Mark Nordenberg
Board Co-Chair, Eradicate Hate Global Summit; Chancellor Emeritus and Chair of the Institute of Politics, University of Pittsburgh
2021, 2022, 2023, 2025, Current
In a University of Pittsburgh career spanning more than forty-five years, Mark Nordenberg has held a succession of key leadership positions, including Dean of the School of Law and Chancellor of the University. During his nearly two decades of service as its Chancellor, Pitt achieved dramatically higher levels of quality and impact on virtually every front. During that same period, the higher education and healthcare sector played a critical role in the rebirth of the regional economy.
Nordenberg now serves as Chair of Pitt’s Institute of Politics and Director of its Dick Thornburgh Forum for Law & Public Policy and holds the special faculty rank of Distinguished Service Professor of Law. For more than thirty years, Pitt’s Institute of Politics has provided a non-partisan forum for elected officials and other civic leaders to address policy issues of importance to Western Pennsylvania. The Dick Thornburgh Forum for Law & Public Policy offers public programming on important global, national, and regional issues. The Institute also includes the Elsie Hillman Civic Forum, which conducts programs designed to nurture a commitment to civic engagement in Pitt students.
In the aftermath of Pittsburgh’s hate-fueled synagogue shootings, Nordenberg served on the small independent committee created by the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh to fairly disburse millions of dollars of undesignated donations made to its “victims of terror fund.” As co-chairs of that group’s subcommittee on memorialization, commemoration, and education, he and CMU President Emeritus Jared Cohon laid the foundation for the Collaboratory Against Hate, a research initiative jointly launched by Pitt and Carnegie Mellon. At the same time, he accepted an invitation from Laura Ellsworth, a former student and now the partner-in-charge of global community service initiatives for the international law firm Jones Day, to co-found and co-chair the Eradicate Hate Global Summit.
Following the most recent census, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court asked Nordenberg to chair the state’s Legislative Reapportionment Commission. Despite these highly polarized times, the group produced a plan that was approved by a 4 to 1 bipartisan vote within the commission itself, unanimously upheld by the state Supreme Court, and widely praised by good government organizations and groups representing minority communities.
At the Summit
The Eradicating Hate Global Summit was both eye-opening and empowering. To have so many experts in the field of countering hate, all there sharing their expertise, working towards practical and real world solutions, was incredibly unique. It is this focus on meaningful conversations, answers, and solutions that makes Eradicating Hate so incredibly important. The spread of hate is a wicked problem, and the way Eradicating Hate approaches it is how we are going to solve it.
