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Morning Lecture Previews

Intervening in Intervention: Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Elizabeth Kolbert to share ‘Under a White Sky’ for joint morning lecture, CLSC talk

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SARAH VEST – STAFF WRITER

Kolbert

People have been hearing that the sky is falling for years, but now the Doomsday clock has ticked uncomfortably close to midnight. 

And yet, the very technology that people have used to dig the planet into a hole may be the only way to pull it back out — according to Elizabeth Kolbert, the author of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle’s Week Two book Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future. 

She will be giving her joint Chautauqua Lecture Series and CLSC presentation for Week Two’s theme “New Frontiers: Exploring Today’s Unknowns” at 10:30 a.m. Tuesday, July 6 in the Amphitheater. 

Sony Ton-Aime, the Michael I. Rudell Director of Literary Arts, said Kolbert “wrote the best nonfiction book of the past 10 years with The Sixth Extinction, and this book Under a White Sky is as good as The Sixth Extinction.”

This year’s CLSC theme is “The People,” which focuses the lens of events that are happening globally though the people who are experiencing them and, in the case of Under the White Sky, the people who are working to change them. According to Ton-Aime, “this book really captured the idea of the people well.”

Kolbert is a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer and journalist. She has written two other books — The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History and Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change — which both began their lives as articles in The New Yorker, where Kolbert has been a staff writer since 1999. She studied literature at Yale University and was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the Universität Hamburg in Germany. Before working at The New Yorker, she was a political reporter for The New York Times. 

According to Kolbert, the driving theme behind Under a White Sky is that humanity is “finding ourselves intervening in natural systems to counteract, or try to correct for, the impacts of their previous interventions.”

Her book is written in a series of anecdotes that span from Chicago to Geelong, Australia. They cover topics ranging from editing the genes of Cane toad using CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) to injecting CO2-infused water into lava rock in order to quickly mineralize the CO2 and keep it out of the atmosphere.

In her presentation, Kolbert will feature a story about the Chicago River, which had its flow reversed in the 1900s and has since been electrified in an effort to keep Asian carp, a subset of invasive species with no predators, out of Lake Michigan. 

“It is a very, very vivid example of the pattern that I’m talking about,” Kolbert said — that of intervention and then reintervention when the first one inevitably creates more problems than solutions. 

Her book paints a bleak picture of the planet’s future, but she said that is part of the reason she wrote it in the first place. 

I think understanding things does have a certain calming effect, even if what you’re understanding is pretty grim or bleak or scary,” Kolbert said.

Despite the fact that the message she is delivering to her readers could be anxiety-inducing, she hopes that the vessel with which she delivers the message will soften the blow. 

“A lot of it is alarming, but it’s sort of a dark comedy,” said Kolbert, who is a recipient of the Heinz Award. “It’s sort of written, weirdly enough, to be a fun read.”

What Kolbert really wants people to get out of her lecture is that we live in an “unprecedented moment.” The ways people are changing the world might seem normal now, but the measures that will need to be taken in the future are unprecedented, and will require the kinds of decisions that cannot be made lightly. 

It boils down to a debate between what society — which is a term Kolbert labels “broad” — is able to do with science and the technological advances that are coming down the pipeline, and if we should actually utilize them. 

“We should have structures in place where these decisions get made in a way that’s both sensible … and equitable,” Kolbert said, “and that’s a lot easier said than done.”

Lauded science fiction author Ted Chiang to frame week looking to future with exploration of genre’s relevance

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SARA TOTH – EDITOR

Chiang

When people talk about science fiction, Ted Chiang thinks, they mostly use the genre as a “synonym for nonsense.” He’d like to correct, or clarify, the record.

“Think of the TV series ‘Westworld,’ ” he said. “There are actors on that show who, in interviews, say, ‘Oh, “Westworld” is not science fiction. It’s dealing with actual issues.’ They’re far from alone in thinking that, but it just makes me think: ‘What do you think science fiction actually is?’ ”

He knows what these actors are trying to say: That “Westworld” and its counterparts are “serious television.” 

“But what they’re basically saying, what they’re implying, is that science fiction isn’t capable of being serious or substantive,” Chiang said. “I’d like to address that.”

Chiang is a celebrated science fiction author whose work has won some of the top prizes in his genre: four Nebula awards, four Hugo awards, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and four Locus awards. 

His debut collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, has been translated into 21 languages; his collection Exhalation was named one of the top 10 books of 2019 by The New York Times Book Review. His short story “Story of Your Life” was the basis of the 2016 film “Arrival,” starring Amy Adams, and he’ll open Week Two of the Chautauqua Lecture Series — themed “New Frontiers: Exploring Today’s Unknowns” — with a lecture titled “Science Fiction and the Idea of the Future” at 10:30 a.m. Monday, July 5 in the Amphitheater.

“I’ll be talking about the march of history as seen through science fiction,” said Chiang, who recently wrapped up the academic year as Artist in Residence at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. “I think what makes science fiction interesting is the ways that it is relevant to our current situation. Science fiction, I think, has a lot more to say.”

It’s not that other genres of literature are incapable of dealing with certain issues, Chiang said, but he thinks that science fiction is “uniquely well-equipped to deal with the current moment.”

“We live in a real, technologically saturated world,” he said. “And if you think of traditional literary fiction, general-audience fiction, until recently, there’s been very little mention of technology. Even now, novels being published today might not mention technology almost at all. I don’t think that’s an accurate reflection of our lives today.” 

That’s not a bad thing, necessarily, and Chiang understands the reasons why an author may make the choices they do — any accurate depiction of technology “is going to be subject to becoming dated, because that’s the world we live in now.” It’s an uncomfortable situation for a writer to be in.

“With regard to science fiction, there is a willingness to acknowledge facts about our lives, that things are changing very rapidly. … But that is still something that we actually have to live with, and deal with,” he said.

Science fiction’s goal is not to predict the future with any kind of accuracy, Chiang said, but essentially, get readers comfortable with the fact that the future will, in fact, be different than the present, “and we don’t know how it’s going to be different. Anyone, anyone who thinks they know what the future is going to look like is going to be mistaken.”

But the point of thinking about the future, even if we can’t plan for it, is at least to mentally prepare for those new differences, Chiang said.

“Even coming to terms with the fact that the future will be different than the present, that is important,” he said. “And that is one of things that science fiction can do.”

