Mary Kate Cary was awarded the 2024 Heterodox Academy Open Inquiry Leadership Award for her work to promote viewpoint diversity and open inquiry in higher education. She is the founder and director of Think Again, an initiative at UVA that promotes free speech, viewpoint diversity, critical thinking, and intellectual humility through student-facing programming. At Think Again events, students put down their phones, take off the earphones, and learn how to make their best case respectfully and with humor. One of Think Again's signature events is "Disagree with a Professor," after she learned that polling showed 75% of current students had never disagreed with a professor.
Ms. Cary recently founded the Campus Discourse Project to share hands-on resources and metrics for similar student-facing programming to be used at colleges and universities nationwide. She is currently the chair of the Heterodox Academy's campus community at UVA, one of the largest chapters in the nation.
Mary Kate Cary currently teaches small seminars in the University of Virginia’s Politics Department on political speechwriting and the greatest speeches in American political history. She is currently filming digital presentations on the greatest American speeches and the stories behind them. Ms. Cary co-taught both “Election 2020” and “Election 2024” alongside a Democratic professor, leading the only political science class in America taught from both sides of the aisle. USA Today covered this ground-breaking class. Ms. Cary was previously a Practitioner Senior Fellow for Presidential Studies at UVA’s Miller Center, serving from 2017 to 2023.
In 2021, Ms. Cary served on UVA’s Committee on Free Expression and Free Inquiry, which produced the University’s policy on free speech. She is the founder of the annual UVA Student Oratory Contest, in which students write and deliver short speeches on American democracy in the Dome Room of the Rotunda; judges are former White House speechwriters.
Mary Kate served as a White House speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush from 1989 to early 1992, helping to write over 100 Presidential addresses by him.
She was a political columnist at US News & World Report during the Obama administration, and was executive producer of 41ON41, a documentary on President George HW Bush that aired on CNN worldwide.