Dr. Pamela Paresky
Founder / Director
Free Mind Foundation

Pamela Paresky is the founder and director of the Free Mind Foundation, a nonprofit that fosters courageous civic engagement by creating spaces for meaningful social connection, principled dialogue, and enduring friendship. Her workshop and eventual book, Habits of a Free Mind: Psychology for Democracy and The Good Life, is a toolkit for engaging across lines of difference without feeling traumatized and without dehumanizing others.

A social psychologist with a clinical background, Dr. Paresky is the author of the guided journal, A Year of Kindness and was the primary researcher and in-house editor for the bestselling book, The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. She writes and speaks about various aspects of illiberalism, including censorship, campus culture, tribalism, and increasingly, Israel and anti-Jewish disinformation. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Jewish Journal, Politico, The Free Press, Sapir, Psychology Today, and elsewhere. 

Dr. Paresky taught leadership as an adjunct professor at the US Air Force Academy and taught the Habits of a Free Mind course at the University of Chicago, Northwood University, and Johns Hopkins University. She is currently affiliated at Harvard University in Steven Pinker’s psychology lab, and through MultiGenerational Consulting Services, LLC, provides leadership development training for individuals, families, nonprofits, and businesses.

She is a Senior Fellow at the NCRI, an Advisor to the Mindful Education Lab at NYU, chairs the Advisory Council of NAVI, and serves on the Advisory Council of Britain’s Free Speech Union. 

For essays on Israel and antisemitism, see “Critical Race Theory and the Hyper-White Jew” in the inaugural issue of Sapir, “Schrödinger’s Trauma” in Psychology Today, and “Shattered” the Jewish Journal’s cover story about October 7. For more articles and to find her Quillette video interviews, see Paresky.Substack.com.