In Chiang’s own work, he said he’s mostly interested in questions of philosophy.

“I like using science fiction as a way to explore and dramatize philosophical questions,” he said. “I think that philosophers often posit scenarios that engage in that kind of thought experiment. But those experiments can seem very remote and abstract to a general audience. … One of the things that I like about science fiction is that it offers a way to make philosophical thought experiments more emotionally engaging, more visceral. It offers a way to make you feel why these questions are interesting.”

In a week filled with speakers who are experts in their field, Matt Ewalt, vice president and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education, said Chiang would set the stage for these discussions, taking a big-picture look at the frontiers of the future.

“In this week we delve into the hard science and ethical implications of our decisions at the frontiers of climate change, genome editing and exploring the cosmos,” he said. “But that journey beings with renowned writer Ted Chiang as our guide, examining the role science fiction has had and continues to play in shaping the ideas of the future and helping us to think through our  biggest questions.”

Political scientist Dexter Roberts to forecast China’s uncertain economic future

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NICK DANLAG – STAFF WRITER

It was hard for Dexter Roberts to find an affordable cup of coffee or a good pizza when he arrived in China in 1995. This was before China’s huge economic growth, when there were few cars on the road and the foreign community within the country was very small. 

At 10:30 a.m. Thursday, July 1 in the Amphitheater, Roberts will speak about China’s uncertain economic future and the global implications of that future, closing out the first week’s theme of the 2021 Chautauqua Lecture Series, “China and the World: Collaboration, Competition, Confrontation?”

Despite the lack of access to Western goods while in China, Roberts noticed the great diversity of China’s geography. He’s stayed in every province, from the mountains of western China near Tibet, the frigid northeast near Siberia, and the semi-tropical areas in the southeast near Vietnam and Myanmar. 

As China’s economy grew, Roberts noticed wealth imbalances along geographic lines. Large coastal cities like Beijing and Shanghai held much of the money, while rural areas teemed with poverty. The country’s large middle class — around 400,000 people who mostly live in cities — is dwarfed by the lower class of almost a billion in rural areas. This inequality shows its face when comparing the schools and health care across regions.

“Particularly over the last couple years, there’s been this tendency to look at China as a monolith: one very big, often ominous power that we need to be worried about,” Roberts said. “I’m not saying we shouldn’t be worried about lots of things that are happening in China and with policies of the leadership there. But this idea that it’s monolithic, that there isn’t diversity (is wrong).”

Roberts is an adjunct professor of political science at the University of Montana and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Asia Security Initiative. As a China bureau chief and Asia news editor at Bloomberg Businessweek, he lived in China for more than 20 years. 

Roberts, like most people in the ‘80s and ‘90s, didn’t realize how far China’s economy would climb. He wanted to travel the world and was fascinated by Chinese culture, so he moved there in the mid-‘90s, right when the country was in the midst of a great transition: more cars on the road, people moving to cities and heavy investment in infrastructure. 

“I like to joke that I looked into the future, that China would become the second-largest economy, on track to becoming the world’s largest economy,” Roberts said, “but that’s completely untrue.”

Roberts lived in China from 1995 to 2018. He saw much of the population move into cities for factory and construction jobs. China currently has around 300 million internal migrants, meaning Chinese citizens who travel long distances within the country for work. 

This large group of migrant workers, he said, often come from poorer areas and are some of the most vulnerable populations. Roberts will discuss this group in his talk today. With China transitioning again, this time from an economy driven by exports and factories to one relying on the spending power of their own people, the group reliant on those jobs may become even poorer.

“If they cannot overcome the issues of inequality,” Roberts said, “then they are not going to be able to build an economy much more driven by the spending power of their own people.”

Ma Jian, translator Flora Drew to present ‘China Dream’ for Week 1 CLSC

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SARAH VEST – STAFF WRITER

MA

George Orwell wrote in his book 1984 “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” This was at the forefront of Ma Jian’s mind as he wrote Week One’s Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle selection China Dream, and he styled his novel as an homage to Orwell’s 1984.

Ma is the author of seven novels, a travel memoir, three story collections and two essay collections. His work has been translated into 26 languages. Since the publication of his first book in 1987, all his work has been banned in China. He was born in Qingdao, China, but now lives in exile in London. He will be giving Week One’s CLSC presentation, with the book’s translator Flora Drew, on China Dream at 3:30 p.m. EDT July 1 on the CHQ Assembly Online Platform. 

“I hope that readers of China Dream will be able to see through this book that Orwell’s 1984 is not just a work of fiction, but is actually a real-life description of the reality of China today,” Ma said in an interview translated by Drew. “My book is in a way … a realization that his work, that 1984, was a prophecy.” 

Sony Ton-Aime, the Michael I. Rudell director of the Literary Arts, read about the cultural revolution in China, but he had never seen America through that lens until he read China Dream.

“The whole idea of the ‘China Dream’ is to suppress memory, to suppress history, and the moment that we are living right now — with our uncertainty on how to teach history, and what is the place of history in our lives — (ties in) just perfect,” Ton-Aime said.

Ma’s book, China Dream, is a satire of totalitarianism that offers a counter narrative to the sweeping “China Dream” of President Xi Jinping’s administration through the eyes of character Ma Daode, a corrupt party official who has been appointed director of the China Dream Bureau. This book is part fact, part science fiction and, at times, autobiographical. 

“I am from (Ma Daode’s) same generation, just as Xi Jinping himself,” Ma said. “We are all victims of those times.”

Like the protagonist, the cultural revolution broke out in Ma’s early teens and, like Ma Daode, Ma yearned to be a Red Guard but was unable to join due to his family background. He was even unable to attend university. However, telling his own story is not what Ma was really interested in focusing on in China Dream

“I was more interested in the psychology that this instills in people,” Ma said. “The psychology of those that blindly follow the revolution and those that, through no fault of their own, are denied this so-called privilege, and how that feeling of dejection, of resentment, can boil into something even more negative, or, in fact, can lead to a certain enlightenment and clarity of vision of the dangers of this revolution.”

Drew

In the same way that the story is told through both fact and fiction, the messages that bleed out through the lines are varied, and work to deliver not only a psychological analysis but to pull back the veil that has been placed over the public image of China. 

China Dream is really about what happens to a society when truth is banned, where lies fill the air, where the threat of violence hangs over every individual,” Ma said. “We see the reality of Xi Jinping’s totalitarian ‘China Dream,’ of so-called ‘glory and national prosperity.’ The truth of it means the suppression of people in Tibet, the genocide occurring in Xinjiang, the crushing of all freedoms in Hong Kong.”

