Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Michael Andrew Hiltzik is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author who has written for the Los Angeles Times for three decades, during which time he has served as a financial and political writer, an investigative reporter, a technology writer and editor, and a foreign correspondent in Africa and Russia.

Hiltzik’s latest book, out of many, Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention that Launched the Military-Industrial Complex, has just been published by Simon & Schuster. His book Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century (2010), was a New York Times best-seller. Currently serving as the L.A. Times’ business columnist, he also blogs on economics, business, and public policy at the Economy Hub blog on the newspaper's website.

A graduate of Colgate University and Columbia University, Hiltzik received the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for articles exposing corruption in the entertainment industry. His other awards for excellence in reporting include the 2004 Gerald Loeb Award for outstanding business commentary and the Silver Gavel from the American Bar Association for outstanding legal reporting.

View Video: YouTube with Michael Hiltzik

Panelists include Andrew Busch, Crown Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow at CMC, whose work has chronicled parties and elections in modern politics; Emily Pears, assistant professor of government at CMC, whose research specialization lies in nineteenth-century federalism; and Jean Schroedel, professor of politics and policy at CGU whose scholarship examines women's rights, Native Americans, and voting access.  

Linda Hervieux is an author, journalist and photographer whose work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, the New York Daily News, the Daily Beast and nbcnews.com. A native of Lowell, Massachusetts, she lives in Paris, France. FORGETTEN: The Untold Story of D-Day's Black Heroes, At Home and At War was published in 2016.

In telling the story of the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, Linda Hervieux offers a vivid account of the tension between racial politics and national service in wartime America, and a moving narrative of human bravery and perseverance in the face of injustice.

Ms. Hervieux is the Veteran's Day Athenaeum speaker for 2016.

View Video: YouTube with Linda Hervieux

Food for Thought: Podcast with Linda Hervieux

Andre Clewell is a noted writer, lecturer, teacher, and practitioner in the field of ecological restoration. He has taught at Florida State University, owned and operated a restoration company, and helped found the Society for Ecological Restoration. His book, Ecological Restoration Principles Values and Structure of an Emerging Profession is used as a text world-wide in restoration and conservation study.

Marc Brody ’83 is a National Geographic grantee and expert for his work to conserve giant pandas and restore their habitat in the Wolong Nature Reserve, for which he is a senior advisor. For over 20 years, Brody has designed and managed a wide range of environmental programs in China, focusing on resource management and planning and stewardship education.

Clewell, in collaboration with Brody, restores fragmented giant panda habitat in Sichuan, China. Following internationally recognized standards and procedures developed by the Society for Ecological Restoration, Panda Mountain, founded by Brody, is working alongside a coalition of Sichuan government agencies and research institutes, Chengdu area universities, and villagers from Wolong to initiate a long-term process to protect the region's biodiversity, including wild panda habitats. 

View Video: YouTube with Andre Clewell and Marc Brody '83

John J. Pitney, Jr. is Roy P. Crocker Professor of American History and Politics at Claremont McKenna College where he teaches courses on Congress, interest groups, political parties, and mass media. A leading expert on the structure and practice of American politics, Pitney is a widely published author or co-author of six books on American politics, including The Art of Political Warfare (2001) and The Politics of Autism: Navigating The Contested Spectrum (2015). He is currently writing a book on the 1988 presidential campaign. In addition to his books, Pitney has published numerous scholarly articles and short essays, and is a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines. He is routinely featured on NPR and other television and radio programs. 

Pitney has not only shaped the study of government at Claremont McKenna College for nearly 30 years, he has also helped shape government itself through his many roles, including as the acting director for the Research Department of the Republican National Committee (1990-1991) and as the Senior Domestic Policy Analyst for the US House Republican Research Committee, among other important appointments. 

Pitney holds a B.A. in political science from Union College, where he was co-valedictorian, and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale, where he was a National Science Foundation Fellow. He received the CMC Presidential Award in 2013 and was named one of the 300 best professors in the United States by the Princeton Review in 2012. 

View Video: YouTube with John J. Pitney, Jr.

Food for Thought: Podcast with John J. Pitney, Jr.

Steven E. Schier is the Dorothy H. and Edward C. Congdon Professor of Political Science at Carleton College. He is the author or editor of 21 books, including the prize-winning Panorama of a Presidency: How George W. Bush Acquired and Spent His Political Capital (M.E. Sharpe, 2008).

