Professor McNeal one of 25 Young Leaders invited to Switzerland conference

Professor Laura McNeal has been invited to participate in the 2015 American Swiss Foundation Young Leaders Conference, Nov. 7-14 in Switzerland. She is one of only 25 young leaders invited.

According to her invitation, the “Young Leaders Conference, now entering its 26th year, brings together some 25 prominent young American leaders with an equal number of their Swiss counterparts for a week of intensive discussions on a broad range of issues of concern to both countries. Participants can also expect to travel and meet with high-level Swiss government officials and business, media, and cultural leaders. The U.S. group is bipartisan.”

The Foundation’s Chairman Emeritus, Faith Whittlesey, who served twice as U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland, will be present throughout the event.

Additionally, Professor McNeal was invited to speak at Duke Law School on Nov. 20 for a program titled "The Present and Future of Civil Rights Movements: Race and Reform in 21st Century America.”

She will provide an overview of her paper titled, “Derailing the School-to-Prison Pipeline: A Call to Action.”

In it, she highlights the work the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School is currently conducting to help eradicate the school-to-prison pipeline. Specifically, the Institute is currently exploring how to reduce the influence of explicit and implicit bias by key decision makers in the school disciplinary process (e.g. teachers, principals, school administrators).

McNeal and others have worked with school administrators in large urban districts to help them recognize how their implicit and explicit biases influence their disciplinary decisions, such as issuing harsher sanctions to African American males than their white peers. Their training is designed to reduce racial disparities in school disciplinary decisions by helping educators recognize and actively respond to the racial bias they may unconsciously and consciously be acting upon as they make discipline-related decisions.