The last, and perhaps most important, idea that Ma hopes people take away from both his book and the lecture is a serious warning about the dangerous nature of the “China Dream” and how China is not the only country this “dream” impacts. 

“The Chinese Communist Party I viewed, even before the outbreak of this coronavirus, as a virus of the mind,” he said. “An ideological virus that has mutated over decades and has become now much more sophisticated, more complex and on the surface beautifully packaged the dream of prosperity. But the lack of freedom at its heart infects all that it touches. It has entered every democratic country in the world — this beautifully packaged dream, with the promises of trade deals, but insidiously, it has infected the mind.”

As Ma is giving his presentation, halfway across the world the Chinese Communist Party will be celebrating their 100th year anniversary. While they celebrate the founding of the party that has been in control since 1949, it is important to keep in mind the hidden agenda behind the fanfare.

“My book China Dream reveals that at the heart of this mission to erase thought, to erase memory, is the desire of these tyrants to obliterate all dissent to erase all memories of the sins they have committed against their own people,” Ma said.

Hudson Institute fellow Michael Pillsbury to speak on U.S.-China relations

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NICHOLE JIANG – STAFF WRITER

Michael Pillsbury, who has several decades of experience with handling U.S. and China relations, is set to give a lecture at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, June 30 in the Amphitheater. Pillsbury served as President Donald Trump’s key adviser on U.S. strategy with China and is a senior fellow and director for Chinese strategy at the Hudson Institute. 

Pillsbury is a distinguished defense policy adviser who not only served as assistant undersecretary of defense for policy planning, but who was also responsible for the implementation of the program of covert aid known as the Reagan Doctrine during the Reagan administration. 

He also had a part in President Jimmy Carter’s decision in 1980 to initiate military and intelligence ties with China. 

Additionally, Pillsbury also served as a special assistant for Asian affairs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense under President George H. W. Bush.

Furthermore, Pillsbury has also helped draft the Senate Labor Committee version of the legislation that created the U.S. Institute of Peace in 1984. 

He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute for Strategic Studies. 

Pillsbury’s experience and credibility have led him to write and publish multiple books and reports on China including The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower.

During his lecture on June 30 in the Amp, Pillsbury will discuss the challenges and obstacles that diplomats and politicians face while navigating the relationship between the U.S. and China, and what the U.S. should do in response to China. 

“From his having the ear of President Trump as a top adviser on China strategy, to the influence of his book The Hundred-Year Marathon, Michael Pillsbury is a critical voice in our understanding the history and current state of the U.S.-China relations and, most importantly, why this relationship is perhaps the most pressing foreign policy issue going forward,” said Matt Ewalt, vice president and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education. 

Before Pillsbury played a crucial role in politics and U.S. and China relations, he graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in history with honors in social thought. He then attended Columbia University for his master’s degree and doctorate. 

Pillsbury was mentored by various influential and credible people during his time at Columbia, such as Zbigniew Brzezinski and Michel Oksenberg. Both played key roles in many presidential administrations on policy toward both China and Afghanistan. 

Human Rights Watch’s Fong to discuss China’s ‘radical experiment’ of one-child policy for CLS

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NICK DANLAG – STAFF WRITER

Mei Fong’s writing is far-reaching and deeply personal. Her book, One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment, covers how the one-child policy still impacts economic growth and families in China, with one-fourth of the population over 65 and the younger generation being predominantly male. In this chronicle of the practice that started in the 1980s, Fong weaves in her own story of striving to have a child. 

Fong’s writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and many other newspapers. As well as winning the 2006 Human Rights Press Award from Amnesty International and the Hong Kong Correspondents Club, Fong is now the Chief Communications Officer at Human Rights Watch. 

At 10:30 a.m. Tuesday, June 29 at the Amphitheater, Fong will discuss the worldwide impact of China’s one-child policy as part of the Chautauqua Lecture Series theme “China and the World: Collaboration, Competition, Confrontation?” 

“We welcome Mei Fong to the Amp this week to speak to what was, in her words, the world’s most radical experiment,” said Matt Ewalt, vice president and Emily and Richard Smucker chair for education, “and has had devastating cultural and economic consequences.”

In a 2017 editorial for Think, Fong delved into her experience of sending her 6-year-old son to school with leftovers, only for him to come home, ashamed, saying that the other children bullied him for his “stinky” food.

“My first instinct when my son told me his lunchbox story was anger,” Fong wrote. “I wanted to send him back into his classroom armed with pride and an indifference to playground slurs. But I also wanted to shield him. He’s only 6! Why should lunch be a battlefield?”

Fong, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, then journeys with the audience through the far-too-big rabbit hole of “lunchbox shaming,” when children, and adults, are hazed for bringing in their culture’s foods. 

In that brief article, she finds American news organizations writing about which foods not to take into the workplace, with one listing Mexican food at the top; depictions of shaming in popular media like “Fresh Off The Boat;” and how some immigrant families protect their children from the shaming they experienced as children. 

At 16, Fong met Queen Elizabeth II after winning an essay writing competition. 

“Nothing so exciting had ever happened in my dull life until then,” Fong wrote on her website.

Pursuing journalism and writing after meeting with Her Majesty, Fong graduated from the National University of Singapore and earned a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University. 

She also produced a podcast called “The Heist’’ that documents power in former President Donald Trump’s America and is in Foreign Policy’s Top 50 U.S.-China Influencers in the Media & Culture section.

One of the things that Fong has continued to raise alarm bells about is China’s declining number of career-age adults. 

“China needs to desperately increase its number of working adults,” said Fong in an interview with CCTV. “China will be adding about 10 million pensioners every year, but adding about seven million working adults. That’s obviously not great in the long term.”

NY Times reporter Sengupta examines U.S., China climate interests

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NICK DANLAG – STAFF WRITER

Sengupta

Just as Somini Sengupta started to read, her grandfather started to lose his eyesight. In a 2018 lecture at Dartmouth College, she talked about reading newspapers to him. Sengupta mostly didn’t understand what the articles were talking about, but she understood the words meant a lot to her grandfather. 

Sengupta knew this because, at the end of each day, her grandfather and his friends would talk on his front lawn, sometimes arguing with each other and sometimes laughing.

