Ronald Crutcher is a celebrated cellist who served as the 10th President of the University of Richmond from 2015 to 2021. He was born in Cincinnati and began studying the cello at the age of 15 with Professor Elizabeth Potteiger, a faculty member at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. At the age of 17 he won the Cincinnati Symphony Young Artist Competition. As a Woodrow Wilson and Ford Foundation Fellow, he studied at Yale University with the renowned cellist Aldo Parisot and became the first cellist to receive the Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Yale. The recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, Crutcher continued his studies in Germany with Siegfried Palm and Gerhard Mantel. He made his Carnegie Hall debut in March 1985. 

Melody Barnes is Executive Director of the Karsh Institute of Democracy, W.L. Lyons Brown Family Director for Policy and Public Engagement, and Professor of Practice at the University of Virginia. Professor Barnes is also former Assistant to the President and Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council in the Obama Administration.