Morning Lecture Previews

In a time of great political polarization and unrest, Jeffery Rosen has chosen his side: the Constitution. 

In what he calls a battle for the Constitution, Rosen leads the charge as the president and chief executive officer of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that seeks to educate the public about the Constitution.

Recently, the center launched a new project in partnership with The Atlantic called “The Battle For the Constitution,” intended to discuss the issues and controversies around the founding document from a Constitutional perspective rather than a political one. 

Rosen will explore this project in his lecture “The Fourth Battle for the Constitution” at 10:45 a.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 17, on the CHQ Assembly Virtual Platform. The lecture will open Week Eight of the Chautauqua Lecture Series; the theme for the week is “Reframing The Constitution.” 

A professor at The George Washington University Law School and contributing editor to The Atlantic, Rosen has authored six books, as well as had his writings featured in The New York Times Magazine and National Public Radio, among others. 

His newest book, Conversations with RBG: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law, was published in November 2019.

Rosen became the president of the NCC in 2013, and has developed the center’s Interactive Constitution, an online resource and platform which brings together top scholars, both conservative and liberal, to discuss areas of agreement and disagreement about each clause of the Constitution. 

The NCC, located on Independence Mall in Philadelphia, steps from where the Constitution was signed, places an emphasis on nonpartisanship and open discussion from all sides. 

“The more I participate in Constitutional conversations, the more convinced I am that the Constitution is a conversation — one where citizens of different backgrounds and perspectives can disagree respectfully and energetically about the Constitutional text and shape its meaning in the future,” Rosen wrote on the NCC website. 

In his Atlantic article “The Fourth Battle for the Constitution,” Rosen discusses what he believes to be the culmination of years of Constitutional debate as the Supreme Court draws closer to providing answers to what he calls “some of the most hotly contested questions of Constitutional law.”

“Our goal is to convene the leading Constitutional scholars in America — progressive, conservative, libertarian, or idiosyncratic — to write about the Constitutional debates at the center of American life,” Rosen wrote. “The stakes of this battle are enormous, and we hope that the essays in this nonpartisan project will provide readers with the context, analysis, and perspective needed to make sense of it all.”

Institution Vice President and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education Matt Ewalt believes that Rosen is the ideal speaker to open the week on the Constitution, as his experience with educating the public on Constitutional issues and discussions takes scholarly material and makes it accessible to any and everyone. 

“As he has done on the Amphitheater stage and throughout his tenure at the National Constitution Center, Jeff Rosen is able to guide us through this founding document, from historical context to interpretation to ramifications today like no one else in this country,” Ewalt said. 

This program is made possible by The Higie Family Lectureship.

It’s only natural to fear the potential of rapidly advancing technology. By portraying artificial intelligence as the root of dystopian dangers and apocalyptic reverberations, science fiction has a tendency to leave its readers dreading the rise of self-aware robotic overlords.

But Flynn Coleman, an international human rights attorney, said there is a more tangible reason people don’t trust algorithms. 

“These aren’t just outlandish future concerns,” Coleman said. “Algorithms are already racist, sexist, incredibly prejudiced and incredibly biased. We are way deeper into this than we realize.”

However, she added, “I’m working on it.”  

Coleman will deliver her lecture, “The Human Algorithm,” at 10:45 a.m. EDT on Friday, Aug. 14, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, as part of the Week Seven Chautauqua Lecture Series theme, “The Science of Us.” Coleman is a writer, public speaker, professor, Harvard fellow and social innovator who has worked with the United Nations, the United States federal government, and international corporations and human rights organizations around the world. 

The premise of Coleman’s presentation is her 2019 book, A Human Algorithm: How Artificial Intelligence Is Redefining Who We Are, which examines the impact intelligent technology “can and will have on humanity.”

We are only as safe and healthy as the most marginalized among us,” Coleman said. “If we don’t build equity, empathy and justice into our societal structures and technological tools, we start to see that the fabric of our nation tears.”

“I am always thinking about how we can use human ingenuity and innovation to create a better world and imagine a better society for the generations that will be,” she said. “To talk about the future of technology, you must also include talking about these intelligent technologies we are creating that could be smarter than we are or could ever be.”

“Everything is intertwined and connected,” she said, so one also can’t talk about intelligent technologies without talking about reconfiguring economic and educational systems alongside them. 

“We are only as safe and healthy as the most marginalized among us,” Coleman said. “If we don’t build equity, empathy and justice into our societal structures and technological tools, we start to see that the fabric of our nation tears.”

The goal then becomes centering the most marginalized; the people most proximate to problems need to be most proximate to solutions.

“The technology we build will mirror its designers, so I knew from the beginning we needed more inclusion, representation and diversity at the table,” Coleman said. “We should all have a voice and a say in the future of tech, because it affects everyone. We need to build tools we would be proud to leave for the ages.”

To “wholeheartedly believe it’s for the best,” Coleman argues it is critical to instill values, ethics and morals into robots, algorithms, and other forms of AI. Equally important then is developing and implementing laws, policies and oversight mechanisms to protect people from “tech’s insidious threats.”

Avoiding that hard work is minacious, according to Coleman.

“Exclusionary practices in which our future is being built without that democratic process is incredibly dangerous,” she said. “These tools will be used no matter what; the only question is by who, and will we be using them for the good of all or only sharing the benefits with a select few?” 

Viewing artificial intelligence as a “partner for all” rather than a threat or a savior, Coleman said can serve as a “lens through which we can view humanity.” These machines, while challenging our personal beliefs and our socioeconomic world order, also have the potential to “transform health and well-being, alleviate poverty and suffering, and reveal further mysteries of intelligence and consciousness.” 

No matter what the problem is — from a pandemic to climate change — Coleman said the mission is to learn how to treat one another better in the process of solving it, regardless of whether or not technology takes part.

“When that small part of ourselves says that to feel better about ourselves we need someone else to feel less than, that’s the root of all danger that comes our way,” Coleman said. “You don’t have to be exceptional and the only center of the universe to be powerful and brilliant. Making room for other kinds of brilliance and living things? That widens our lens.”

This program is made possible by the Week Seven “Program Sponsor” Allegheny Health Network and The Charles and Gail Gamble Lecture Endowment. 

In 2019, Angela Saini published her book, Superior: The Return of Race Science. But she’d like to clarify: Though the word resides in its title, Superior is not a science book, because there is no science to race.

Superior, rather, serves as a historical guide, tracing the past, present and future of how notions  of inferiority and superiority “live on in people’s imaginations.”

