Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

After months of debates, polls, and punditry, the primary season has begun! The Iowa caucus will have taken place on February 1st, soon followed by the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary on February 9th. Join an expert panel discussion that will analyze the results from the Iowa caucus, and the up-to-the-minute returns from New Hampshire on election night. This will be an exciting and evolving discussion that will yield strong indications of which candidates will build enough momentum to survive the short primary season to be contenders for their party's nomination this summer.

View Video: YouTube with Decision '16

Every culture has some kind of story to explain the existence of evil. In Greek myth it is Pandora, the first woman, who brings evil into the previously carefree world of mortal men. The Greeks did not think of human beings as poised between poles of pure good and evil, however, but as enmeshed in a complex field of overlapping and ambiguous forces: beauty and evil, joy and pain, are inseparable aspects of our world. As misogynist as it is, the story of Pandora makes women emblematic of that complexity. It is a story not just about good and evil, but about the inextricable presence of both in human life.

Ruby Blondell is a professor of classics and Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor in the Humanities at the University of Washington in Seattle. She has published widely on Greek literature and philosophy, and on the reception of myth in popular culture. Her books include The Play of Character in Plato’s Dialogues (Cambridge 2002); Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides (co-authored) (Routledge 1999); Helping Friends and Harming Enemies. A Study in Sophocles and Greek Ethics (Cambridge 1989); and most recently, Helen of Troy: Beauty, Myth, Devastation (Oxford 2013). She is currently writing a book on the portrayal of Helen in film and television.

Read more about Ruby Blondell...

Michael S. Roth is president of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut where he has served since 2007. Known as a historian, curator and author, Roth was previously Hartley Burr Alexander Professor of Humanities at Scripps College, associate director of the Getty Research Institute, and president of the California College of the Arts.

Author and curator (most notably of the exhibition “Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture,” which opened at the Library of Congress in 1998), Roth describes his scholarly interests as centered on “how people make sense of the past.” His fifth book, Memory, Trauma and History: Essays on Living with the Past was published in 2012. His most recent book, Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters (2014), is a stirring plea for the kind of education that has, he believes, since the founding of the nation cultivated individual freedom, promulgated civic virtue, and instilled hope for the future.

He regularly publishes essays, book reviews, and commentaries in the national media and scholarly journals. He continues to teach undergraduate courses and through Coursera and MOOCs, the most recent being “How to Change the World.”

Critics of higher education have attacked liberal education for its perceived irrelevance and elitism—often calling for more vocational instruction. In his Athenaeum talk, Roth will focus on important moments and seminal thinkers in America’s long-running argument over vocational versus liberal education, including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, Jane Addams and John Dewey to develop his own defense of a “pragmatic liberal education.”

President Roth’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Salvatori Center.

Read more about Michael S. Roth…

View Video: YouTube with Michael Roth

Food for Thought: Podcast with Michael Roth
 

Spencer Abraham served as the tenth U.S. Secretary of Energy from 2001 to 2005. Under his leadership the department made major advances in the development of new energy technologies, successfully implemented a variety of nuclear non proliferation and nuclear security programs after the September 11 attacks, and launched initiatives to improve the nation’s energy security. He also had responsibility for U.S. national labs and energy research activities.

An honors graduate of Michigan State University and Harvard Law School, Abraham was the co-founder of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy and the Federalist Society. He was a law professor at the Thomas M. Cooley School of law before being elected chairman of the Michigan Republican Party in 1983. He later served as deputy chief of staff in the Office of the Vice President and as co-chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

In 1994 Abraham was elected to the United States Senate from Michigan. While in the Senate, he authored 22 pieces of legislation that were enacted into law and served on the Senate Judiciary, Commerce and Budget committees. He chaired the Senate sub committees on Immigration and Manufacturing and Competitiveness. Much of his legislative focus was on advancing the emerging information technology/E-Commerce revolution including the now ubiquitous use of electronic signatures in commercial activities.

