Over the course of the 2024 Summer Assembly Season, the Institution has programmed a series of lectures dedicated to Chautauqua’s pillars — Arts, Education, Religion and Recreation, given by former leaders in each of those areas.
This week, the series concludes with a capstone from Chautauqua Institution’s 17th President Tom Becker, whose 13-year tenure at the helm of Chautauqua oversaw each of those programmatic areas. But Becker’s work at the Institution began long before his presidency, in 1985, as vice president of the Chautauqua Foundation, during the tenure of Chautauqua’s 15th President Daniel Bratton, who was a key orchestrator of five annual U.S.-USSR conferences for delegations of Chautauquans, American performing artists, diplomats and scholars, and representatives of the USSR and the Soviet Embassy in Washington from 1985 to 1989.
These conferences — which started at the 1985 season in a weeklong program titled “The Chautauqua Conference on U.S.-Soviet Relations” — will be the subject of Becker’s Pillar Talk at 3:15 p.m. today in Smith Wilkes Hall.
“The importance of this week was (in part that) it occurred just after the ascension to power of Secretary Gorbachev and before his proclamation of increased openness in relations which finally culminated in the Reagan-Gorbachev Geneva Exchange Initiatives,” Bratton wrote in his published account, The Journey to Jūrmala.
A “key and early staff player in the game,” Bratton wrote, was Becker.
“He recognized early in the game the great possibilities of the trip for the Institution, including the development dimension,” Bratton wrote. “He, therefore, immediately became a strong advocate for the trip within the councils of the Institution and my primary aide in handling what would be a nightmare of administrative decisions and details to be addressed.”