“When you start to understand the history and the political elements of race and how this idea was constructed over many centuries, then you can begin to dismantle it in your head,” Saini said. “Slowly, as we start to do that as individuals, we can do that as societies and as institutions.” 

Saini, science journalist, broadcaster and author, will deliver her lecture, “The Return of Race Science” at 10:45 a.m. EDT on Thursday, Aug. 13, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, as part of the Week Seven Chautauqua Lecture Series theme, “The Science of Us.” 

The classifications were so arbitrary that they had no biological meaning anymore,” Saini said. “That’s what finally broke the glass.”

In her presentation, Saini said she plans to explore propositions suggesting race has any kind of “biological validity, considering it’s something scientists tell us again and again is a social construct.”

“I want to dismantle the ways in which modern Western science constructed the idea of race and built upon that,” Saini said. “Then, I want to explore the way that the legacy lives on in medicine, genetics, DNA ancestry testing and also in the alt-right and far-right; how these ideas get used and abused in ethnic nationalism and white supremacy.”

Most find it hard to believe, Saini said, but before World War II, being racist was not seen as an unfavorable attribute the way it is currently. In fact, the concept of subspecies among the human race was “widely held” by many Western scientists across Europe and the United States.

“That view wasn’t seen as marginal at all — it was seen as something totally acceptable,” she said. “Somehow, even the concept of eugenics was tolerable; favorable, even. (Eugenics) was taught in universities and talked about by public figures on both the left and right.” 

Eugenics is the study of arranging reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics considered to be most desirable. Because Nazis in Germany tried to biologize identity, Saini said eugenics was also the philosophy “partially behind the Holocaust.” 

The consequences of the Holocaust were so harrowing, mainstream science turned its back on race science.

“The classifications were so arbitrary that they had no biological meaning anymore,” Saini said. “That’s what finally broke the glass.”

Even though the global population appeared to come together in the wake of the genocide, Saini said for some scientists, it was already too late. 

“They couldn’t imagine a world where race didn’t matter,” she said. 

The scientists “at fault” weren’t solely responsible. According to Saini, the superiority complex lives on in citizens of societies that have experienced colonialism or slavery, or have been the perpertrators of either of those things. Two prime examples: the United States and United Kingdom. 

For example, during the Brexit “Vote Leave” campaign, Saini said the debate around the issue occasionally shifted into a racialized question about whether Brits wanted “more immigration or not.”

“Some people discussed their wish to return to some kind of British empire again, failing to understand that this is not seen as a good thing by historians,” she said. “Those ideas about what makes Britain special or what makes Britain great were playing out — underlying some of that was this idea of racial superiority.”

The most obvious difference between the U.S. and London these days is that race and ethnicity are “always a point of discussion in the States,” she said.

“If there is one thing I think I have found about the States that is different than London these days, it’s that my race and ethnicity is constantly being observed and commented on, and I think that speaks to how racialized the United States has become,” she said.

Racism has been a constant throughout history, Saini said, and clearly, it’s something that will take years to fully remove. 

“I don’t think we will see the end of it in my lifetime,” Saini said. 

What it requires is a “huge amount of reflection and introspection,” Saini said. People are exposed to norms and social constructs early on in life, meaning that looking outside of them, ultimately changing them, comes with a number of challenges. 

“I was raised with these norms and ideas just like everybody else in the society I live in,” Saini said. “I wasn’t even taught about Britain’s involvement in the slave trade. But, because of things like the Black Lives Matter movement, people are starting to educate themselves. In that process, the world will change.”

This program is made possible by the Week Seven “Program Sponsor” Allegheny Health Network and the G. Thomas and Kathleen Harrick Lectureship Endowment.

In 2009, Sheri Fink published her investigative piece “The Deadly Choices at Memorial” in the New York Times Magazine. The article, which distilled more than two years of reporting, detailed the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina at the New Orleans Memorial Medical Center in 2005. It won a 2010 Pulitzer Prize and a National Magazine Award for investigative reporting.

She later transformed the 13,000-word article into a nearly 600-page book, Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, which she presented at the Institution as a Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle author in 2014. It won a PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award and National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction.

As of April, Fink is once again being honored for her work recording history in hospital halls. This time, for a story with a global impact — the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Dr. Fink is able to look inside such a crisis to understand both the science and the humanity — from the gut-wrenching decisions of doctors and nurses at overcrowded hospitals, to the impact on individual families amid continued political debates,” said Vice President and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education Matt Ewalt.

Fink will deliver her lecture, “Inside the Science of and Response to COVID-19” at 10:45 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, Aug. 11, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, as part of the Week Seven Chautauqua Lecture Series theme, “The Science of Us.” In addition to her work as an award-winning author, Fink serves as an executive producer of the Netflix documentary television series “Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak” and a correspondent at The New York Times.

Fink, and her New York Times colleague Mike Baker, won the April Sidney Award for “It’s Just Everywhere Already: How Delays in Testing Set Back the U.S. Coronavirus Response,” a critical early scoop that revealed how state and federal regulators stymied a flu surveillance lab in Washington State.

“There were people getting sick and we didn’t know about it,” Fink said in an interview with the Sidney Hillman Foundation. “There were researchers who were ready and willing to (test) very early on. It’s very, very sad that that capacity couldn’t have been used.”

Fink and Baker’s investigation began in late January, when the first confirmed United States case of coronavirus surfaced in the greater Seattle area. Helen Chu, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Washington, and her colleagues had already been collecting nasal swabs from people in the Puget Sound region as part of their ongoing flu surveillance project. To repurpose their testing to monitor the spread of the virus, Chu and her team needed the support of state and local officials. However, according to Fink, they were denied for weeks. 

“I think the bottom line is that there wasn’t alacrity,” Fink told the Hillman Foundation. “There was this very dangerous virus and it was known many, many weeks before that it had two features that make scientists concerned: One, that it had the capacity to cause serious disease, and two, that it had the capacity to transmit effectively from person to person.”

In late February, Chu started testing the nasal swabs without government approval. The results established the coronavirus had been circulating in the community for at least six weeks. At that point, two people had already died. 

“It’s very, very sad that that capacity couldn’t have been used,” Fink said in that interview. “Here was a system that actually existed that had hundreds and hundreds of samples from people who were symptomatic with flu-like symptoms, which looks a lot like coronavirus, and they were sitting on this and not testing because of these obstacles.”