“I have no idea what they were actually arguing about, but I knew that the world beyond my grandfather’s stoop was important; that there were people out there making important decisions … that were affecting our lives,” Sengupta, international climate correspondent for The New York Times, told her Dartmouth audience.

A recipient of the George Polk Award for foreign reporting and many other accolades, Sengupta tells the stories of those most vulnerable to climate change.

At 10:30 a.m. Monday, June 27 in the Amphitheater, Sengupta will kick off the 2021 Chautauqua Lecture Series and Week One’s theme of “China and the World: Collaboration, Competition, Confrontation?” She will discuss the converging interests on climate change of China and the United States.

“We open our season,” said Matt Ewalt, vice president and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education, “and our week on China, looking at how the world’s two biggest superpowers can work together — and whether they will work together — to solve the biggest issue of our time. 

“As the international climate correspondent for The New York Times, Somini Sengupta has been on the front lines of this work, from pledges made to the U.N. General Assembly to the devastating impact of climate on communities throughout the world.”

After getting her undergraduate degree in English and development studies at the University of California, Berkeley, Sengupta worked at The Los Angeles Times.

“As journalists, we are instructed with the stories of others,” Sengupta said in 2020 Marie Colvin Lecture at Stony Brook University School of Communication and Journalism. “That’s an incredible gift — and that’s all the more so when it’s the stories of people who are hurt, who are exploited, who are cheated by people in power.”

Since then, she has reported around the world. She has worked as The New York Times U.N. Correspondent, but she now focuses her reporting on international climate change. 

In 2016, Sengupta published The End of Karma: Hope and Fury Among India’s Young, a nonfiction book about those affected by the unprecedented youth bulge, or population boom, in India. The people Sengupta writes about are driven by hope, yet held back by the state and society.

Journalism “has never been more important to defending the tenets of democracy,” Sengupta said at Stony Brook. “Not with a quick take,” she said, “not with an angry screed on Twitter, but with stories that tell people what happened, who did it, who gained, who lost, who did the damage, who got hurt.”

A political cascade: Ambassador Samantha Power to close Chautauqua Lecture Series with emphasis on the role of America, the individual in driving diplomacy

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Before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, before California and Australia were ravaged by climate change-fueled wildfires, before a massive explosion shattered Beirut and a U.S. drone strike killed an Iranian major general, Chautauqua Institution placed the Week Nine theme “The Future We Want, The World We Need: Collective Action for Tomorrow’s Challenges” on the 2020 calendar.

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Ideally, according to Samantha Power, the rest of the world would have been on the same page. And if that were true, “we would not have needed this very rude and devastating reminder of how critical global cooperation is,” she said. 

“So many of the key issues on people’s minds right now, the necessity is cooperation among countries,” Power said. “No matter which issue you choose, no matter what you care about, chances are, there is some international dimension.”

Power’s lecture, “America’s Role in International Engagement and Leadership,” will close the 2020 Chautauqua Lecture Series and the Week Nine theme in partnership with the United Nations Foundation. Her lecture will air at 10:45 a.m. EDT Friday, Aug. 28, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform. Power is the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author twice selected as one of TIME’s “100 Most Influential People,” and a professor at Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Law School.

America is the most powerful country in the world, so it’s impossible to imagine addressing these problems in full without America at the table,” Power said. “If America isn’t part of the solution, it’s part of the problem.”

A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, Power’s 2002 book, won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2003. It illustrates a century’s worth of American inaction in the face of multiple massacres: of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during the World War I, in Europe during the Holocaust, and in Rwanda in 1994.

Eighteen years have passed since A Problem from Hell, and while the present-day problems are different in both size and shape, the irrevocable consequences remain largely the same. In the United States alone, more than 177,000 people have died from COVID-19. Nearly three billion animals were killed or displaced during Australia’s wildfires, more than 2,000 structures destroyed in the wake of those in California. The detonation in Beirut’s port compounded the ongoing political and economic crises gripping a Lebanon already unraveling.

As Power will emphasize in her presentation, there is a “disproportionate rate” of responsibility for America, and a growing one in China, to “get it right.” 

“America is the most powerful country in the world, so it’s impossible to imagine addressing these problems in full without America at the table,” Power said. “If America isn’t part of the solution, it’s part of the problem.”

But in recent decades, Power said America has made an inordinate investment — both in terms of “big budget allocations” and attention — in the military over diplomatic solutions, “and we’ve got to change that.”

“We have to make investments in ending conflicts; aggressively addressing climate change, putting in place an infrastructure to deal with future pandemics — that has to be a top-tier priority in a way diplomacy never has been in my lifetime,” Power said. “The balance has to shift.”

The question of whether the United States will make those investments in diplomacy may “very well hinge on how many turn out for the November election,” according to Power.

“The fact that we have walked away from combating climate change domestically turned on a very narrow election margin,” she said. “Now, many Independent and Republican voters have begun to care about climate change — not, of course, the current president — but it’s a sign that individual action can elevate these issues.” 

Individual action is often halted by a recurring tendency: People feel small compared to the scale of the problems that greet them, Power said. 

“That can be very disempowering,” she said. “The pandemic has reminded us of the possibilities of being connected, but also the risk.”

No one person can resolve the COVID-19 pandemic, or any pandemic for that matter. So what Power can and will offer in her lecture and in the face of “problems of this magnitude,” is the strength in “shrinking the change,” or tailoring for oneself what their individual difference is going to be.

“I, Samantha, can’t solve the global refugee crisis — I single-handedly can’t do that,” Power said. “But I can go door to door in support of a candidate I believe in. I can donate money for an organization I care about. Everything feels small until enough people pick up that small task and that creates, over time, a political cascade. That cascade makes all the difference.” 

This program is made possible by Week Nine “Program Sponsor” Erie Insurance and the Helen C. Lincoln Fund for International Programming.

UNICEF Director Henrietta Fore to discuss how to help children reach their potential amid COVID-19

Henrietta Fore

Of all the questions posed by the coronavirus pandemic, one of the most important is how exactly schools — both primary and secondary schools, as well as institutions of higher education — reopen safely.

Fore

“When the COVID-19 pandemic began sweeping across the planet, there was a lot the world did not know about its impact on children,” wrote Henrietta Fore, the director of The United Nations Children’s Fund, also known as UNICEF, in a June 19 opinion piece on cnn.com. “Could they get sick? Could they transmit the virus? Were schools safe? We have since learned quite a bit. We have learned that children are not the main drivers of the epidemic across countries.”