He has analyzed U.S. politics in national newspaper columns and television appearances and is the lead author of Presidential Elections with David Hopkins, Nelson Polsby and Aaron Wildavsky, now in its 14th edition from Rowman & Littlefield.

Professor Schier’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Rose Institute of State and Local Government.

View Video: YouTube with Steven Schier

Andrew Jacobs has been a reporter for The New York Times since 1995. Over the years, he has covered a variety of beats, from the New York City Police Department and criminal courts, to the American South, Styles and New Jersey politics. He is currently based in New York City and covers a number of topics, including Brazil and China's relationship with the rest of the world.

Jacobs was part of a team of reporters who won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of the September 11 attacks in Manhattan, and in 2009 he was part of a team of reporters that won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting related to the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal.

Mr. Jacob’s Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by CMC’s Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies.

View Video: YouTube with Andrew Jacobs

Food for Thought: Podcast with Andrew Jacobs

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is the Suzanne Young Murray professor at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University, where he also teaches the history of race and public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is the former director of the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, one of the leading research facilities dedicated to the study of the African Diaspora. His academic work focuses on racial criminalization and the origins of the carceral state. He is the author of “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America” (Harvard University Press, 2010), which won the 2011 John Hope Franklin Best Book Award in American Studies. His articles and scholarship have appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, New Yorker, and the Washington Post.  

Muhammad is a native of the South Side of Chicago. He graduated with a B.A. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and received his Ph.D. in American history from Rutgers University, specializing in 20th century United States and African-American history.mHe also holds honorary doctorates from The New School (2013) and Bloomfield College (2014).

Professor Muhammad's Athenaeum talk is part of the Race and Law Enforcement in America series.

View Video: YouTube with Khalil Muhammad

Linda Cruse is an international aid worker, disaster management specialist, author, inspirational speaker, creator of the Emergency Zen thought leadership series, social entrepreneur, and founder of Be the Change: Business Leaders on The Frontline and the 21-Day Global Impact Challenge. In 2014 she was appointed a senior fellow in the College of Business and Law at the University of Canterbury New Zealand. 

Cruse’s 17 years of frontline humanitarian aid work has taken her to every continent in the world where she has assisted in some of the world’s most catastrophic natural and humanitarian disasters including the Asian tsunami, the Pakistani earthquake, two Philippine super-typhoons, the Nepal earthquake, the Ecuador earthquake, refugee camps in Uganda, and more.

Cruse’s area of expertise lies in bridging the gap between the private and public sectors and creating health, education, and business synergies to cultivate innovative opportunities for sustainable employment and income generation. Her trademark is her ability to engage the entrepreneurial skills and business acumen of the private sector to solve seemingly intractable problems on the frontline.

Ms. Cruse’s talk is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights.

California has the nation's most extensive system of direct democracy, as citizens regularly exercise the power to determine important policy issues by direct popular vote. In this election, Californians will vote on an astounding 17 propositions. The topics cover a broad range of subjects, including among other things, the death penalty, legalizing marijuana, criminal sentencing, firearms and ammunition sales, bond funding, cigarette tax, income tax, and open government measures. Two of the state's leading political commentators, Bob Stern and Tony Quinn, will provide expert analysis of these consequential choices. Professor Ken Miller will moderate the discussion and also present the Rose Institute’s Video Voter series of informational videos produced by Rose Institute students.

Bob Stern is the co-founder and former president of the Center for Governmental Studies, a California think tank focused on political reform. Stern has been called “the godfather of modern political reform in California.” He began drafting and analyzing political reform laws as a staff attorney for the California Legislature’s Assembly Elections Committee; he then served as the Elections Counsel to the California Secretary of State’s office. He has drafted numerous state initiatives, and was a principal drafter of the City of Los Angeles’ Ethics and Public Campaign Financing laws in 1990. He is a graduate of Pomona College and Stanford Law.

Tony Quinn is co-editor of the California Target Book, a non-partisan almanac of California politics. Quinn is an authority on California political trends and demographics. He served three years as an assistant to the California Attorney General, is a former director of the Office of Economic Research in the Department of Commerce, and for five years served as a member of the California Fair Political Practices Commission. Dr. Quinn has written extensively on California politics and elections. He holds degrees from Georgetown University, University of Texas, and Claremont Graduate University.

