The annual Social Justice Awards ceremony on May 20 brought 160 people to the Hanover Inn Ballroom to celebrate this year’s honorees and hear a keynote speech by Nobel laureate and investigative journalist Maria Ressa.
The awards recognize individuals at Dartmouth and in the Upper Valley who have consistently demonstrated their commitment to furthering civil rights, public health, environmental or social justice, and education.
Tennille Haynes, associate vice president for inclusion and strategic engagement in Institutional Diversity and Equity, introduced Ressa and the honorees at the event, which was also livestreamed.
Alluding to this year’s theme, “The Urgency of Now,” Haynes said, “the work of justice does not wait. It demands our presence, our courage and our willingness to act. Even when, and especially when, it is difficult.”
Ressa, who is Filipino-American, has been an investigative journalist for 40 years, including for CNN, and founded the Filipino independent journalism website Rappler. She is the author of Seeds of Terror: An Eyewitness Account of al-Qaeda’s Newest Center of Operations in Southeast Asia and How to Stand Up to a Dictator.
The latter chronicles her campaign to expose the human rights abuses of the regime of former Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte, who is now under arrest by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Ressa, who was threatened and arrested by the Duterte regime, was also the subject of the 2020 documentary A Thousand Cuts, which was shown at the Sundance Film Festival, and followed Ressa and her fellow journalists as they took on Duterte. It was screened earlier this month at the Hopkins Center for the Arts.
Ressa shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 with Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov. Both were cited for their “efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace,” according to the Nobel Prize website. She is currently a professor of practice at Columbia University and co-leads its Technology and Democracy Initiative.
In a sobering 30-minute address, Ressa made the case for why social media pose a threat to democracies worldwide, and why it is so difficult to keep ahead of the online manipulation of facts and constant harassment. But she also reiterated her belief in human decency, truth-telling, and the power of people standing together in common cause against autocracy, citing the Social Justice Awards honorees as examples of civic good.
“We hold the line. We link arms. It’s not a slogan. It’s a practice,” Ressa said. “It’s what each of the people we’re about to honor has been doing in their own way for years, and in some cases for decades. It isn’t glamorous, it’s repetitive. It’s often lonely, and it is the only thing that has ever worked.”
The forces arrayed against democracy are many, and powerful, Ressa said.
Citing a 2018 MIT study, Ressa said that lies on the internet have been shown to spread six times faster than truths. There are rewards for clickbait, for lying, for real or manufactured outrage.
“That’s the incentive structure we live in today. And if you lace it with fear, anger, and hate, it spreads even more virally,” she said. “Since 2016, when Duterte was elected in the Philippines, I’ve been saying this over and over and over: facts, truth, trust. All of these lead to a shared reality. You need facts to have truth. You need truth to have trust.”
Without that shared, agreed-upon reality, Ressa argued, “you can’t have the rule of law, you can’t have journalism. You can’t begin to solve any problem, let alone the existential ones, like climate change, or those pandemics that we’re living through.”
Democracy itself is at risk, and what used to be military battles have moved online, she said. “We call it narrative warfare. It’s not a metaphor: it’s a method.”
When the “information ecosystem” is so degraded that people don’t know what or who to believe, when they can no longer distinguish between fact and fiction, they will often believe the loudest voices, Ressa said. “And when that happens, the strongman wins, then the lawsuits come, then it’s institutional capture.”
Death by a thousand cuts is how democracy disappears, she said.
Add to that the advances in artificial intelligence, with its potential to rapidly alter and manufacture reality, and “the cost of producing a lie has gone to zero. So the cost of finding a fact has gone up. That’s the asymmetry that breaks every assumption in our democracies, and what we built our democracies on,” she said.
If that isn’t enough, Ressa said, there’s an ancillary harm. “When we hand our thinking over to machines, our brains do less.”
Habitual AI users will lose the practice and habit of thinking, and they will lose clarity of thought, she said. AI, which relies on the probability of the next most likely word or image, she said, is an “engine of the average.”
The job of defending democracy and human ingenuity and creativity is the responsibility of “every person in every domain who refuses to let the lie stand, who insists on the facts—one community at a time,” she said. “That’s the urgency of now. We don’t have the luxury of waiting for someone else to fix this.”
“There’s no cavalry. We—you—are the cavalry,” Ressa concluded.
Haynes saluted the 2026 honorees, who were introduced by a video montage describing their work, for acting “thoughtfully, persistently, and bravely with their spheres of influence to expand opportunity and equity for others. They show us what it means to lead from where you are, to speak out when it matters, and to lift others as you rise.”
The 2026 Social Justice Awards honorees were:
The Lifetime Achievement Award
Charles R. Thomas Jr. ’79
Chair and Professor of Radiation Oncology and Applied Sciences at Geisel School of Medicine
The Lester B. Granger ’18 Award
Cathleen Caron ’92
Founding Director of Justice in Motion
The Holly Fell Sateia Award
Bala Chaudhary
Associate Professor of Environmental Studies
The Upper Valley Community Award
Martha Tecca, Tuck ’87
Chair of the Board at Supporting and Helping Asylees and Refugees (SHARe)
Ongoing Commitment
Carmen Lopez ’97
Executive Director, College Horizons and Member, Native American Visiting Committee
Jodi Guinn ’09
Associate Director and Senior Clinical Instructor, Harvard Education Law Clinic
Emerging Leadership Award
Sarah Kelly
Lecturer and Research Associate in Geography and Research Scientist and Co-Founder of the Energy Justice Clinic at the Irving Institute for Energy and Society
Student Organization Award
Tuck Community Consulting
Co-Chairs: José Caraveo, Tuck 26; Maddy Hinesley, Tuck ’26; and Ethan Mulvey, Tuck ’26.
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The Social Justice Awards are sponsored by Institutional Equity and Diversity and co-sponsored by the Office of the Provost, Department of Government, Tuck Center for Business, Government, and Society, Geisel School of Medicine, Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life, the William Jewett Tucker Center, Dartmouth Center for Social Impact, Dartmouth Dialogues, Dartmouth NEXT, and the Office of Pluralism and Leadership.