After leaving his post as Secretary of Energy in 2005, Abraham launched The Abraham Group, an international energy consulting business. He serves on the boards of a number of public and private corporations and authored Lights Out: 10 Myths About and Real Solutions to America’s Energy Crisis (2010).

The Honorable Spencer Abraham is the featured parent speaker for Parents' Weekend 2016.

Read more about Spencer Abraham…

View Video: YouTube with Spencer Abraham P'19

Edward J. Latessa, PhD, is director and professor of the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati. Latessa has published over 200 works in the area of criminal justice, corrections, and juvenile justice. He is co-author of eight books including What Works (and Doesn’t) in Reducing Recidivism (2013); Corrections in the Community (1996); and, Corrections in America.

Latessa has directed over 150 funded research projects including studies of day reporting centers, juvenile justice programs, drug courts, prison programs, intensive supervision programs, halfway houses, and drug programs. He and his staff have also assessed over 600 correctional programs throughout the United States, and he has provided assistance and workshops in forty-eight states.

A recipient of dozens of awards and honors, he was identified in 2013 as one of the most innovative people in criminal justice by a national survey conducted by the Center for Court Innovation in partnership with the Bureau of Justice Assistance and the U.S. Department of Justice.

Read more about Edward Latessa…

View Video: YouTube with Edward Latessa

Food for Thought: Podcast with Edward Latessa
 

Jinhee Park is a founding principal at the award-winning New York City and Seoul based architecture firm SsD, a practice which approaches design as a convergent, interdisciplinary, and sustainable venture. She received a masters in architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a B.F.A. in industrial design from Seoul National University. Her work at SsD has been celebrated through numerous awards including a 2015 Best in Competition Award from AIANY, a 2012 Architecture Vanguard from Architectural Record, the 2009 AIA Young Architects Award, and the 2007 Young Architects Forum Award from the Architectural League of New York.

Jinhee is currently adjunct professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation and from 2009-13 she served as design critic in architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Previous appointments include distinguished visiting professor at the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture City College New York in 2014, the Morgenstern Chair Professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 2008, and the Sasaki Distinguished Visiting Critic at the Boston Architectural College in 2007.

Ms. Park's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Mellon Global Liberal Arts Visiting Scholar Fund.

Food for Thought: Podcast with Jinhee Park

John Prendergast is a human rights activist and best-selling author who has worked for peace in Africa for 30 years, including helping facilitate the end of the Ethiopean and Eritrean conflict in the late ‘90s. The standard image of Africa is a starving baby, a continent of helplessness and a population ensconced in victimhood. These impressions are reinforced by the media, especially big-budget motion pictures that portray Africans as helpless or inherently violent. However, contends Prendergast, the reality is far different.

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. 

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.

Read more about John Prendergast...

Food for Thought: Podcast with John Prendergast

Miguel E. Basáñez was ratified by the Mexican Senate as Ambassador of Mexico to the United States on September 2, 2015. Prior to his appointment as ambassador, he was professor of values, culture and development at the Fletcher School of Tufts University and director of special research and educational projects. In Mexico, he worked to expand democracy by introducing public opinion polls in the 1988 elections.

His career has been a combination of public service (1968-1988), opinion polling (1988-2008), and academia (1970-2015). In the public sector, Basáñez worked as director general of opinion polling for the office of the president, chief of staff for the governor of the state of Mexico, attorney general of the state of Mexico, and chief of staff for the secretary of energy.

In the academic arena he was a Fulbright Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan. He is the author or editor of 14 books, including: The Struggle for Hegemony in Mexico, 1968-1980 (1981); The Pulse of the Presidential Terms: 20 Years of Crisis in Mexico (1990); North American Trajectory: Trade, Politics and Values (with R. Inglehart) (1994); Human Beliefs and Values: A Cross-cultural Sourcebook Based on the 1999-2002 Values Surveys (with R. Inglehart) (1998). He has a Ph.D. in political sociology from the London School of Economics.

(Source: Mexican Embassy website)

The burden of mental illness in our society, as measured by the number of people on disability due to mental illness, has dramatically increased in the last 35 years. This raises the following question for Robert Whitaker: How do psychiatric medications affect people over the long-term? What do history and science show?

