Tag Archives: Clinton School Speaker Series

Today at noon – Legacies and Lunch with Bobby Roberts

Posted on by

robertsThe Butler Center for Arkansas Studies and Clinton School of Public Service present today’s Legacies and Lunch program which features a conversation with Bobby Roberts.

Roberts has been the director of the Central Arkansas Library System (CALS) since 1989. During his tenure at CALS, it has been recognized as one of the premier library systems in the United States, noted for outstanding public service and innovative programming. Roberts is retiring from CALS on March 4. On March 2, he will talk with Clinton School of Public Service Dean Skip Rutherford at the Butler Center’s monthly Legacies & Lunch presentation series.

A native of Helena, Ark., Roberts became a historian and archivist, a writer of Civil War history, a university faculty member, and a member of Governor Bill Clinton’s staff before taking leadership at CALS. At Legacies & Lunch, Rutherford will interview Roberts about his interest in history and politics, the transformation of CALS, and what he sees for the future of the library system, the city of Little Rock, and the state of Arkansas. This special program is sponsored in part by the Arkansas Humanities Council.

Wednesday, March 2, 2016 at 12:00 Noon
CALS Ron Robinson Theater

Today at noon at the Clinton School – A conversation about the upcoming Ark Rep productionof AN ILIAD

Posted on by

Arkansas Repertory Theatre producing artistic director, Bob Hupp, will host a conversation with Joe Graves, star of the upcoming one-man show, “An Iliad.” This production adapts Homer’s Trojan War epic into a compelling monologue that captures both the heroism and horror of warfare, and answers the question: “What has really changed since the Trojan War?”

This production makes the western world’s oldest extant work of literature not only intelligible, but immediate, relevant and eerily fascinating—as if a storyteller were telling the oldest story in the book and making you believe it is being told for the very first time. Gods and goddesses, weak-tendoned heroes and the face that launched a thousand ships…it’s all just another (incredibly engrossing) yarn in this one-man adaptation, developed at the Sundance Theatre Institute.

Graves has appeared at Arkansas Rep in many productions including RED, OF MICE AND MEN, ALL MY SONS and MY FAIR LADY.

“The Good Story: Inspiring Leadership” is focus of Clinton School program this evening

Posted on by

uacs hafreyLeigh Hafrey, author and a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has worked in professional ethics for over two decades, with a focus on ethical leadership, teaching college courses at Harvard Business School and MIT and consulting for private organizations around the world. For 17 years, along with his wife, Sandra Naddaff, Hafrey was a co-Master of Mather House, one of the 12 residential complexes in Harvard College.

Hafrey is a sought after expert on the relationship between storytelling and inspiring leadership.  He has been featured at conferences all over the world discussing the connection between leadership and the ability to tell a good story.  As he told The Power of Storytelling in 2015:

Storytelling supplies a narrative logic to events past, present, and future. Presentations by definition work with the principles of storytelling: plot, place, character, conflict and resolution.  Some people do it better than others, and those individuals reach leadership positions in part because of their skill as storytellers. Think Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Aung San Suu Kyi, Muhammad Yunus and Vaclav Havel.

In his most recent book, War Stories: Fighting, Competing, Imagining, Leading, Hafrey covers the arc of military American self-perception on the screen, in print, and in public conversation over the past 20 years.

Little Rock Look Back – Abraham Lincoln

Posted on by

Abraham_Lincoln_November_1863On February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky.

Lincoln never visited Arkansas. In the 1860 election, he barely registered on the Arkansas election map. Arkansas counties went strongly for Southern Democratic candidate John Breckinridge.  John Bell, the Constitutional Union/Whig candidate ran strongly in Pulaski County and a scattering of other counties.  Neither Lincoln nor Northern Democratic candidate Stephen Douglas carried a county in Arkansas.  In 1864, though Arkansas was officially under control of the Union forces, the state had not been readmitted. Therefore no Arkansans voted for Lincoln that year.

As President, Lincoln did correspond with several Arkansans.  It is said that the polite written exchanges he had with former Mayors C. P. Bertrand and Gordon Peay were helpful in maintaining a fairly peaceful occupation of Little Rock by federal forces.

In the listing of Presidential Streets of Little Rock, Lincoln is omitted.  On first blush, this might seem to be intentional to skip the name of the President who oversaw the “occupation.”  However, if that were the case, then surely Johnson would have been left out as well since he was President during the final years of the federal military occupation.  In fact, there once was a Lincoln Street. A portion of what is now Cantrell/Highway 10 was named for Lincoln. It predated the other Presidential streets.  At the time the other streets were laid out, Lincoln was skipped because a street already bore the name.

