Professor Jennifer Lackey has been awarded the 2023 Horace Mann Medal from Brown Graduate School, according to their recent announcement. Lackey is the Wayne and Elizabeth Jones Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern.
The Horace Mann Medal is given annually to a Brown Graduate School alumnus or alumna who has made significant contributions in his or her field, inside or outside of academia.
“Lackey is, by any measure, one of the top intellectual leaders in her field. But she is also one of those scholars who has taken extremely seriously her mission to apply her scholarly expertise outside the academy in a way that contributes to society at large,” says David Christensen, Professor of Philosophy at Brown University and one of Lackey’s nominators.
Lackey is the founder and director of the Northwestern Prison Education Program (NPEP), a partnership between Northwestern University and the Illinois Department of Corrections – notably, the only bachelor’s degree-granting program for incarcerated students offered by a top 10 university in the United States.
“My father and my cousin (who was more like the older brother I never had) went to prison before me, plus a handful of other relatives. For me, NPEP is the hammer that will break the generational chain of incarceration that has plagued my family.” –Brandon Perkins, student, Northwestern Prison Exchange Program
Read the full press release here.