The United States, which accounts for less than 5% of the world population, currently leads all other countries in global coronavirus infections and deaths. The nation represents more than 22% of global coronavirus deaths and more than 25% of infections as of Wednesday, Aug. 5, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

“I think that’s very representative of this larger failure to roll out and significantly increase the capacity to test in this country, both in the private sector and in our public health labs,” Fink told the Hillman Foundation. 

Fink and Baker’s story, one of the first of many scoops that revealed aspects of the federal government’s mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic, exposed the beginning of a broader pattern still coming to light. According to Ewalt, that insight makes Fink a quintessential contributor to the Week Seven conversation.

“‘The Science of Us’ during the COVID-19 crisis, of what we know and don’t know, of what we choose to believe and how we respond, was clearly a topic we needed to explore this summer,” Ewalt said.

This program is made possible by the Week Seven “Program Sponsor” Allegheny Health Network and the Donald West King and Francis Lila King Lectureship.

For the majority of the population, theoretical physics is just that — theoretical. Maybe it was studied briefly in a high school physics class, or maybe dabbled in during college, but oftentimes theoretical physics remains, for most people, a mystery.

Brian Greene is not one of these people. In fact, Greene is one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists, boasting degrees from Harvard University and Oxford University and currently serving as the director of Columbia University’s Center for Theoretical Physics, where he is also a professor of physics and mathematics. 

A Rhodes Scholar and best-selling author, Greene will open the Chautauqua Lecture Series week on “The Science of Us” with his lecture, “Mind, Matter and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe” at 10:45 a.m. EDT on Monday, Aug. 10, on the CHQ Assembly Virtual Platform.

Theoretical physics is a branch of physics which explains, rationalizes and predicts natural phenomena through the study of mathematical models and abstractions of physical objects and systems. 

Simplified, theoretical physics is an attempt to understand the world by creating models of reality, in contrast to experimental physics which involves actual interaction with whatever is being studied, from pushing a sphere down a hill to measuring the speed of light particles. 

Greene is well known for the books he has authored: The Elegant Universe, The Fabric of the Cosmos, The Hidden Reality and, his most recent publication, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe. Combined, these books have sold over 2 million copies and have been translated into 40 languages, and have spent a collective 68 weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list. 

In addition to his work as an author and professor, Greene is also the co-founder of The World Science Festival, which, according to its website, seeks to “cultivate a general public informed by science, inspired by its wonder, convinced of its value, and prepared to engage with its implications for the future.”

The theme for Week Seven, “The Science of Us,” centers on discussion of the social and historical impact of 21st-century scientific developments, and the implications that new understandings of heritage and ethnicity have on community development and socioeconomic models moving forward. Greene’s lecture will touch on these topics, as well as giving an overview of his new work, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe, which explores deep time and humanity’s search for purpose. 

Vice President and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education Matt Ewalt said that Greene will offer a unique perspective on the week’s topic. 

“In a week in which we consider how 21st-century science is shaping how we think of ‘us’ as a species, Brian Greene begins at the very beginning and looks to the end of time as we know it, examining how we came to be, our role in the vast universe and humanity’s continued search for meaning,” Ewalt said.

Ewalt said he was excited to collaborate with Greene’s production team at the World Science Festival, who have produced a 50-minute program with “exceptional graphics and animations” to accompany Greene’s lecture.

This program is made possible by the Week Seven “Program Sponsor” Allegheny Health Network and the Barbara R. Foorman Science Literacy Endowment.

When it comes to New Year’s resolutions, education beat reporters have two chances at “fresh starts” to the year — the calendar year, in January, and the academic year, in August.

Moriah Balingit, the national education reporter for The Washington Post, didn’t have a set list of resolutions per se when it came to her work, but in a January episode of EWA Radio, the Education Writers Association’s podcast, she shared with host Emily Richmond a list of stories she hoped to be seeing more coverage of in 2020.

That list included topics like food stamp rules impacting the number of American students on free and reduced meals, and resulting stories about “lunch-shaming” told from the perspective of the lunch workers who have to employ such policies, and the students and families being impacted by them. Balingit also wanted to see coverage on school safety, and classroom conditions.

But the big topic, she said, is equity.

“One of the principles I’m trying to think about more as I move into the new year, and I’m going to try to do it with more intention, is that the U.S. education system is supposed to be, as Horace Mann put it, a great equalizer,” she told Richmond. “And anybody who has covered schools or attended schools knows that that is absolutely not the case. In fact, in some cases, it seems to have the opposite effect. It creates greater gaps, greater barriers for children who are already growing up in challenging circumstances. In some ways, it would be easy to get complacent about the system we currently have … and accept it as the norm, but that’s not the principle the system was built on initially.”

Balingit, who was a finalist for her beat coverage in the 2019 National Awards for Education Reporting, will participate in a special installment of the Chautauqua Lecture Series at 1 p.m. EDT Friday, Aug. 7, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, closing the Week Six theme of “Rebuilding Public Education.” Matt Ewalt, vice president and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education, said Balingit will “share her learnings as a journalist covering education at the national level, speaking with teachers, administrators, students and parents at a time of great anxiety and fear.”

Balingit started working at the Post in 2014, as a graduate student fellow from American University, where she earned a master’s degree in journalism and public affairs while covering Virginia schools. Prior to joining the Post, she covered crime and city hall for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where she earned fellowships from the International Center for Journalists and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to report on the rise of labor unions in Bangladesh’s garment industry and on Nepal’s Bhutanese refugees.

Her work lately has centered on schools reopening amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and districts cutting ties with police and school resource officers following Black Lives Matter protests.

“We’ve heard the issue of equity from all of this week’s speakers on public education, and Ms. Balingit brings particular interest and insight as a journalist on how the great challenges within public education are tied to systemic failures in other sectors of our economy and culture,” Ewalt said.

This program is made possible by Dorothy M. Wissel Lectureship.

When Carey Wright began her position as Mississippi state superintendent in 2013, she was met with a culture of low expectations for student performance. She knew that had to change.

“Children can do and will do what you tell them they can and will do, and support them in doing it,” Wright said. “That’s been my foundational belief my entire life as an educator, and we’ve proved that possible here in a state (where) I don’t think they thought it was possible.”

In the seven years since she started in her position, Mississippi public schools have made massive gains in education. In 2020, Education Week’s Quality Counts ranked Mississippi second in the nation for improvement in education. Student participation has doubled in Advanced Placement classes. Student achievement on the National Assessment of Education Progress improved at a rate faster than the majority of the country. 

At 10:45 a.m. EDT Friday, Aug. 7, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, Wright will present the story of Mississippi’s education reformation as part of Week Six’s Chautauqua Lecture Series theme, “Rebuilding Public Education.”