Over time, Highway 10 had been given multiple names for various sections: Lincoln, Q, and Cantrell. In the 1930s, these names were consolidated into Cantrell which was the longest section. The name Lincoln was dropped. There were very few addresses on Lincoln, most of it was railroad property.  The viaduct connecting Highway 10 with LaHarpe still bears the name of Lincoln Avenue.

In 2008, Sam Waterston appeared at the Clinton School of Public Service to kick off the Abraham Lincoln Sesquicentennial celebration activities. The official launch was supposed to be elsewhere but was cancelled due to inclement weather. So it happened in Little Rock as Waterston appeared in a program reading letters and writings from throughout Lincoln’s lifetime.  In 1994, Waterstson had received a Tony Award nomination for starring in the Lincoln Center revival of Abe Lincoln in Illinois.

Tonight at the Clinton School – Devery Anderson discusses the 1955 murder of Emmett Till

Posted on by

Emmett Till bookThis evening at 6pm at the Clinton School, Devery Anderson discusses his book on the murder of Emmett Till. A book signing will follow.

Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement offers the first truly comprehensive account of the 1955 murder and its aftermath. It tells the story of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago brutally lynched for a harmless flirtation at a country store in the Mississippi Delta. His death and the acquittal of his killers by an all-white jury set off a firestorm of protests that reverberated all over the world and spurred on the civil rights movement. Like no other event in modern history, the death of Emmett Till provoked people all over the United States to seek social change.

For six decades the Till story has continued to haunt the South as the lingering injustice of Till’s murder and the aftermath altered many lives. Fifty years after the murder, renewed interest in the case led the Justice Department to open an investigation into identifying and possibly prosecuting accomplices of the two men originally tried. Between 2004 and 2005, the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted the first real probe into the killing and turned up important information that had been lost for decades.

This book will stand as the definitive work on Emmett Till for years to come. Incorporating much new information, the book demonstrates how the Emmett Till murder exemplifies the Jim Crow South at its nadir. The author accessed a wealth of new evidence. Anderson has made a dozen trips to Mississippi and Chicago to conduct research and interview witnesses and reporters who covered the trial. In Emmett Till Anderson corrects the historical record and presents this critical saga in its entirety.

Tonight at the Clinton School – Jeremy Haft speaks about Unmade in China

Posted on by

uacs haft bookUnmade in China by Jeremy Haft, Thursday, February 11 at 6pm.

Jeremy Haft, author and adjunct professor at Georgetown University who lectures in both the Walsh School of Foreign Service and the McDonough School of Business, has spent two decades starting and building companies in China across sectors of the economy. In his book Unmade in China: The Hidden Truth about China’s Economic Miracle, Haft explores the hidden world of China’s intricate supply chains and tells the story of systemic risk in Chinese manufacturing and what this means for the United States.

If you look carefully at how things are actually made in China – from shirts to toys, apple juice to oil rigs – you see a reality that contradicts every widely-held notion about the world’s so-called economic powerhouse. From the inside looking out, China is not a manufacturing juggernaut. It’s a Lilliputian. Nor is it a killer of American jobs. It’s a huge job creator. Rising China is importing goods from America in such volume that millions of U.S. jobs are sustained through Chinese trade and investment.

In Unmade in China, entrepreneur and Georgetown University business professor Jeremy Haft lifts the lid on the hidden world of China’s intricate supply chains. Informed by years of experience building new companies in China, Haft’s unique, insider’s view reveals a startling picture of an economy which struggles to make baby formula safely, much less a nuclear power plant. Using firm-level data and recent case studies, Unmade in China tells the story of systemic risk in Chinese manufacturing and why this is both really bad and really good news for America.

He has also authored other books covering China’s economy, including All the Tea in China: How to Buy, Sell, and Make Money on the Mainland, which presents best practices for importing, exporting, and doing business in China.

Award winning composer Dan Visconti at the Clinton School today

Posted on by

Today the Clinton School, in partnership with the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, welcomes composer Dan Visconti. His remarks will start at 12 noon.

Dan Visconti is an American composer whose compositions often explore the rough timbres, propulsive rhythms, and improvisational energy characteristic of jazz, bluegrass, and rock. His work has been performed by some of the top interpreters of contemporary music in some of the best venues around the world, including Carnegie Hall, the Sydney Opera House, and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and has received numerous awards.

For his ongoing initiatives innovating concert experiences that address social issues through music, Visconti was awarded a 2014 TED Fellowship and delivered a TED talk at the 30th Anniversary TED Conference in Vancouver. Visconti serves as composer and Director of Artistic Programming at Chicago’s Fifth House Ensemble, a nonprofit organization that reaches new audiences with an emphasis on civic outreach, educational programming, and collaborative projects with other artists. He is also composer-in-residence at the Fresh Inc Festival, where he works with young entrepreneurs in building musical careers in line with their own unique vision and values.