Marian Miner Cook
AthenaeumA distinctive
feature of social and
cultural life at CMC
Marian Miner Cook
AthenaeumA distinctive
feature of social and
cultural life at CMC
Marian Miner Cook
AthenaeumA distinctive
feature of social and
cultural life at CMC
Unique in U.S. higher education, the Athenaeum brings today’s leading scholars and activists, innovators and entrepreneurs, politicians and poets, scientists and musicians to engage our community in an intimate and relaxed setting. A complete, current list of open events is available.
Coming Up at the Ath
Pat Crowley '02 is founder and CEO of Chapul Inc., a company revolutionizing the food industry with their award winning cricket bars. Fueled with a passion for a more sustainable future, Crowley has broken down cultural barriers and introduced edible insects into western cuisine. From hand-making energy bars in a small kitchen, to a crowd-funded start-up, then on to winning an investment from Mark Cuban on the hit TV show, Shark Tank, Pat has created an international presence and ignited a revolution that is challenging the boundaries of food. Pat has been interviewed by CNN, Huffington Post, Wall Street Journal, and has spoken from TEDx, University, and International stages.
After graduating CMC in 2002, Crowley hitchhiked and surfed his way through Central America, witnessing first-hand the global water crisis. He returned to the U.S. to receive his M.S. in hydrology and dedicated his career to ensuring a more sustainable water future. Diving into the the largest consumer of global water supply, agriculture, it became evident that our food system is in need of a massive revolution.
Eating insects is his attempt at such a revolution.
A long-time resident of Santa Barbara, Congresswoman Lois Capps represents California’s 24th District, which includes San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties, and a portion of Ventura county. She has served in Congress since 1998.
A nurse and educator by training, Capps’ extensive healthcare background informs her work in Congress where she is a respected and effective leader, especially on issues related to public health. She has successfully spearheaded and passed legislation specifically to address the national nursing shortage, detect and prevent domestic violence against women, curb underage drinking, improve mental health services, provide emergency defibrillators to local communities, improve research on pediatric rare diseases, support greater diversity in clinical trials for more effective treatments, bring CPR instruction to schools, identify and link newborns with hearing loss to services, strengthen Medicare coverage for patients suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease, expand TRICARE health coverage for military mothers, and improve rental car safety to protect consumers.
Capps has also been at the forefront of efforts to protect the environment and promote clean energy and green technology. She has led efforts to prevent new oil and gas drilling off our coast and on the public’s lands, strengthen oil pipeline safety and spill response, protect consumers from shouldering the financial burden of cleaning up water pollution in their water supplies, and conserve wildlife and rare species native to the Central Coast. She has also authored laws to establish a national system for ocean monitoring, expand conservation efforts for our public lands and strengthen labeling standards for organic foods.
Among other commitments, she serves on the powerful Committee on Energy and Commerce where she sits on the Health, Energy & Power, and Environment & the Economy subcommittees and also serves on the Natural Resources Committee where she sits on the Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources, Subcommittee on Federal Lands. Her work on this committee is focused on energy production, fisheries and wildlife, public lands, oceans, and Native Americans.
Capps graduated from Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington with a B.S. in Nursing with honors and worked as a nursing instructor in Portland, Oregon. She earned an M.A. in Religion from Yale University while working as Head Nurse at Yale New Haven Hospital and an M.A. in Education from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has received honorary doctorates from Pacific Lutheran University and Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary.
Representative Capps’ Athenaeum presentation is sponsored by the Rose Institute of State and Local Government.
John Prendergast is the founding director of the Enough Project, an initiative to end genocide and crimes against humanity. He is also the co-founder of the Sentry, a new investigative initiative focused on dismantling the networks financing conflict and atrocities. Prendergast has worked for the Clinton administration, the State Department, two members of Congress, the National Intelligence Council, UNICEF, Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group, and the U.S. Institute of Peace. During his time in the US state department, Prendergast was an instrumental part of a team which mediated, and ended, the 1998-2000 war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the deadliest war in the world at the time. Since then, Prendergast has made it his mission to combat mass atrocities in Africa.
