Lee C. Bollinger is the nineteenth president of Columbia University and the Seth Low Professor of the University. He is one of the United States's foremost scholars of the First Amendment, and his most recent book is The Free Speech Century, with Geoffrey R. Stone (2018).

Agnès Callamard is the director of Columbia University's Global Freedom of Expression initiative and the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary killings. She has led human rights fact-finding missions in more than forty countries and headed the UN investigation into the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.