Though Fore said we can be certain about children’s safety in terms of COVID-19, she also said that we “know there can be severe negative effects on children — from deterioration of mental and physical health to lack of sufficient food in some cases — when they are out of school.”

Fore said one of the most important questions to ask is why so many schools around the world are still closed. 

“Strict measures were taken to help contain the spread of COVID-19 and flatten the curve,” she wrote for CNN. “Often, schools were among the first places to close, sometimes even before shopping malls, movie theaters and restaurants. By early April, nation-wide lockdowns in 194 countries left 1.6 billion children out of school, approximately 90% of the world’s students. As (June 19), two months on, while many countries begin to ease lockdowns for non-essential services, over 1 billion children in 144 countries are still not in their classrooms.”

At 10:45 a.m. EDT on Thursday, Aug. 27, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, Fore will deliver a lecture titled, “How to Help Children Reach Their Full Potential,” bringing together her expertise with the international issues that plague children and her experience as a leader and speaker. Her lecture is part of the Week Nine Chautauqua Lecture Series theme, “The Future We Want, The World We Need: Collective Action for Tomorrow’s Challenges,” a week in partnership with the U.N. Foundation.

“We’re honored to have Henrietta Fore provide critical insight on the challenges facing children around the world, particularly during COVID-19, and how our prioritizing children is critical as we address the world’s most pressing problems, now and into the future,” said Matt Ewalt, vice president and the Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education.

A subset of children who are particularly vulnerable are young girls, Fore wrote, in part because when they remain out of school they’re at high risk for sexual exploitation and abuse. 

“During the 2014 West Africa Ebola outbreak, for example, pregnancy rates among teenagers in Sierra Leone doubled and many girls were unable to continue their education when schools reopened,” she wrote. “And we cannot forget the millions of children, particularly those living in rural areas, from poorer families or with special needs, who rely on schools as a lifeline to meals, support in times of distress, health screenings and therapeutic services.”

Fore said that there’s still much to be done to improve health safety in schools, especially in poorer communities.

“For example, handwashing stations, disinfection and physical distancing,” she wrote. “However, the evidence is clear: Investment in safety protocols yields high returns. It may never be business-as-usual again. We need safer and better schools. We need innovative approaches to learning. We need better access to technology for every child to bridge the digital divide. But it’s time to put children back on the learning track. It’s time to reopen schools.”

This program is made possible by Week Nine “Program Sponsor” Erie Insurance and The Foglesong Family Lectureship Fund.

United Nations Association of the USA Executive Director Rachel Bowen Pittman to speak on Americans role in solving global problems for Week Nine Lecture

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On Oct. 24, 1945, in San Francisco, delegates from 51 different countries gathered with a goal to promote international human rights, social progress, and to never again see the horrors and destruction of a world war. With that, the United Nations was founded.

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Seventy-five years later its goal remains the same. This January, the organization launched its UN 75 campaign, with a mission to, in the words of Secretary General António Guterres, “host the biggest-ever global conversation on the role of global cooperation in building the future we want.”

In service of this goal, the United Nations Association of the USA recently held 80 virtual consultations with more than 1,800 particants, representing all 50 states, Washington D.C. and Pureto Rico.

“We answered three big questions,” said UNA-USA Executive Director Rachel Bowen Pittman. “Are we on track to secure a better word? What kind of future do we want to create? And what action is needed to help us build a brighter future?”

Pittman will be speaking as part of Chautauqua Institution’s Week Nine Lecture platform, “The Future We Want — The World We Need: Collective Action For Tomorrow’s Challenges,” in partnership with the U.N. Foundation. Her talk, “Americans’ Role in Addressing Global Problems at a Local Level,” will air at 10:45 a.m. EDT Wednesday, Aug. 26, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform.

The UNA-USA is a grassroots organization with a mission to raise awareness of and mobilize support for American participation in the U.N. There are more than 200 chapters in the U.S., with over 20,000 members nationally.

“The most important thing, I think, that we do is we advocate for strong U.S. leadership at the U.N. and U.S. funding at the U.N.,” Pittman said. “We galvanize our members throughout the year to take different advocacy action, be it through petitions or social media or going to (Capitol Hill).”

In the midst of the global pandemic, when the efficacy of current health, economic and social structures have been regularly thrown into question, the results of the UNA-USA’s consultation captured a snapshot of an America in the process of re-evaluation.

“There are all these issues that are coming to light that we need to address — how people reacted to the pandemic, and with that in mind, what they think is needed to have a brighter future,” she said.

For her talk, Pittman will take Chautauquans through the findings from the UNA-USA’s consultations, and explain what individuals can do to work toward the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals, a set of 17 goals the U.N. adopted in 2015 that seek to eradicate global poverty and hunger, reduce inequality and increase sustainability — and more — by 2030.

“We have 10 years (left) to work on these goals, but it requires civilian society, businesses and individuals like you and me to participate,” she said. “Anything from living a sustainable life to supporting a homeless shelter, to encouraging more gender equality around the world (can help).”

Pittman said that now, more than ever, Americans can see that from climate change to COVID-19, problems rarely stay contained to one nation’s borders.

“We have to work together because the pandemic has no knowledge of shores, it’s not going to stay in one place,” she said. “That’s just another example of why all of these issues are interrelated. People (need) to take note, and where they can, take action.”

This program is made possible by Week Nine “Program Sponsor” Erie Insurance, the Arnold and Jill Bellowe Lectureship and the Kathryn Sisson Phillips Memorial Lectureship Fund.  

United Nations Under-Secretary-General Fabrizio Hochschild to tackle global threats in Chautauqua lecture

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This year, 2020, marks the 75th anniversary of the United Nations, the founding of which forever strengthened the bond between the nations of the world.

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Fabrizio Hochschild, the under-secretary-general and special adviser to the secretary-general of the United Nations, will be coordinating the commemoration of the U.N.’s diamond anniversary through reflections on the role of the U.N. in advancing international cooperation. 

He will discuss these reflections during his lecture, “How to Reinvigorate and Rejuvenate Global Cooperation to Tackle Global Threats,” at 10:45 a.m. EDT Tuesday, Aug. 25, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform. The lecture is the second in the final week of the 2020 Chautauqua Lecture Series, “The Future We Want, The World We Need: Collective Action for Tomorrow’s Challenges” in partnership with the U.N. Foundation, honoring the U.N. and the work it has done. 