Whitaker is the author of five books, three of which tell of the history of psychiatry. Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill  (2001) was named by Discover magazine as one of the best science books of 2002. His second book Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America (2010) won the Investigative Reporters and Editors book award for best investigative journalism in 2010, and has been translated into nine foreign languages. His latest book on the history of psychiatry, co-written with Lisa Cosgrove, is Psychiatry Under the Influence: Institutional Corruption, Social Injury, and Prescriptions for Reform (2015).

He is the founder of madinamerica.com, a website that features research news and blogs from an international group of writers interested in “rethinking psychiatry.”

View Video: YouTube with Robert Whitaker

Food for Thought: Podcast with Robert Whitaker

Catherine Reed is the McElwee Family Professor of Psychology and George R. Roberts Fellow at CMC where she teaches courses in psychology, neuropsychology, and cognitive neuroscience.

Reed uses electrophysiology (EEG/ERP) and behavioral methods to investigate the influences of the body on attention, perception, emotional processing, and economic decision-making. She also investigates how the brain integrates information about vision, touch, and the body.

She has been published in Cortex, Brain, Social Neuroscience, Attention Perception & Performance, and Emotion, among others. Her grants from the NSF train students in EEG/ERP data collection and analysis, providing them with skills relevant for positions in medical and research laboratories.

Professor Reed’s Athenaeum presentation celebrates and highlights her installation as McElwee Family Professor of Psychology at CMC.

View Video: YouTube with Catherine Reed

The challenges of growing up black and female in apartheid South Africa have been the foundation of Nontombi Naomi Tutu’s life as an activist for human rights. Those experiences taught her that the whole human family loses when we accept situations of oppression, and how the teaching and preaching of hate and division injure us all. In her speeches, Tutu blends this passion for human dignity with humor and personal stories. 

Tutu is the third child of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nomalizo Leah Tutu. Born in South Africa, she has had the opportunity to live in many communities and countries. She was educated in Swaziland, the US, and England, and has divided her adult life between South Africa and the US. Growing up the “daughter of Desmond Tutu" has offered Naomi Tutu many opportunities and challenges in her life. Most important of these has been the challenge to follow her own path and role in building a better world. She has taken up the challenge and channeled the opportunities she has been given to raise her voice as a champion for the dignity of all. 

Her professional experience ranges from serving as development consultant in West Africa to program coordinator for programs on race & gender and gender-based violence in education at the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town. In addition Tutu has taught at the University of Hartford, University of Connecticut, and Brevard College in North Carolina. She served as program coordinator for the historic Race Relations Institute at Fisk University, and was a part of the Institute’s delegation to the World Conference Against Racism in Durban. 

As well as speaking and preaching, Naomi Tutu has established Nozizwe Consulting. Nozizwe means “Mother of Many Lands” in Xhosa and is the name she was given by her maternal grandmother. The guiding principle of Nozizwe Consulting is to bring different groups together to learn from and celebrate their differences and acknowledge their shared humanity. As part of this work she has led truth and reconciliation workshops for groups dealing with different types of conflict. 

Ms. Naomi Tutu’s Athenaeum's talk is co-sponsored by the PSR Initiative, Office of Civil Rights, and the President’s Leadership Fund. 

Food for Thought: Podcast with Naomi Tutu

Warren Meyer agrees that manmade warming from CO2 is real, but contends that its magnitude and effects are likely greatly exaggerated by climate activists. He believes that in trying to simplify climate science for a lay audience, the media has made a series of mistakes that have polarized the debate and obscured potential solutions.

Meyer writes for many publications including Forbes.com and has been writing on climate-related issues for over ten years. He is a frequent speaker on climate change issues, and has authored several books and videos on the topic. With a 30-year background in the modeling of complex dynamic systems, his main focus in his journalism has been trying to improve the portrayal of climate science to lay audiences.