“The major theme (of the lecture) is really about the historic education achievement gains that Mississippi has made. It’s really the story of how this came to be, and the policies and processes that we put in place, belief systems that we used to drive our work, etc.,” Wright said. “This is really kind of a detailed story of Mississippi before and Mississippi now.”

Wright spearheaded many initiatives responsible for these gains, including several key pieces of legislation. 

In 2013, the Early Learning Collaborative Act was established, providing Mississipians their first public pre-K program funded by the state government. The same year, the state passed the Literacy-Based Promotion Act which required third-grade students to pass a literacy test before advancing to the fourth grade. Along with this, tests were mandated for new elementary teachers to ensure they understood the foundation skills and science of reading.

“For me, the classroom has always been my heart. I started out as a teacher, then was an elementary school principal for a number of years. I just really believe that the magic takes place in the classroom. So, if we could do the best that we could to build teacher capacity in order to teach what we knew they needed to be teaching, … it would pay off for us,” Wright said. “I really invested in teachers and in their professional development. We more than doubled down on the amount of professional development we have been providing teachers across the state.”

During this process, Wright reached out to the Region Education Laboratory, an educational research center, to observe the classroom consequences of Mississippi’s new legislation. After observing hundreds of teachers across the state, REL and Wright found that teachers felt more secure in their understanding of the science of reading after their professional development. 

At the same time, Wright and the public school system also wanted to bring reform to high schools. 

“We found that not all high schools were offering Advanced Placement — so we had an Advanced Placement initiative and it more than doubled the number of kids not only enrolled in Advanced Placement, but it also took our pass rate to an all-time high,” Wright said. “So, it let me know that there were a lot of kids out there that needed that access, but weren’t getting it.”

Wright’s expectations were set by her time as an educator across the country. She began her career as a teacher for second through sixth grades, and moved onto an elementary principal position in Maryland. Wright then moved to Washington D.C. to work in an education administration position before moving to Mississippi in 2013. 

In her time as an educator, Wright has learned to use a research-based approach when setting standards and reforming education. She urges other educators to look at the research, base their policy around that and then stick to it, no matter how tedious the journey is. 

Above all else, Wright believes that educators should stress the importance of literacy at an early age. 

“Reading is the gateway to every other subject in the world. We need to ensure that all of our children are strong readers,” Wright said. “That, to me, is … the big essence of my presentation, that you’ve got to focus first (in literacy).”

This program is made possible by the George and Julie Follansbee Family Fund.

Diane Ravitch has worked as a historian of education for more than four decades. She’s served as the assistant secretary of education under President George H. W. Bush, written numerous books on education and has taught as a research professor of education at New York University for the last 26 years. In that time she’s watched the evolution of the American education system, and has been vocal about the evolution of her own thoughts on the matter.

“In the last 10 years I’ve become an activist on behalf of public schools and the importance of public education in a democracy,” Ravitch said in an April interview with Education Week. “This was a big change from where I was before then.”

Ravitch will be speaking as part of the Chautauqua Institution’s Week Six, “Rebuilding Public Education.” Her lecture will air at 10:45 a.m. EDT Thursday, Aug. 6, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform.

“Ravitch is one of the country’s strongest advocates for public education, and with that advocacy comes strong criticism of the current education reform movement,” said Matt Ewalt, an Institution vice president and the Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education. “During a week that looks at reform efforts throughout the United States, Professor Ravitch will make the case against privatization and highlight those who have fought against these forces.”

In 2010, after being known for years as a conservative advocate for the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, charter schools and school choice, Ravitch came out against these policies. In her 2010 book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, she writes about becoming disillusioned with NCLB.

“I realized that the remedies were not working, I started to doubt the entire approach to school reform that NCLB represented,” she wrote. “I realized that incentives and sanctions were not the right levers to improve education; incentives and sanctions may be right for business organizations, where the bottom line — profit — is the highest priority, but they are not right for schools. I started to see the danger of the culture of testing that was spreading through every school, community, town, city, and state.”

Ravitch has come to realize that national standardized testing and penalizing “under-performing” schools does little to raise education standards or address the root causes of undereducation.

“Standardized tests themselves are a social construction of very limited value,” she told Education Week. “When we use standardized tests we judge children, we stigmatize them unless they’re in the top. … (They) have become a way of adding to the privilege of those who are already privileged.”

She is highly critical of billionaire philanthropists trying to “disrupt” the education system through the advocacy of such measures at the Common Core.

“The great failure of the billionaires, aside from their arrogance in thinking that they are somehow entitled to reinvent education without paying attention to the people who do the work, is that they change the subject,” Ravitch said in the same interview. “The subject to me is, what do we do about the dramatic inequality in our society?”

To her, the only way the American education system will improve is if politicians and voters see it as a resource worth investing in.

“Almost half the kids in this country are, by federal definition, living below the poverty line, and an enormous number of them have special needs,” she told Education Week. “It costs money to address all those needs. Are we willing to pay teachers a professional salary and have a teaching profession, or do we want to just keep skimping and pretending that choice and testing are somehow a substitute for genuine social and political action?”

This program is made possible by The Locke-Irwin Fund.

Political platforms often include party-affiliated stances on a variety of issues, from tax reform to health care. Typically, the Democratic party and the Republican party hold opposing beliefs regarding these issues, giving voters a choice of one side or the other. 

One of the only topics that tends to transcend party differences — at least in theory — is that of improving  education. Across the board, politicians and governments strive to better education systems on local, state and national levels. 

Jeb Bush, the 43rd Governor of Florida, is one of the most prominent voices in the fight for better education, and made such large improvements to Florida’s education systems during his 1999 – 2007 tenure as governor that Florida remains a national leader in education and is one of the only states in the nation to significantly narrow the achievement gap. 

Bush will speak on education reform during his lecture, “Rebuilding Public Education,” at 10:45 a.m. EDT on Wednesday, Aug.5, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, as part of the Week Six Chautauqua Lecture Series theme, “Rebuilding Public Education.”

“Education has been a top priority while Jeb Bush served as governor of Florida and in his professional life since leaving the governor’s office. He remains an influential voice, with his foundation working closely with states all around the United States on reform,” said Vice President and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education Matt Ewalt.

He will be the first member of the Bush family to speak to a Chautauqua audience since former First Lady Barbara Bush lectured in 1987. 

The first Republican in Florida’s history to be reelected governor, Bush championed educational reform as a priority, implementing an accountability system in public schools that created one of the most ambitious school choice programs in the nation. 