In Hochschild’s lecture, said Vice President and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education Matt Ewalt, he “will frame how the United Nations is using the 75th anniversary of the organization to look to the future — rather than the past — and engage the world in public dialogue on what must be our shared priorities to address global threats.”

Prior to his appointment as the under-secretary-general, Hochschild served as assistant secretary-general for strategic coordination in the executive office of the secretary-general from 2017 to 2019. He has also served as deputy special representative for the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic, U.N. resident coordinator, humanitarian coordinator and resident representative of the U.N. Development Programme, director of the Field Personnel Division in the United Nations Department of Field Support, New York; and as chief of field operations and technical cooperation in the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. 

Since the beginning of his career in 1988, Hochschild has worked to promote coherence and peace-keeping among the member nations of the U.N., and has stood for issues across the spectrum, from global development to the protection of human rights.

Hochschild’s decades-long career with the U.N. gives him a wealth of experience and knowledge from which to draw, and provides to him a unique perspective for his lecture on Tuesday. 

This week, the Chautauqua Lecture Series has partnered with the U.N. to discuss the issues of tomorrow and what the world may look like in the coming years. Hochschild will speak on these issues and explain the necessity of interconnectedness between nations in order to continue to evolve and survive as a species. 

“Future generations will judge whether we seize the opportunities of this unprecedented moment,” Hochschild wrote in an article for Al Jazeera. “As we emerge from the current crisis, there needs to be a global, collective, responsibility to build back better, on a safer and more equitable technological foundation. The time to act is now.”

This program is made possible by Week Nine “Program Sponsor” Erie Insurance and the William and Julia Clinger Lectureship.

‘The fate of our world:’ As pandemic proves dysfunction, Elizabeth Cousens makes her case for international cooperation

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The COVID-19 pandemic is helping Elizabeth Cousens make her case.

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With an economic collapse, rising death tolls and breakdowns in supply chains, the absence of a certain necessity has come into focus: global cooperation. 

The need can’t be ignored any longer, she said. But will citizens rise to the challenge? The jury’s still out. 

“There are too many issues on the global agenda that require global cooperation, and I think the real challenge for all of us is whether we can summon the kind of resolve to recognize that,” said Cousens, president and CEO of the United Nations Foundation

Cousens’ lecture, “This is Not a Test: Collective Action in the Age of Covid,” will open the Week Nine Chautauqua Lecture Series theme, “The Future We Want, The World We Need: Collective Action for Tomorrow’s Challenges,” in partnership with the United Nations Foundation. Her lecture will air at 10:45 a.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 24, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform.

Cousens has been at the forefront of global policymaking and innovation for over 20 years. From 2012 to 2014, she served as the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Economic and Social Council and Alternate Representative to the U.N. General Assembly. Cousens joined the foundation in 2015, starting as its deputy chief executive officer. 

It wasn’t until January 2020 that Cousens stepped into her role as the U.N. Foundation’s president and CEO, yet she still managed to raise almost $200 million for the U.N. Foundation’s COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund, which benefits the World Health Organization

Cousens said she is eager to pull from her experiences to “exchange views and ideas about the turning point we are in as a country and as a world.”

“It doesn’t take a leap of imagination to realize what an unprecedented moment we are in right now,” Cousens said. “We are in it in terms of our collective health, we are in it in terms of the future of our democracy and we are in it in terms of our ability to work together at scale on issues that are analogous to this (pandemic), like climate change or inequality.”

Countries cooperate when they are presented with two things: a set of common interests and goals they can’t accomplish as easily or efficiently on their own, according to Cousens. 

When COVID-19 is the crisis in question, both boxes are checked — instantaneously. 

“You look at a challenge like a global health crisis of the kind we are in, and you easily realize we cannot solve it without working together and recognizing the degree we are mutually dependent, mutually vulnerable and mutually capable of helping each other climb out of it,” she said. 

More importantly, Cousens said, “we aren’t beating this (pandemic) anywhere if we don’t beat it everywhere,” so there is an exigency for partnership, especially across borders.

“Some of those borders are internal borders; you look at the challenges we are facing as a country, just trying to figure out how to enable a country to recover, or you have a patchwork of different plans and approaches across states and cities — that alone is a challenge,” she said. “But the pandemic isn’t the only issue that confronts us with it.” 

Decisive moments are nothing new; Cousens said they appear in nearly every international issue from global warming to disparities in access to education. But the pandemic, in its “unprecedented severity,” has fostered a “recurring and deep belief”: The choices people make as individuals, whether that be as citizens, employees, or members of a community, can impact the “global course we end up on.”

“I hope (Chautauquans walk away) with a deep sense of the consequence of the time we are in,” Cousens said, “(and) a deep sense of their own ability to impact the outcome. Some of that is about voting, some of that is about the choices you make as an individual in your own behavior.”

Individual choices and decisions matter disproportionately in the United States, a country Cousens believes has a profound impact on the decisions made by the world around it. But it’s not as daunting as it sounds. In fact, she said this is a time to feel energized by potential, the potential to impact, “very decisively, the fate of our world.” 

“This is not an insurmountable crisis,” Cousens said. “We actually know a lot of the steps that we need to take and that we need our government to make — the challenge is to organize ourselves to do it. That’s the kind of challenge we should be able to rise to.”

This program is made possible by Week Nine Program Sponsor Erie Insurance and the Oliver and Mary Langenberg Lectureship Fund. 

Presidential historian Jon Meacham to speak on the endurance of the Constitution, closing Chautauqua’s Week 8

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First, he spoke to the world at the 2020 Democratic National Convention, where he addressed the people and endorsed Joe Biden for presidency. 

“This is a grave moment in America,” Jon Meacham said in his speech.

Now, Meacham will bring his words directly to the screens of Chautauquans in his lecture “How the Constitution Will Endure” to close out Week Eight of the Chautauqua Lecture Series: “Reframing the Constitution.” The lecture will air at 10:45 a.m. EDT Friday, Aug. 21, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform.

Meacham, in delivering the 2018 Governor’s Lecture in the Humanities as part of the E.N. Thompson Forum on World Issues in Lincoln, Nebraska, placed the challenges of the year in perspective.

“The Constitution was written for this time and moment,” he told his audience then.