Meyer holds an MBA (with high distinction as a Baker Scholar) from the Harvard Business School and a mechanical engineering degree magna cum laude from Princeton University. He has received numerous academic awards and is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa, Tau Beta Pi, and Sigma Xi honor societies. His research work at Princeton focused on the modeling and behavior of complex dynamic systems—particularly the prediction of feedback effects—work he has used since both in economic and climate modeling.

Warren is owner and president of Recreation Resource Management (RRM), a private operator of approximately 150 public parks, campgrounds, and recreation facilities in 11 states. Prior to RRM, Warren held a series of senior marketing and planning roles at AlliedSignal, Honeywell, and Emerson Electric. He also has run several Internet companies, including Avolo, Whitepages.com, and a division of Mercata.

View Video: YouTube with Warren Meyer

Adam Michnik is the founder and editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, a daily often referred to as “The New York Times of Eastern Europe.” He is among Poland’s most prominent public figures, with a distinctive voice dedicated to dialog, tolerance, and freedom. He was a leading figure in the 1968 student movement in Warsaw, a co-founder of KOR (Committee for the Defense of Workers) in 1976, and a prominent “Solidarity” activist in the 1980s.

Repeatedly detained by the Polish communist regime for his dissident activities, he spent a total of six years in prison between 1965 and 1986. In 1989, he participated in the Round Table Talks, which resulted in Poland’s nonviolent transition to democracy, and he served as a deputy in Poland’s first non-communist parliament (1989-1991).

Author of several books and countless essays, analyses, and interviews, Michnik is the recipient of many prizes, honors, and honorary doctorates, including the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award. He regularly travels throughout the world, giving lectures on democracy, totalitarianism, and the paradoxes and dilemmas of contemporary politics.

Adam Michnik’s Athenaeum talk is part of the “Dissidents and Subversives” series sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at CMC.

Dave Zirin writes about the politics of sports for The Nation magazine. Winner of Sport in Society and Northeastern University School of Journalism's 'Excellence in Sports Journalism' Award, Zirin is also the host of Sirius XM Radio's popular weekly show, Edge of Sports Radio. He also co-hosts the radio program The Collision: Sports and Politics with Etan Thomas & Dave Zirin.

Called "the best sportswriter in the United States," Zirin was nominated for the PEN American award for literary sports writing. Zirin was also honored for his work in Online Magazine Writing at the 2015 81st Annual National Headliner's Awards. In addition, he has written Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics, and Promise of Sports (Haymarket Books) (2007). Sports Illustrated wrote that Terrordome is "a provocative, sometimes chilling, look at sports and society right now." His first book What's My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States (2015) is now in its third printing.

Zirin has brought his blend of sports and politics to multiple television programs including NBC's Last Call with Carson Daly, FX's Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell, ESPN's Outside the Lines, MSNBC's Morning Joe, ESPN Classic, CNN, MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, Comcast Sports Network's Sports Talk Live, C-SPAN's BookTV, and Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman. He has also been on numerous national radio programs from sports radio to National Public Radio's Tell Me More, Talk of the Nation, and All Things Considered.

Dave Zirin’s Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the Personal and Social Responsibility Initiative, CMS Athletics, and the Center for Writing and Public Discourse.

With Democrats now filling all statewide offices, dominating both houses of the Legislature, and controlling both U.S. Senate seats and 39 of the state’s 53 House districts, California has become one of the nation’s most solidly blue states. Yet, as Robert Hertzberg will address, California Democrats face a number of challenges, including divisions on some issues and emerging battles to replace older leaders in the state’s top elected offices. 

Hertzberg, a native of Los Angeles, was twice unanimously elected Speaker of the California State Assembly (2000‐2002), and is the first former Assembly Speaker in 86 years to be elected to the California State Senate, where he now serves nearly one million residents in the San Fernando Valley. Hertzberg continues to address the big challenges facing California and is a founding member of The Berggruen Institute’s Think Long Committee and serves on the board of directors at the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna College.

Hertzberg is a graduate of The University of Redlands (1976), and earned his law degree from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law (1979).

Mr. Hertzberg's Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at CMC.

Food for Thought: Podcast with Robert Hertzberg