Full Name
Ben Berger
Title
Executive Director, Lang Center for Civic & Social Responsibility
Institution
Swarthmore College
Speaker Bio
Ben Berger is Executive Director of Swarthmore College’s Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility and associate professor in the Department of Political Science. Under Berger’s Lang Center leadership, Swarthmore has achieved international recognition as an Engaged Scholarship leader among liberal arts colleges. His Lang Center team was chosen as Campus Compact’s sole partner to lead the nationwide Engaged Scholars Initiative, and Lang Center programming earned Swarthmore the Excellence in Student Engagement Award from the international Engagement Scholarship Consortium (for which Berger now serves on the Executive Committee). In 2019 he was named Princeton University’s Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching, instructing a combined class of incarcerated students and Princeton undergraduates at East Jersey State Prison. He has served on nonprofit boards and civic committees, and has expanded and deepened Swarthmore College’s mutually beneficial community collaborations in Chester, Philadelphia, and surrounding regions (with the Camden-based Transformative Justice Initiative as a superlative example). Berger’s book, Attention Deficit Democracy: the paradox of civic engagement—published by Princeton University Press—won the NASSP Best Book Award in 2011. He has written for a variety of political science journals, and has been a repeat guest on the nationally syndicated NPR program “Radio Times” as well as KYW Newsradio’s In Depth radio broadcasts and podcasts. Berger holds an AB from Princeton University and an MA and PhD from Harvard University.
Ben Berger