In answering audience questions, he encouraged his listeners to “engage someone with whom you disagree.”

“Bear witness,” he said. “You can join the arena.”

Meacham is one of America’s leading presidential historians and scholars as well as an award-winning writer and a contributing editor at Time. One of several bestselling books authored by Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009. His most recent book is The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels.

Meacham is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a fellow of the Society of American Historians, and chairs the National Advisory Board of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University, qualifications which will shape his Friday lecture, where he will share his reflections on the lasting power of the Constitution, and on the nation’s future. 

The five-minute speech at the DNC was ample time for Meacham to spread his message. He invoked the words of Martin Luther King Jr. to call of unity in a time of unrest. 

“In his final Sunday sermon days before his death, Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘We are tied together in the single garment of destiny.’ This is the way God’s universe is made, this is the way it is structured. A single garment of destiny,” Meacham told the virtual DNC audience. 

Meacham ended his speech with his endorsement of Biden and a call for people to use their voices and their votes for justice.

“The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. Bending that arc requires all of us. It requires ‘We the People,’” Meacham said. “… With our voices and our votes, let us now write the next chapter of the American story; one of hope, of love, of justice. If we do so, we might just save our country. And our souls.”

Meacham has spent his entire career studying the history of America, specifically, the history of American Presidency. A graduate of The University of the South, Meacham is a Distinguished Visiting Professor of History at The University of the South and a Visiting Distinguished Professor at Vanderbilt. 

This program is made possible by The Susan Hirt Hagen Lectures Fund.

New York Times Magazine journalist Emily Bazelon to discuss voting rights and the Constitution

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In Emily Bazelon’s estimation, the separation between politics and law has always been foggy.

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Historically, it’s been judges who are the ones that have professed to sharpen it.

“In July 2013, Aimee Stephens wrote a letter to her co-workers and her employer at a funeral home in the Detroit area, where she had worked for six years,” wrote Bazelon — a journalist, author and activist — in “How Will Trump’s Supreme Court Remake America?,” a cover story for The New York Times Magazine. “After four years of counseling, Stephens explained that she was transitioning from being a man to being a woman, and so, at the end of an upcoming vacation, she would come back to work as her ‘true self,’ wearing women’s business attire. Stephens’ boss told her that her self-presentation would harm his clients and business, and he fired her.”

Stephens’ case eventually ended up before the Supreme Court, where an exchange between Stephens’ lawyer and Justice Neil Gorsuch ended up playing a key role.

“Gorsuch, who was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Trump in 2017, asked (Stephens’ lawyer David Cole), who is the national legal director for the A.C.L.U., how judges should now interpret an ‘old’ law, written in a different era,” Bazelon wrote. “This question is of particular importance to Gorsuch, who says he uses a method called textualism for deciding cases that involve a statute like Title VII. He believes that judges should focus only on the plain meaning of the text.”

At 10:45 a.m. EDT Thursday, Aug. 20, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, Bazelon will give a lecture on “Voting and the Constitution” to a virtual audience as part of the Week Eight Chautauqua Lecture Series theme, “Reframing the Constitution.” She’ll discuss how voting rights are — and are not — protected in the U.S. Constitution, and what challenges to mechanics of voting lie ahead for the 2020 election. In addition to being a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, Bazelon is the Truman Capote Fellow for Creative Writing and Law at Yale Law School, the author of Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration and a co-host of Slate’s “Political Gabfest” podcast. 

“We’re honored to have one of the country’s leading legal journalists join us during this week for a far-ranging conversation in the U.S. Constitution, from issues around voting rights and what is and is not explicitly stated and protected in the Constitution to the potential for amendments in our near future,” said Matt Ewalt, vice president and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education.

Among her numerous stories covering legal issues from the Supreme Court, to mass incarceration, to voting rights, is a May cover story for The New York Tiimes Magazine that posed the question: Will Americans lose their right to vote in the pandemic? 

“Before the coronavirus, the 2020 election was already vulnerable to disinformation campaigns, foreign interference and the country’s increasing polarization. The pandemic creates other challenges,” Bazelon wrote. “In a nightmare scenario, officials could use the virus as an excuse to shut the polls selectively, to the benefit of their party. Or state legislatures could invoke the power the Constitution gives them to choose the electors who cast votes in the Electoral College, and thus actually select the president. (The states turned this power over to the voters in the 19th century, but they could try to take it back.) Any move like that would surely land in the Supreme Court, which has its own deepening groove of ideological division — and the dubious history of Bush v. Gore, the case in which the court intervened to effectively decide the outcome of the 2000 election.”

In her February cover story for The New York Times Magazine, Bazelon examined that “deepening groove of ideological division,” and wrote that since the 1960s, conservatives have often derided liberal judges as “activists” who bend the law to make big changes.

“Until his departure in 2018, Justice (Anthony) Kennedy held the Supreme Court’s swing vote and (like Sandra Day O’Connor before him) restrained his fellow conservatives by forging a kind of national compromise on abortion rights, marriage equality, gun laws, the regulatory powers of federal agencies and the scope of the death penalty,” Bazelon wrote. 

According to Bazelon, Gorsuch, along with Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, have become the next generation of conservatives who aren’t afraid to alter laws.

“The more that conservatives on the court want to overturn precedents and strike down laws, the more useful it is for them to claim a coherent philosophy that seems to merely follow the dictates of the Constitution or a statute,” she wrote.

This program is made possible by the Richard Newman Campen Chautauqua Impressions Fund and the Donald Chace Shaw Fund.

Cato Institute Chairman Robert A. Levy to discuss the founding fathers’ vision of limited government for Week Eight Lecture

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Robert A. Levy knows that Americans have a lot of misconceptions about libertarianism.

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“Most people think libertarianism is synonymous with conservatism, which it is not,” he said. “Libertarians tend to be conservative on some issues, and they tend to be the fiscal issues: taxes, regulations, spending — but we are very liberal on other issues, things like marriage equality, drug legalization, liberalized immigration policy, civil liberties and, certainly, a non-interventionist foreign policy.”

While these party-crossing beliefs lead critics to call libertarians ideologically inconsistent, Levy argues the opposite.

“Conservatives want less government, except in your bedroom, and the liberals want more government, except in your bedroom,” he said. “Libertarians are quite consistent in wanting small government across the board. We want a government that stays out of our wallet and stays out of our bedroom and stays out of foreign entanglements, unless our vital interests are at stake.”

