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at CMC.

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Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum

Claremont McKenna College
385 E. Eighth Street
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