“The sad truth is that equality of opportunity doesn’t exist in many of our schools. We give some kids a chance, but not all. That failure is the great moral and economic issue of our time. And it’s hurting all of America,” Bush said in his speech at the 2012 Republican National Convention. “I believe we can meet this challenge. We need to set high standards for students and teachers and provide students and their parents the choices they deserve. We must stop excusing failure in our schools and start rewarding improvement and success. We must have high academic standards that are benchmarked to the best in the world. Education is hard work, but if you follow some core principles, and you challenge the status quo, you get great results.”

Following his time in office, Bush became the president and chairman of the board of directors of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, a national non-profit organization that aims to raise student achievement through collaboration with education leaders, teachers, parents and advocates. 

During his lecture, Bush will discuss the work being done by ExcelinEd to transform education reform and bolster student achievement. 

According to its website, ExcelinEd has a goal of “transforming education to unlock lifelong opportunity and success for each and every child.” The organization works with educators and politicians at all levels to develop and implement policies that aid in student achievement. 

ExcelinEd is able to provide each state with unique solutions for issues in their education systems through the help of educational experts from around the nation, and seeks to advance student learning, increase equity and ready graduates for college and career. 

Ewalt is looking forward to Wednesday’s lecture and thinks that the discussion of educational reform is an interesting and important element of the weekly theme of Education. 

“We look forward to learning more about his call for reform and how we navigate the often contentious debate around education in this country,” Ewalt said. 

This program is made possible by The Charles Ellsworth Goodell Lectureship in Government and Public Affairs & the Carnahan-Jackson Lectureship.

In 2006, Sir Ken Robinson, CBE FRSA, dazzled his TED Talk audience with acerbic wit, relatable anecdotes, and one piercing question: “Do schools kill creativity?”

Robinson’s talk has since been viewed over 60 million times, in 160 countries. In it, he makes a case that children’s innate creativity has been squandered and squashed by education systems across the globe, and called for a reordering of priorities for producing educated, healthy students. 

“We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence,” he told his audience then, “(because) we think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically, we think in abstract terms, we think in movement.”

An internationally recognized leader in education policy who was knighted in 2003 for his service to the arts, Robinson was originally scheduled to speak to Chautauquans worldwide, addressing the state of education in the United States in his lecture at 10:45 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, Aug. 4, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform, opening the Week Six theme on “Rebuilding Public Education.” His lecture, originally scheduled for Monday, Aug. 3, was initially postponed due to a family emergency; it will be aired Tuesday without a live Q-and-A.

“Sir Ken Robinson’s powerful message of how our educational system has impoverished the culture of learning comes at an extraordinary time for a national dialogue on public education — a time of great anxiety and uncertainty for children, parents and educators,” said Matt Ewalt, vice president and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education at Chautauqua Institution. “Yet this very moment also makes clear the power of his larger argument, that a culture of learning must prioritize compassion, collaboration and the diversity of our communities.”

Following the lecture will be a live Q-and-A, when viewers will be able to send in questions via questions.chq.org or on Twitter at #CHQ2020. 

“We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we are educating our children,” Robinson told his TED audience in 2006. More recently, in line with this credo, Robinson has published, spoken and brainstormed around the world for systems that will embrace children’s innate gifts. 

A prolific author as well as public speaker, Robinson has published New York Times best-selling works including The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything; Finding Your Element: How to Discover Your Talents and Passions and Transform Your Life; You, Your Child, and School; and Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education. 

Aside from his books, Robinson hosts the podcast/video series “Learning From Home,” which looks at the way that the COVID-19 pandemic has forced many parents to take charge of their children’s education. Through it, Robinson shares resources, insights and support. 

“These are times where we all need to pull together,” he said in the pilot episode, “and support each other with whatever expertise and resources that we can.”

The podcast has released three episodes to date, each sharing strategies, stories and insights from parents and educators worldwide.

The environment which informed Robinson’s 2006 TED Talk was dominated by the legislation of No Child Left Behind, which mandated authorization of school funds according to test scores. It often ensured that programs such as art and music, not covered in testing, would be underfunded or cut altogether. It was criticized across the board, even spawning a humorous protest song from troubadours Tom Chapin and John Forster. According to Robinson, the prioritization of only some subjects has been devastating, because it ignores gifts that children might otherwise develop.

“Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we’ve strip-mined the earth,” he said in that original TED Talk. “Our children should be their own best resources, and by not equipping them properly, we are failing their developmental future the same way we fail their environmental future. The only way we’ll (survive) is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are, and seeing our children for the hope that they are. Our task is to educate their whole being so they can face this future.”

This program is made possible by the Richard and Emily Smucker Endowment Fund and the Louise Roblee McCarthy Memorial Lectureship.

If you want democracy to work, Barbara A. Milkulski likes to say, you have to work at democracy.

A great deal of that work was done by generations of women in America as they fought for their right to vote, finally secured in 1920 by the 19th Amendment — and it wasn’t just a fight, Mikulski said. It was a battle.

“I bristle at the phrase, ‘given the right to vote.’ No one ‘gave’ them anything,” Mikulski said. “Suffragists were tarred, ostracized, and fought a tremendous battle to win hearts and minds and a place in the Constitution.”

Mikulski, former U.S. Senator from Maryland, is the longest-serving woman in Congressional history, a lifelong public servant, and a commissioner for the federal Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission. Currently the Homewood Professor of Public Policy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Mikulski will close the Chautauqua Lecture Series Week Five theme of “The Women’s Vote Centennial and Beyond” in conversation with Institution President Michael E. Hill on “How to Use This Anniversary to ‘Remember, Reflect and Recommit’” at 10:45 a.m. EDT Friday, July 31, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform.

Mikulski spoke as part of the Chautauqua Women’s Club Contemporary Issues Forum in 2018; at that point, plans were already being formed for a week celebrating the centennial of the 19th Amendment.

“Senator Mikulski has been a trusted guide throughout our planning for a week on the suffrage centennial, reminding us of how we can look to history as a reminder of the work ahead of us,” said Matt Ewalt, vice president and Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education, who works with his department to plan each week’s theme and lectures. “In particular, we look forward to her insight on the lessons we can take from the suffragists as we look to today’s social justice movements.

When Mikulski and Institution staff began talking about 2020, they were aware that “this is a significant year,” she said, encompassing the national census and a presidential election alongside demographic shifts.

“The manner of Chautauqua, with roots in tradition of the exchange of the contemporary and new ideas with reflecting on the past … means that they can bring that principled nonpartisanship to a commemoration on the suffrage centennial,” Mikulski said.