Levy is a Constitutional scholar, former Georgetown University law professor and chairman of the board of directors at the Cato Institute, a liberterian think-tank headquartered in Washington D.C. He will be speaking as part of Week Eight’s Chautauqua Lecture Series theme, “Reframing the Constitution.”

His talk, “The Founding Fathers’ Vision” will air at 10:45 a.m. EDT Wednesday, Aug. 19, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform.

In a week centered around the Constitution and its potential reformation, Levy will argue that the reform needed is not further distance from, but a return to, the framers’ original limited-government intentions.

“I’m going to talk about how the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted,” he said. “And I’m going to argue that the Supreme Court has occasionally subverted the original design, and I will recommend a few steps that I think are necessary to restore Constitutional government.”

Levy will discuss the two main schools of thought when it comes to interpreting the Constitution: textualism, favored by conservative judges, and the living Constitution, more commonly used by liberals. Levy is a practitioner of textualism.

“The conservatives believe that the words in the document tell us how the document ought to be interpreted,” he said. “And the liberals believe that the Constitution is this evolving document and you can pretty much disregard the words and make sure that (it) conforms to changing cultural, technological, social (and) political happenings over time.”

Over the last 200 years, a succession of Supreme Court decisions have expanded the power and reach of the federal government, in what Levy calls a “bastardization” of the Founding Fathers’ original intentions.

“It did not happen in one fell swoop; it evolved over time as a result of a number of different cases and culminated with the New Deal under the Roosevelt administration and the Court at the time,” he said. “Now we have the federal government involved in everything from health care to education, to welfare to housing, to aid to the arts.”

For Levy, the Founding Fathers’ vision is most clearly laid out in the last two amendments in the Bill of Rights.

“The 10th Amendment specifically says the federal government only has the powers that are enumerated (in the Constitution),” he said. “The Ninth Amendment is just the reverse; it specifically says that individuals have a broad list of rights, those that are enumerated in the Constitution, … but also rights that are not enumerated, rights that we had before the (it) was written, before the government was even formed, and that we still retain.”

For this reason, Levy believes that through the libertarian view of government, Americans can most clearly see the America the founding fathers hoped for.

“That was the framing intention; that we would have a broad panoply of rights, but the government would have very limited power,” he said. “We, libertarians, believe in a very broad list of rights, and a strictly limited list of governmental powers.”

This program is made possible by the John M. Wadsworth Lectureship on Free Market and Libertarian Principles.

Johns Hopkins professor Martha Jones to speak on history of voter suppression, Nineteenth Amendment

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The average election day in the United States goes something like this: 

Assuming their work schedules will allow it, voters find their spot at the end of hours-long waiting lines at their polling location — given that the location was not shut down without notice. Once they reach the check-in point, they cross their fingers hoping their registration — filed ahead of time in accordance to varying state deadlines — was not purged without their knowledge. Once the voter has satisfied the ID requirements of their particular state, they enter the booth and hope that the machine is functioning and uncompromised

Voting — a right guaranteed by the government — has been guarded by hurdles at every corner. According to Martha Jones, the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, this is just the newest chapter in a centuries-long tale of voter suppression in the United States.

Jones will return to Chautauqua Institution for the second time this season to discuss voter suppression at 10:45 a.m. EDT Tuesday, Aug. 18, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform with a presentation titled “The Onerous Process of Amending the Constitution” as part of the Week Eight Chautauqua Lecture Series theme, “Reframing the Constitution.” The presentation is a look at how Constitutional amendments regarding voting rights do not always ensure Americans the vote. 

“I want people to think hard about what it means when — whether it’s in Washington or it’s in your state legislature — lawmakers appear to be ready to stand by while we all struggle in many, many different ways to cast ballots in 2020,” Jones said. “I want people to appreciate that there’s nothing purely circumstantial about what we’re facing this November — that this country has a history of voter suppression, and it’s taken many forms.”

The presentation uses the 19th Amendment as a case study. The amendment states that no state shall deny someone the right to vote on account of their sex. But, it does not prohibit any other barrier to voting. 

What would it be like if we actually guaranteed to all Americans the right to vote if the burden was on the state to ensure that we could cast our ballots? We would not be having this debate about (voting) by mail and the like,” Jones said. “We would understand that the government was responsible for ensuring our ability to cast ballots. But, we live in a regime that leaves the individual states with a great deal of latitude.”

“I want to look at the ways in which the amendment prohibits the states from doing things, but doesn’t promise to any American woman that she will be able to cast a ballot,” Jones said. “Many things (kept) women from the polls after 1920, including state requirements related to age, residency and citizenship, state requirements related to poll taxes, literacy tests, and the Jim Crow facets of state level voting rights.”

In 2020, Jones pointed out that voters face another issue keeping them from voting: the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Of course, COVID-19 presents people with a profound dilemma: Do I risk my health and my well being in order to cast the ballot? That was (also) true in 1920 for Black women who knew they would face intimidation and Klan-style violence if they tried to go to the polls,” Jones said. “Today, some of us are going to be asked to risk our health and maybe our lives in order to get to the polls.”

With the fear of mass gatherings at polling locations, many are expressing interest in mail-in voting. But President Donald Trump admitted to cutting funds to the USPS ahead of the election to slow down mail-in votes which he fears will lose him the November election. Many have called this a blatant act of voter suppression

“What would it be like if we actually guaranteed to all Americans the right to vote if the burden was on the state to ensure that we could cast our ballots? We would not be having this debate about (voting) by mail and the like,” Jones said. “We would understand that the government was responsible for ensuring our ability to cast ballots. But, we live in a regime that leaves the individual states with a great deal of latitude.”

Jones will also lead a three-day scholar-in-residence seminar — from Wednesday, Aug. 19, to Friday, Aug. 21 — titled “The Right to Vote?: Why Constitution Amendments Have Never Been Enough.” In this, Jones will extend on her presentation’s subject, while looking at three specific suffrage narratives: those of Black men, white women, and Black women. 

“I wanted to underscore that even something as momentous as a 15th or 19th Amendment does not guarantee any American the right to vote,” Jones said. “Still here in 2020 we recognize that we have to remain vigilant, that there are many kinds of vagaries Americans encounter — some of them sinister, some of them not so sinister, that are still impediments to the polls.”

This program is made possible by the Edward L. Anderson Jr. Foundation, Inc.

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