Join the Kravis Lab for Civic Leadership for the sixth installment of Civitas Sessions (continuing from last year), an Athenaeum lunch series designed to build real-world civic skills and the knowledge needed to live thoughtful, productive lives as responsible community members and leaders. Each session will deliver practical knowledge and discuss the application of the subject matter to important current issues. With a welcoming ‘come-as-you-are’ atmosphere, the Civitas Sessions focus on the stuff you need to know before it becomes the stuff I wish I had known…
In this session Vernon C Grigg III, J.D., Executive Director of the Kravis Lab, and Lily Geismer, Professor of History at CMC, will discuss The Civic Implications of School Choice and Private Education in the United States.
Public education has long been a core responsibility of government and considered critical to the flourishing of democracy. Increasingly, other models of education have been coming to the fore. This talk will explain and help us better understand the emergence and implications of various alternative educational models like private schools, charter schools, and voucher programs on society and civic identity.
(Parents Dining Room - lunch served at 12:00 noon, program begins at 12:15 PM, but feel free to come a little late if you're getting out of class)
Civitas Sessions is organized by the Kravis Lab and moderated by Executive Director Vernon C. Grigg III, JD. A lawyer by training, Grigg holds degrees from Yale Law School (J.D.), the London School of Economics (G.SC.), and the University of Michigan (BA). Vernon comes to the Kravis Lab from his role as CEO & President of Up with People, a fifty-five-year-old international nonprofit education and arts organization. He managed a global team of 50 employees across three continents as he led the nonprofit to sustainability and health despite the challenges of the worldwide pandemic.
Lily Geismer’s research and teaching focuses on 20th century political and urban history in the United States, especially liberalism and the Democratic Party. She is the author of Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality (PublicAffairs, 2022) which examines the Democratic Party during the Clinton era's effort to use the market-based solutions to address poverty and its long-term impact on both economic inequality and the fate of the Democrats. Her first book, Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton University Press, 2015), traces the reorientation of modern liberalism and the Democratic Party away from their roots in labor union halls of northern cities to white-collar professionals in postindustrial high-tech suburbs by focusing on the Route 128 corridor around Boston. She is also co-editor of Shaped by the State: Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2019) and her work has appeared in the Journal of American History, The New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, and Dissent. In 2018, she was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Corporation. Her work has also been supported by the American Council for Learned Societies and the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University.