But more than just commemorating, Mikulski pointed to the national theme of the federal commission: “Know our history, and to own the whole narrative,” she said. “Reflect on what it meant, and not just observe the benchmarks of these battles, but remember, reflect and recommit.”

At the commission, Milkulski said, “we are committed to owning the entire narrative. The good, the bad and, at times, the ugly. Often, we talk about what George W. Bush said at the dedication of the (National Museum of African American History and Culture): that a great nation often has flaws, but what makes a nation great is that it looks at its flaws and tries to do better.”

As her conversation with Hill will offer insights on just how to “Remember, Reflect and Recommit,” Milkulski wants to impart “how each person can make a difference and work together to make change. People will say, ‘I’m just one person,’ but you can make a difference.”

It’s about participating in a community, voting in elections, volunteering, she said. It’s about taking ideas and turning them into actions. It’s what the suffragists did.

“Ideas and ideals that lead to action, to empowerment — that’s what the battle was for,” she said.

This program is made possible by the Richard W. and Jeannette D. Kahlenberg Lectureship Fund. 

Carol Jenkins’ grandfather had 15 children — nine girls and six boys — and he sent all his daughters to college. In the 1920s, Jenkins said, he “believed his daughters deserve to have a fair shot in the world and he was going to give them a college education.”

By sending his daughters to college, Jenkins said, that Black Alabama farmer created “several generations now of doctors, lawyers, writers. … I call it the small army that came out of that little plot of land in Lowndes County, Alabama.”

Alongside her work in the ERA Coalition and the Fund for Women’s Equality, where she is co-president and CEO, Jenkins was a journalist for 30 years, and served as the founding president of the Women’s Media Center. She will present “On the Work Toward Passage and Enactment of the Equal Rights Amendment” at 10:45 a.m. EDT Thursday, July 30, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform as part of the Week Five Chautauqua Lecture Series theme, “The Women’s Vote Centennial and Beyond.” 

Journalism was Jenkins’ dream, and in 1968, newsrooms were covering “rioting situations where they found it useful to have a person of color.”

“They were looking for Black people. They were looking for women,” Jenkins said. “You’ll see at that time that most of the people of color who got hired were Black women, because they filled two HR needs, so to speak.”

Jenkins started out as a researcher, then was promoted to a writer then to an on-air talent. From there, she worked at NBC News for 23 years.

At the ERA Coalition and the Fund for Women’s Equality, Jenkins works on behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment, which would codify that discrimination based on sex is illegal and allow the U.S. government to form laws that would better protect women and girls.

“Every day, when I get up, my first thought is, ‘What could we do today to bring equality to girls and women, to people of color? How can we move this forward, because we are so far behind?’ … The Equal Rights Amendment is literally putting a fix on our Constitution that wasn’t there. Women are not included.”

The Constitution states that any amendment must receive a two-thirds vote in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and then three-fourths, or 38, of the states must ratify it. Jenkins said that ERA was first proposed almost 100 years ago in 1923 and voted through Congress in 1972, but only 35 states chose to ratify the amendment. In 2017, Nevada ratified ERA, and Illinois and Virginia followed suit in 2018.

The Department of Justice then said that because of a time limit that was in the introduction of the amendment, the ERA has lost its opportunity to be passed.

“What we say is that there is no time limit on equality,” Jenkins said. 

Jenkins said that the House and 38 states have agreed to remove the deadline from the ERA, and she and others are working to pass the amendment through the Senate.

“When the Constitution was written by mostly slaveholding wealthy white men … slaves and women were left out,” Jenkins said. “… If I can make a contribution to ensuring that my daughter and her children do not have to face the same obstacles to success, then I want to work on that.”

In addition to her work at the ERA Coalition, Jenkins hosts the three-time New York Emmy-nominated show, “Black America.” She said the show was inspired by “African American Legends,” a show in which Roscoe Brown would interview “all of the heavyweights in the black community.” Brown and Jenkins’ fathers were both Tuskegee Airmen.

“(Brown and I) had a conversation, and he anointed me as worthy of being a successor. … I was so honored,” Jenkins said.

“Black America” is currently in its sixth season.

“We always ask two questions. The first is, ‘How do you place yourself in Black America, where do you fit in, what do you do, what are your influences?’” Jenkins said. “We always end with the statement, the strength, the power of Black America, and those have been fascinating, fascinating answers.”

Jenkins is also working on a miniseries about her uncle, who she also wrote about in Black Titan: A.G. Gaston and the Making of a Black American Millionaire. Gaston was the grandchild of slaves and his mother cooked for wealthy Alabama families. 

“(Gaston) worked in the coal mines and started selling insurance and ultimately became a multimillionaire with about 10 businesses — not only insurance, but banking and The A. G. Gaston Hotel, which was famous for being the headquarters for Martin Luther King Jr. during the desegregation of Birmingham,” Jenkins said.

For her Thursday presentation, Jenkins will discuss the progress that has been made to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, and why ratifying it would be pivotal.

“It’s a complicated, convoluted step forward, a step back. Women are working, they run into obstacles, they continue to work, and then (experience) surprise breakthroughs,” Jenkins said. “It’s been a long, long, long effort.”

This program is made possible by the Travis E. and Betty J. Halford Lectureship Endowment.

While covering the Iowa caucuses earlier this year, Errin Haines, co-founder of The 19th, was surprised that a lot of the same mistakes of the 2016 election were happening again in political journalism.

“Most of the people that are covering our politics are white men, and most of the gatekeepers and decision makers around political journalism are white men,” she said. “What that told me was that the issue was not limited to any individual or was not limited to any individual newsroom, but that the problem was systemic, and that the fastest way to address this from a systemic structural response was to really just start over.”

One of the main catalysts behind The 19th — launched earlier this year — was to create a newsroom and coverage that was necessary for women and, Haines said, marginalized communities “who have not seen themselves reflected in our politics.”

“I think being at The 19th now, as a Black woman, really allows me to just bring my full self to the newsroom every day,” Haines said, “to be in a place that values my lived experience as an asset, and not a liability, to journalism.”

Haines is editor-at-large and a co-founder of The 19th, a nonprofit newsroom focused covering women, politics and policy, and was a national writer on race and ethnicity for the Associated Press. She has also written for The Los Angeles Times, The Orlando Sentinel and The Washington Post, and will present “The Role of Journalism & Media at the Intersection of Gender, Politics & Policy,” at 10:45 a.m. EDT Wednesday, July 29, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform as part of the Week Five Chautauqua Lecture Series theme, “The Women’s Vote Centennial and Beyond.” 

