Sheryll D. Cashin

Sheryll D. Cashin of Washington, D.C., a trustee since 2002, graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt University in 1984 with a degree in electrical engineering. A British Marshall Scholar, she received an M.A. in Jurisprudence (English Law) from Oxford University in 1986, with second highest honors. Then, in 1989, she graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she served as an editor on the Harvard Law Review.

Ms. Cashin served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and to Judge Abner Mikva, formerly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
She joined the Georgetown University Law Center faculty in 1996 after having served in the Clinton White House for three years, first as Director for Community Development and, in her final year, in direct service to Vice President Al Gore as Staff Director for Community Empowerment. In both capacities, she developed and oversaw policies to support revitalization in low-income communities. She simultaneously served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

In her capacity as a professor of law at Georgetown, Ms. Cashin teaches and writes about government, politics, and inequality in American life. Her recent book, The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class are Undermining the American Dream, received critical praise in the national press for its forthright discussion of American race relations. She is a frequent radio and television commentator. She also has published several academic articles about the impact of federalism and decentralized government on racial and political minorities.

Ms. Cashin has served on the boards of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, the International Foundation for St. Catherine’s College (Oxford), Vanderbilt’s Washington D.C. alumni club, the British Marshall Scholars Selection Committee for the North Eastern Region, and the Vanderbilt Alumni Association. She currently serves on the governing board of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. In 2000, Ms. Cashin was awarded the Walter R. Murray Jr. Distinguished Alumnus Award by the Association of Vanderbilt Black Alumni. She is regularly an invited speaker at Vanderbilt’s Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture Series.
Ms. Cashin is also a visual artist.

She is married to Marque Chambliss and they have two sons Logan and Langston.