Ken Miller is a member of the government department at CMC and is the associate director of the Rose Institute. His research focuses on state government institutions, with emphasis on direct democracy (initiative, referendum, and recall) and the interaction between law and politics. 

This Athenaeum panel discussion is co-sponsored by the Rose Institute for State and Local Government.

View Video: YouTube with Bob Stern and Tony Quinn

Award-winning composer Koji Nakano’s music reflects the relationship between beauty, form and imperfection through the formality of music. In 2008, he became the first composer to receive the S&R Washington Award Grand Prize. Nakano has been recognized as one of the major voices among Asian composers of his generation.  

Nakano currently divides his time between USA and Asia as a composer, scholar and an educator. As the co-founder of the Asian Young Musicians’ Connection, he promotes new music by commissioning emerging composers to create music for worldwide professional musicians for its regular concerts, lectures and workshops.  

This fall, Nakano is the Scripps Erma Taylor O’Brien Distinguished Visiting Professor at Scripps College.

Joseph W. Dauben is Distinguished Professor of History and History of Science at the City University of New York. He is the author of biographies of Georg Cantor and Abraham Robinson, and most recently, a three-volume Chinese-English dual-language edition of the ancient Chinese classic, The Nine Chapters on the Art of Mathematics (2013), written in collaboration with Guo Shuchun and Xu Yibao. He is a 1966 graduate of CMC where he majored in mathematics. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University.  His areas of interest and research include history of science, history of mathematics; the scientific revolution; sociology of science; intellectual history, 17-18th centuries; history of Chinese science; and history of botany.

Dauben started out as a historian of mathematics with a focus on the modern period in Europe and America. His most famous publication from this part of his career is Georg Cantor: His Mathematics and Philosophy of the Infinite, a highly regarded biography that covers both Cantor's contributions to mathematics, notably set theory and the theory of the infinite, his life, and his theological and philosophical ideas. Dauben then developed an expertise in Chinese mathematics, even learning to speak Chinese, mentoring Chinese students, and publishing on classical and modern mathematics in China. 

A recipient of many international prestigious awards including delivering an invited lecture at the 1998 International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin on Karl Marx's mathematical work, Dauben became an honorary member of the Institute for History of Natural Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2002. In January of 2012 he received the American Mathematical Society’s Albert Leon Whiteman Memorial Prize for History of Mathematics.

View Video: YouTube with Joseph Dauben '66

Jeffrey Flory joined the Robert Day School in 2013 from the University of Chicago. He uses field experiments to examine questions in development economics, competition incentives, and gender. Flory has received grants from the National Science Foundation, the World Bank, the Department for International Development, and the Lowe Institute of Political Economy. His research has been published in journals such as Review of Economic Studies. 

Ilan Wurman ‘09 graduated from CMC in 2009 with a major in government and physics. In 2013, he graduated from Stanford Law School and is now an attorney at Winston & Strawn LLP in Washington D.C. He was formerly the deputy general counsel of Rand Paul's presidential campaign and associate counsel on Tom Cotton's campaign for U.S. Senate in Arkansas. He has written extensively on constitutional interpretation and administrative law, and his writings have appeared in City Journal, National Affairs, The Weekly Standard, Commentary, and several academic law reviews. 

Wurman’s Athenaeum talk, A Debt Against the Living, is based on a forthcoming book on originalism and the Constitution where he addresses views expressed by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. 

In an oft-quoted letter to Madison, Jefferson asserts that the earth belongs to the living and that we cannot be bound by the "dead hand of the past," that the Constitution must be a "living, breathing" document that is continually updated in modern times. Less familiar, however, is Madison's response to Jefferson. If the earth be the gift of nature to the living, wrote Madison, then it belongs to them in its natural state only; the improvements made by the dead form a debt against the living, who take the benefit of them. This debt cannot be otherwise discharged, he wrote, than by a proportionate obedience to the will of the authors of the improvement—originalism.  

Who is right—Thomas Jefferson or James Madison? 

Wurman’s talk will address this difficult question and offer an answer in favor of Madison, originalism, and the Constitution. 

Ilan Wurman’s Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the Salvatori Center. 

View Video: YouTube with Ilan Wurman '09