25 Facts About Geoffrey Cowan

Geoffrey Cowan was born on May 8,1947 and is an American lawyer, professor, author, and non-profit executive.

In 2010, Cowan was named president of The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands, a position he held until July 2016.

Geoffrey Cowan was born to a Jewish family on May 8,1942, in Chicago, Illinois.

Geoffrey Cowan is the son of Louis G Cowan, former president of the CBS television network and professor at the Columbia School of Journalism.

Geoffrey Cowan's mother, Polly Spiegel Cowan, granddaughter of Joseph Spiegel, was a TV and radio producer, and a civil rights activist who started Wednesdays in Mississippi together with Dorothy Height.

Geoffrey Cowan is a graduate of both the Dalton School and the Choate School.

Geoffrey Cowan went on to graduate from Harvard College, where he studied American History and Literature, and was an editor of The Harvard Crimson.

Geoffrey Cowan is a 1968 graduate of Yale Law School.

Geoffrey Cowan did more to change conventions than anybody since Andrew Jackson first started them.

In 1969, after graduating from law school, Geoffrey Cowan moved to Washington, DC, where he co-founded the first public interest law firm in the United States, the Center for Law and Social Policy.

In 1974, Seymour Hersh revealed that Geoffrey Cowan was his source for a story on the My Lai Massacre that won Hersh the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.

In 1972, Geoffrey Cowan moved to Los Angeles to become the first director of UCLA's Communications Law program.

Geoffrey Cowan spent more than twenty years teaching law to undergraduates in the UCLA Communication Studies program, received numerous teaching awards and founded the Center for Communication Policy.

From 1979 to 1984, Geoffrey Cowan was a member of the Board of Directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, where he played a key role in the development of National Public Radio and the launch of its "Morning Edition" program.

In 1994, President Bill Clinton appointed Geoffrey Cowan to serve the nation as the 22nd director of the Voice of America, the international broadcasting service of the United States Information Agency, which at the time had more than 100 million listeners each week and was broadcast in more than 47 languages.

The VOA under Geoffrey Cowan created a radio documentary series that explored the growth of Islam in the US and the integration of Muslims into everyday life in the country, as well as other innovative programs such as Perspectives and This I Believe.

Geoffrey Cowan launched and remains involved with major USC Annenberg centers and projects, including the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, the Norman Lear Center, the Charles Annenberg Weingarten Program on Online Communities, the Knight Digital Media Center and the USC Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future.

Geoffrey Cowan holds a joint appointment in the USC Gould School of Law and teaches courses in communication, journalism and entrepreneurship.

Geoffrey Cowan produced a new edition of The Quiz Kids, a popular radio and TV series from the 1940s and 1950s that was originally created by his father.

Geoffrey Cowan's late brother, Paul Cowan, was a journalist and staff writer for The Village Voice for more than 20 years, and author of An Orphan in History.

Geoffrey Cowan's sister, Holly Cowan Shulman, is the editor of the Dolley Madison Digital Edition and a professor at the University of Virginia, and his sister Liza Cowan is an artist, graphic designer, curator and blogger.

Geoffrey Cowan serves on the board of the Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, the Berggruen Institute, Common Sense Media, Democracy 21, and the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation.

Geoffrey Cowan is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy.

Geoffrey Cowan chaired the California Bipartisan Commission on Internet Political Practices and served as a member and chair of the White House Fellows regional selection committee during the Clinton and Bush administrations.

In 1991, Geoffrey Cowan was elected to the Common Cause National Governing Board.