Samuel G. Freedman is an award-winning professor, columnist, and author of nine acclaimed books. Freedman was a staff reporter for The New York Times from 1981 through 1987. From 2004 through 2008, he wrote the paper's "On Education" column, winning first prize in the Education Writers Association's annual competition in 2005. From 2006 through 2016, Freedman wrote the "On Religion" column, receiving the Goldziher Prize for Journalists in 2017 for a series of columns about Muslim-Americans that had been published over the preceding six years. As a professor of journalism at Columbia University, Freedman has been named the nation's outstanding journalism educator by the Society of Professional Journalists and received Columbia's coveted Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching.