DR. JOHN MAGUIRE, Keynote Speaker 

2010 Leadership Awards Luncheon
Thursday, January 14, 2010 at 12:00 NOON at Knoxville Marriott

Dr. John Maguire was named President Emeritus of Claremont Graduate University in 1998 after serving as President for 17 years.  Currently, he is engaged in racial and social justice community building projects as Director and Senior Fellow in the Institute of Democratic Renewal in the University’s School of Politics and Economics.  Dr. Maguire has degrees from Washington and Lee University and Yale Divinity School.  He has served on the faculty at Wesleyan University and was a Fulbright scholar engaged in post-doctoral research at the University of Tübingen in Germany.  This past May, he received the Lifetime Achievement Medal from the Fulbright Association.

He was a colleague of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and is a life director of the King Center where he served in its initial year as Chairman of the Board.  In addition, he serves on boards for Union Theological Seminary, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and other organizations.  He is currently the Senior Fellow at the Institute for Democratic Renewal and Senior Consultant for Project Change (IDR/PC), a joint anti-racism venture, and Senior Consultant to the annual Poetry in Idyllwild program.

Dr. Maguire is deeply involved in his twin passions -- social justice and the arts, especially poetry. His joint anti-racism venture with the Institute for Democratic Renewal/Project Change brings together organizations incubated in a university and in a corporation. IDR/PC's growing successes range from swelling the ranks of alumni of the venerable anti-racism People's Institute in New Orleans to an anti-predatory lending law in the State of New Mexico.

Dr. Maguire delights in championing poetry, which he sees as an alternative form of discourse - another way to give voice to those same deep feelings and convictions expressed in the vocabulary of true spirituality.