Speakers
Anne D. Neal
President, American Council of Trustees and Alumni
Anne D. Neal is president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a nonprofit advancing academic excellence, academic freedom, and accountability in higher education. Ms. Neal is a First Amendment attorney and formerly served as general counsel of the National Endowment for the Humanities. She serves on the boards of many cultural and civic organizations, including those of the All Hallows Guild, the Washington National Cathedral, the Washington Founders’ Committee for Historic Mount Vernon, the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, and the U.S. Capitol Historical Society. Ms. Neal regularly gives lectures and offers expert testimony, with experience before the U.S. Senate, the Foreign Policy Association, the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, the National Association of Scholars, Montana State University, and the U.S. Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education. She has also convened a number of higher education conferences under the auspices of The Philanthropy Roundtable. She is the author of numerous publications relating to higher education, the arts and humanities, landscape architecture, and the law. Ms. Neal graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from Harvard College with an A.B. in American history and literature; she received her J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she served as the first female editor of the Harvard Journal on Legislation.