He is the author or co-author of ten books. His latest book, Unlikely Brothers: Our Story of Adventure, Loss, and Redemption (2012), is a dual memoir co-authored with his first little brother in the Big Brother program—a program in which he has been involved for over 25 years. His previous two books were co-authored with Don Cheadle, Not On Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond (2007), a New York Times bestseller and NAACP non-fiction book of the year, and The Enough Moment: Fighting to End Africa's Worst Human Rights Crimes (2010). He is also beginning a book project on the Congo with Ryan Gosling and New Yorker writer Kelefa Sanneh.
The recipient of multiple honorary degrees and awards, Prendergast has taught at many American and foreign colleges and universities and is a board member and strategic advisor to Not On Our Watch, the organization founded by George Clooney, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, and Brad Pitt that advocates in support of global human rights. He appears in the Warner Brothers' motion picture "The Good Lie" (2014), starring Reese Witherspoon and is a primary subject of the book by Jane Bussman, A Journey to the Dark Heart of Nameless Unspeakable Evil (2014).
John Prendergast’s Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights.
As the Mao era fades in popular memory, its history has fallen out of focus and has been infused with myth. Drawing on his recent book, China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed (Harvard 2015), Andrew Walder will take up two related questions. First, what were Mao's intentions and what were the actual outcomes of his radical initiatives? Second, why did these outcomes occur? Mao emerges from the historical record as a radical revolutionary whose initiatives frequently had consequences that he had not intended and that frustrated his designs.
Andrew Walder is the Denise O'Leary and Kent Thiry Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and Senior Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. A political sociologist, Walder specializes on the sources of conflict, stability, and change in contemporary China. He received his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Michigan in 1981. Before coming to Stanford, he taught at Columbia, Harvard, and also headed the Division of Social Sciences at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
His recent publications include China Under Mao (Harvard University Press, 2015); and Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement (Harvard University Press, 2009). He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Professor Walder’s Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by CMC’s Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies.
Other Events and Announcements
Brandi Hoffine '06 has worked in both the public and private sectors in Washington, D.C. for ten years and has expertise on political communications and strategic messaging. Since August 2014, Hoffine has served as assistant press secretary and spokesperson for the White House where she handles a range of domestic and international policy issues.
Prior to the White House, she was a domestic finance spokesperson for the United States Treasury. She also served as Senator Tim Kaine's communication's director on his successful 2012 campaign for the United States Senate in Virginia. She has also worked in communications and research at the Democratic National Committee, including serving as the deputy national press secretary for the Democratic Party, and in the private sector for Deloitte Consulting.
Originally from Sacramento, Hoffine is a 2006 graduate of Claremont McKenna College.
Michael Shear '90 is the White House correspondent for The New York Times’ Washington bureau where he has worked for the last six years. In this role, he also covered the 2012 presidential campaign. Prior to that, he was a reporter for the Washington Post, where he spent 18 years covering local communities, school districts, state politics, the 2008 presidential campaign, and the first two years of the Obama White House.
A member of the Pulitzer Prize winning team that documented the shootings at the Virginia Tech campus in 2007, Shear is a 1990 graduate of Claremont McKenna College and has a masters in public policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
Rukmini Callimachi joined The New York Times in 2014. Her series of articles, “Underwriting Jihad,” showing how ransoms paid by European governments had become one of the main sources of financing for Al Qaeda, won the George Polk Award in International Reporting. She is also a three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, the winner of the Michael Kelly award, and the first journalist in the 75-year history of the Overseas Press Club to win both the Hal Boyle and the Bob Considine awards the same year.
Earlier this spring, she wrote an extensive feature piece on ISIS’s use of birth control to maintain a steady supply of sex slaves. Last summer, she wrote of the lonely young American woman from rural Washington state lured by ISIS. Her insights come not only from dangerous work in the field, but also from meticulous trolling online.
A graduate of Dartmouth College, Callimachi spent ten years at the Associated Press before joining the Times. From 2006 to 2014, she was based in Dakar, Senegal, covering 20 countries as the AP correspondent and West Africa bureau chief.
Ms. Callimachi’s Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights and the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies.
Follow the Athenaeum
Unless otherwise noted, lunch begins at 11:45 a.m.; speaker presentations begin at 12:15 p.m.
Evening receptions begin at 5:30 p.m.; dinner is served at 6 p.m.; speaker presentations begin at 6:45 p.m.
The Athenaeum facilitates dynamic interactions and dialogue that underscore
the essence of a liberal arts education.
