Tag Archives: Clinton School Speaker Series

Life of longtime CALS trustee Ira Sanders topic of today’s Legacies & Lunch

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SandersIraE_fToday at noon at the CALS Ron Robinson Theater, the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies and Clinton School for Public Service collaborate on a special Legacies & Lunch.

James Moses, professor of History at Arkansas Tech University, will discuss the life of Ira E. Sanders, who served as rabbi at Congregation B’nai Israel in Little Rock for 38 years and was a legendary champion of social justice in Arkansas and throughout the nation.

Rabbi Sanders was a founder of Arkansas Lighthouse for the Blind, the Arkansas Eugenics Association, and the Urban League of Greater Little Rock. He also served for 40 years on the Central Arkansas Library System’s Board of Trustees. James Moses is writing a book about Rabbi Sanders, to be titled “Life Fire Shut Up in My Bones.”

Legacies & Lunch is free, open to the public, and supported in part by the Arkansas Humanities Council. Programs are held from noon-1 p.m. on the first Wednesday of each month. Attendees are invited to bring a sack lunch; drinks and dessert are provided.

 

Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library focus of Clinton School program tonight

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uacs dpilimglib2cIn 1995, Dolly Parton launched an exciting new effort to benefit the children of her home county in East Tennessee. Parton’s vision was to foster a love of reading among her country’s preschool children and their families by providing them with the gift of a specially selected book each month.

Since launching 20 years ago, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library has become the premier early childhood book-gifting program in the world, by mailing over 66 million books in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Currently the program mails over 830,000 specially selected, age appropriate books monthly to registered children from birth to age five. Parton’s vision was to create a lifelong love of reading, prepare children for Kindergarten, and inspire them to dream more, learn more, care more, and be more.

Tonight at 6pm at the Clinton School, Jeff Conyers, the executive director of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, will discuss the program.

Family bonds and College Football, tonight at the Clinton School

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uacs last seasonPolitical strategist Stuart Stevens will speak at the Clinton School this evening about his book, The Last Season: A Father, a Son and a Lifetime of College Football tonight at 6pm at the Clinton School.

In the fall of 2012, after serving as the top strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, Stuart Stevens, having turned sixty, realized that he and his ninety-five-year-old father had spent little time together for decades. His solution: a season of attending Ole Miss football games together, as they’d done when college football provided a way for his father to guide him through childhood–and to make sense of the troubled South of the time. Now, driving to and from the games, and cheering from the stands, they take stock of their lives as father and son, and as individuals, reminding themselves of their unique, complicated, precious bond. Poignant and full of heart, but also irreverent and often hilarious, “The Last Season” is a powerful story of parents and children and the importance of taking a backward glance together while you still can.

Stuart is one of the nation’s most successful political strategists and media consultants. For twenty-five years, Stuart has been the lead strategist and media consultant for some of the nation’s toughest political campaigns such as Senator Portman, Senator Blunt, Governor Haley Barbour, Governor Tom Ridge and President George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004.

In 2014, he was lead strategist for Senator Thad Cochran’s come from behind runoff win and led an 8 state Super PAC campaign to help secure the new Senate Majority. Beginning his political career in his native Mississippi, Stuart first worked on Thad Cochran’s campaigns and has gone on to help elect more governors and US Senators than any other current Republican media consultant.

Stuart has written five books, published numerous essays and articles, written extensively for both film and television, is a former Fellow of the American Film Institute and a current weekly columnist for The Daily Beast.

Collegiate Sports during Great Depression focus of Clinton School address tonight

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Democratic SportsDisparity in collegiate sports has been around since, well, the beginning of collegiate sports. Tonight at 6pm at the Clinton School, Brad Austin discusses “Democratic Sports: Men’s and Women’s College Athletics during the Great Depression.”

 

Austin is a professor of history at Salem State University, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in modern American history, sports history, and history education, and has served as the chairperson of the American Historical Association’s Teaching Prize Committee.

 

In his new book “Democratic Sports: Men’s and Women’s College Athletics during the Great Depression,” Austin explores the funding cuts that America public universities suffered while they were also responsible for educating an increasing number of students. University leaders used their athletic programs to combat the crisis of mounting financial troubles, coupled with a perceived increase in the number of “radical” student activists, and to preserve “traditional” American values and institutions, prescribing different models for men and women.

