Richard Keady

Professor Comparative Religious Studies
San Jose State University

Professor Keady received his Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University with a specialization in Religion and Society and has been teaching at San Jose State for 35 years. For the past six years, he has been working to build campus and local capacity to deal with conflict in a creative and effective manner. He is co-founder of Conflict and Common Ground, a San Jose State organization that promotes the reduction of campus conflict, including religious conflict, via work with the University Campus Police, resident assistants in the dormitories, education of student leaders, and training of faculty, staff and students to be peacemakers on campus. Off campus he is co-founder of the Santa Clara County Campus Consortium, an organization that brings together for mutual support and exchange of resources faculty and staff from San Jose State University, Stanford University, Santa Clara University and approximately eight local community colleges, as well as representatives of the Human Relations Commission of Santa Clara County. In conjunction with this work, he has been co-principle investigator (with Shawn Spano, Communication Studies) of the Ford Foundation “Difficult Dialogues Seminar” at San Jose State, through which difficult religious dialogues were addressed.