When she was in college in Atlanta, Haines started writing for The Atlanta Daily, interviewing city officials and occasionally leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. 

“What that taught me was that our stories were important, stories about and by Black people were important,” Haines said, “but also that I shouldn’t have to fight or argue with anyone for why those stories matter and why they should be considered to be important journalism.”

She then covered national politics for the first time during President Barack Obama’s 2008 election, covering mainly the Black electorate. Haines said that intersection between race and politics is very pronounced and “covering race is really the unfinished business of our democracy.”

Haines covered the 2016 presidential election and the 2018 midterms with the Associated Press and is reporting on the 2020 presidential election with The 19th.

“My experience covering race for as long as I did made me uniquely qualified to cover politics in this moment,” she said, “to be able to see certain things and understand kind of what they are and what they meant. … All politics are identity politics.”

Haines started to report for The 19th shortly before COVID-19 spread to the United States. Like many other political journalists, she was following the campaign trail before the pandemic.

“This year was supposed to be our Super Bowl. (The presidential election) was the main event. Especially for us making our debut as a newsroom; this is going to be hugely consequential for us, but also for the country,” Haines said “By mid-March, the campaign trail had basically vanished. … It’s pretty much virtual.”

Haines said the team at The 19th realized they needed to pivot their focus to also covering how the pandemic has disproportionately impacted women, who make up a majority of essential workers in education, nursing and different caregiving fields. They are still covering the election, like Joe Biden’s upcoming vice presidential pick, and how the pandemic is affecting how people vote and participate in democracy.

Haines said it was important for The 19th to cover voting rights and suppression, as the news organization is named after the 19th Amendment. Aug. 18 marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment’s ratification, and Haines said the news agency plans on engaging as many women as possible, including those who have never voted or do not always vote. 

During her Chautauqua lecture, Haines will discuss what she calls “the dual pandemics of coronavirus and racism” and the disparities and ethical questions exposed by the pandemic — such as who will be able to attend school or work safely and who will have secure access to food and housing.

“It’s not just about one president, one moment, the pandemic. It’s not just about George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor. It literally is about the intersection of everything for people,” Haines said. “Even before the pandemic, I was saying that racism is on the ballot, and that race and gender were kind of the story of 2020 — but I think that that could not be more true headed into November.”

This program is made possible by The Frank G. Sterritte Memorial Lectureship & the Dr. Robert R. Hesse Lectureship.

Kimberly Churches doesn’t subscribe to the Golden Rule. Treating people the way you wish to be treated? That’s egotistical, she said — at best.

“That’s a very self-centered way of thinking because it’s focusing solely on our lived experiences, our upbringing, our own personal values,” Churches said. 

So, “flip it on its head” and treat people how they wish to be treated. That acknowledgement, she said, is how “change will be made.”

Churches, CEO of the American Association of University Women, will deliver her lecture “Close the Gaps Forever” at 10:45 a.m. EDT Tuesday, July 28, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform as part of the Week Five theme “The Women’s Vote Centennial And Beyond.” 

In 2017, Churches attended the Women’s March in Washington D.C. with her daughter and sister. Though it was “a moving experience,” she said she feared there was a limit to its agenda. 

“I felt like there was no set itinerary as to what could be done to break down the barriers and biases for women and girls,” she said. “Even the laws we have in this country don’t actually ensure that human behavior and practice is fully met in the end.”

She joined the American Association of University Women, an organization “committed to empowering women” through education and economic security, that same year. In 2018, she put forward a strategic plan that focuses on implementing plans to achieve more “racial and gender equities” throughout the nation, especially within the “realm of equal access to education.” 

To give a perspective on how “we got here,” Churches said she will take a step back in history during her lecture, starting with the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which “aimed and failed’ to abolish the gender wage disparity.

“The gap has barely budged in the last two decades, when we should have had equal pay for people of color and for women right when this law was initially passed,” she said. “It’s not happening in practice because there are loopholes and not enough transparency or accountability.”

Even laws that successfully prompt immediate action often miss a mark of their own, according to Churches. For example, the 19th Amendment did grant women the right to vote, but Churches said white women were the only ones to reap its benefits.

They want to see diversity and inclusion and accessibility in everything they do,” Churches said. “Research has shown for decades that if you have more people with different backgrounds around the table, better decisions are made. If you are homogenous in your thinking, the same ideas will keep getting regurgitated. That doesn’t make them good ideas.”

“That law only helped white women when it came down to it, not women of color,” Churches said. “The individual and collective work we all need to be doing is making sure we are examining our own biases and checking them at the door. Passing laws is important, but we need to ensure that we are improving human behavior and accountability at the same time or we are going nowhere.”

The overlap of the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement presents a “beautiful opportunity” to break those historical cycles of “words being valued over actions,” Churches said.

“You have an American public that is not on European vacations or running to see the latest blockbuster movie,” she said. “We have more opportunities right now to listen, absorb and then act on what we hear.” 

While permanently breaking those cycles may not be a feat accomplished in her lifetime, Churches said she is optimistic that younger generations — millennial and Gen Z — are already doing the necessary work to reform their workplaces beyond what is “written in the handbooks.” 

“They want to see diversity and inclusion and accessibility in everything they do,” Churches said. “Research has shown for decades that if you have more people with different backgrounds around the table, better decisions are made. If you are homogenous in your thinking, the same ideas will keep getting regurgitated. That doesn’t make them good ideas.”

This program is made possible by the Margaret Miller Newman Lectureship Fund.

In many ways, it makes sense that Elaine Weiss is opening Week Five of the CHQ Assembly season, dedicated to celebrating the centennial of women’s suffrage in the United States. For one, she literally wrote the book on the topic: The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote. But perhaps more importantly, while the book takes place in Nashville in 1920, Weiss thinks the suffrage movement itself would not have been possible without the Chautauqua Movement.

“This is the heyday of the mother and daughter Chautauquas,” Weiss said. “When you think about it, how do suffragists get the message out? And Chautauqua becomes important as one of the biggest gatherings of people across the country, but it’s also the suffrage audience, of open-minded, educated, reform-minded men and women.”

Weiss will discuss The Woman’s Hour as part of the Chautauqua Lecture Series, opening a week on “The Women’s Vote Centennial and Beyond” at 10:45 a.m. EDT Monday, July 27, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform.

In researching her book, Weiss found “again and again and again” just how critical Chautauquas all across the country were as the “primary communication source” of the suffrage movement. And part of that research? Spending hours in the archives of The Chautauqua Assembly Herald, the precursor to The Chautauquan Daily. 

“It was very revelatory,” she said. “It was such fun; at a certain point, I had to tear myself away, but through those newspapers, you’re able to find when Chautauqua was discussing suffrage and when it wasn’t, and who was speaking when.”

The Woman’s Hour was published in March 2018; in August of that year, it was announced that Amblin TV had optioned the rights for a television adaptation. It will mark Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s debut as an executive producer.

Weiss admits she’d anticipated a different role for the executive producer at the helm of the adaptation: “The book was turned in the day before the (2016) presidential election. We had kind of assumed it would come out during the first term of the first woman president.” But her editor at Viking, Weiss said, told her something “quite wise.”

“This book,” her editor said, “is more important now.”

“We as a nation have not really reckoned with or been able to agree on what kind of democracy we want or need,” Weiss said. “It started at the very beginning — the Constitution only gave voting rights to wealthy white men. There had to be a struggle — it was not very long-lived, but there was pressure and struggle for universal suffrage among white men of all classes. But it was still only white men. In 1870, we have the 15th Amendment (granting suffrage to African-American men) but that gets undermined by Jim Crow, and then again, the 19th Amendment is undermined by Jim Crow. Race is shot through all of this.”

Indeed, one of the arguments against women’s suffrage was that “universal” suffrage meant suffrage for Black women. And despite the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Weiss said, “we are still battling for voting rights, as minority women and men are still targeted for partisan reasons. We are still grappling with what we mean when we say we are a democracy, and we’ve been pretty hypocritical about it for all of our history.”

“Why,” she asked, “if we consider a government by and for the people, should we fear our own citizens?”

In The Woman’s Hour, Weiss details not just the women on the frontlines of the suffrage movement, but the anti-suffrage movement, as well. 

“The anti-suffrage side had not been told very much, and it’s extremely important to know who they are and what they understood the dangers of suffrage to be. … In the last chapter, I trace the results of the anti-suffrage women who were ‘forced’ to vote,” Weiss said. “They organize in a much better and more effective fashion than the former suffrage movement.”

The suffragists had dispersed, Weiss said, taking disparate ideologies with them. 

“They were a big tent: Socialists, Republicans, those in the temperance movement,” Weiss said, while the anti-suffragists were much more unified. The results can be traced through the 20th and 21st centuries — from McCarthyism to movements against the Equal Rights Amendment and modern voting rights.

“They are very much connected. Isn’t that fascinating? I was struck that the ‘antis’ do a much better job than the suffragists,” Weiss said. “I was struck that I have heard these arguments — about a woman not being temperamentally suited to leadership, how they’re shortchanging their children by attending meetings and marches and lobbying — in my lifetime.”

This program is made possible by The Eleanor Fund Lectureship Endowment.

Michael Sandel has spent many summers speaking from the Amphitheater stage, and in all that time he’s never just come just to deliver a lecture. He comes to Chautauqua to have a conversation, and this year is no exception.

“The Chautauqua community is really very special,” Sandel said. “It’s one of the most morally, as well as intellectually, engaged communities that I’ve been privileged to speak to over the years.”

Sandel, a Harvard political philosopher and best-selling author, will be leading Chautauquans in a Socratic discussion on “Digital Responsibility in the Tech World” at 10:45 a.m. EDT Friday, July 24, on the CHQ Assembly Video Platform. His talk will finish off Chautauqua Institution’s Week Four, “The Ethics of Tech: Scientific, Corporate and Personal Responsibility.”

He will be speaking live, and will engage with a group of around 20 of pre-selected volunteers throughout his talk. Participants were randomly chosen from a pool of Chautauquans who responded to a call through the Institution’s e-newsletters and social media.

“A subgroup of the audience will be live participants in what I expect will be a lively dialogue about the ethical dilemmas posed by new technologies,” Sandel said. “The theme of the session, in line with the theme of the week, will be: How can we think our way through the hard ethical dilemmas raised by new technologies?”

He urges Chautauquans to be critical of the promises of new tech developments.

“New digital technologies promise to make life more efficient, convenient; some even promise modes of decision making more objective and more ‘rational’ than human decision-makers can make,” Sandel said. “But I think we need to question these assumptions and ask whether there are some important human and civic values that we must be careful to protect.”

The illusion of privacy on the internet, particularly in the wave of scandals like Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica breach, is a major point of conversation regarding ethics in technology.

“A great many people like the ability to use Facebook or Instagram to keep in touch with their friends,” he said. “But in the last couple of years we’ve become increasingly aware of the downside, even the dark side, of these platforms for sharing information and personal data.”

With so much money to be made selling user data to companies for advertising purposes, companies like Facebook have been resistant to any attempts at regulation.

In the European Union, legislation like the General Data Protection Regulation asserts when, where and how companies can collect personal data from users. There is currently no such legislation in the United States.

Another illusion that needs deconstructing is the idea that algorithms are inherently objective.

“Decisions of who should get parole, or what neighborhoods should be the target of policing, these are areas where we’ve come to rely more and more on algorithms,” Sandel said. “While (they) may seem objective, going dispassionately on data and making predictions based on data, too often the data built into the algorithms reflect patterns of inequality and of discrimination that raise questions about just how fair (they) can be.”

In 2017, Amazon infamously disbanded a resume-screening AI project after it observed patterns in the resumes submitted to the company and started discriminating against female applicants.

Sandel said that while it’s easy to view the increasing power of tech companies and the increasing dependence on new technologies as inevitable, history says otherwise.

“We should not accept the idea that the direction of technology is entirely outside our control,” he said. “We can think back historically to the rise of big powerful corporations around the turn of the century, and it seemed then that the rise of big trusts and monopolies … (were) inevitable.”

However, the rise of the antitrust movement from 1900 to 1920 brought in new regulations that broke up monopolies like John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil.

“Perhaps we are now going through a similar time,” Sandel said, “when we need to summon up public awareness and public determination to deliberate together as democratic citizens about how to bend technology to human purposes.”

While Friday’s talk won’t solve any of these problems in itself, Sandel believes it’s a step in the right direction.

“Our discussion will be, I hope, at least one example of the kind of public debate we need as citizens if we are to direct technology to human and democratic ends,” he said.

This program is made possible by “The Lincoln Ethics Series” funded by the David and Joan Lincoln Family Fund for Applied Ethics, The Sondra R. & R. Quintus Anderson Lectureship, “The Chautauqua Lecture” and the Malcolm Anderson Lecture Fund.