 

In the book, Austin discusses the stark contrast of educators emphasizing the individualistic, competitive nature of men’s athletics in order to reinforce the existing American political and economic systems, while the prevailing model of women’s college athletics taught a communal form of democracy, denying women individual attention and high-level competition. “Democratic Sports” tells the important story of how men’s and women’s college athletic programs survived, and even thrived, during the most challenging decade of the twentieth century.

Role of Arkansas in development of MLB focus of documentary at Clinton School

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The-First-Boys-of-SpringTonight at 6pm at the Ron Robinson Theater, the Clinton School will screen the new documentary The First Boys of Spring. 

Beginning in 1886, baseball spring training was held for the first time, not in Florida or Arizona, but in the Arkansas resort town of Hot Springs, and that’s where the annual rite caught on. For parts of eight decades, many of the best who ever played the game, came to Hot Springs to shake off the rust from winters to prepare for long seasons ahead, with such teams as the Red Sox, Dodgers, and Pirates—and the Negro League’s Monarchs, Crawfords, and Grays.

The First Boys of Spring is a one-hour documentary by award-winning filmmaker Larry Foley, narrated by Academy Award-winner Billy Bob Thornton. The film tells stories of baseball Hall of Famers who worked out, gambled and partied in Hot Springs, including Cy Young, Satchel Paige, Honus Wagner and baseball’s first superstar, Mike “King” Kelly. A central figure is a young Babe Ruth, who belted a 573-foot home run into the Arkansas Alligator Farm in March of 1918, while trying to convince Boston Red Sox management to play him every day, even though he was already the game’s dominant pitcher.

The First Boys of Spring is made possible by Visit Hot Springs, Arkansas Humanities Council, University of Arkansas, Munro Foundation, Morris Foundation, The Arlington Hotel Resort Hotel and Spa and the Department of Arkansas Heritage.

 

Challenges of Democracy & Leadership in South topic of Clinton School noontime talk

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Today at noon, the Clinton School Speaker Series will feature a program on democracy and leadership in the South.

In “Uniting Mississippi,” Eric Thomas Weber, associate professor of public policy leadership at the University of Mississippi and executive director of the Society of Philosophers in America, applies a new, philosophically informed theory of democratic leadership to Mississippi’s challenges.  These challenges could also be applied to Arkansas and most Southern states.

the book begins with an examination of Mississippi’s apparent Catch-22, namely the difficulty of addressing problems of poverty without fixing issues in education first, and vice versa. These difficulties can be overcome if we look at their common roots, argues Eric Thomas Weber, and if we practice virtuous democratic leadership. Since the approach to addressing poverty has for so long been unsuccessful, Weber reframes the problem.

The challenges of educational failure reveal the extent to which there is a caste system of schooling. Certain groups of people are trapped in schools that are underfunded and failing. The ideals of democracy reject hierarchies of citizenship, and thus, the author contends, these ideals are truly tested in Mississippi. Weber offers theories of effective leadership in general and of democratic leadership in particular to show how Mississippi’s challenges could be addressed with the guidance of common values.

The book draws on insights from classical and contemporary philosophical outlooks on leadership, which highlight four key social virtues: wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice. Weber brings to bear each of the virtues of democratic leadership on particular problems, with some overarching lessons and values to advance.

 

Juggling Career and Family focus of Anne-Marie Slaughter remarks at Clinton School

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AMS-alt2_300dpiThis evening at the Clinton School at 6pm, Anne-Marie Slaughter will be discussing her book Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family.

When Anne-Marie Slaughter, former dean of the Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, accepted her dream job as the first female Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department in 2009, she was confident she could juggle the demands of her position in Washington, D.C., with the responsibilities of her family life in suburban New Jersey.

But then life intervened. Parenting needs caused her to make a decision to leave the State Department and return to an academic career that gave her more time for her family. After that decision and the reactions to it, she began to question the feminist narrative she grew up with and wrote an article for The Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” which created a firestorm, sparked intense national debate, and became one of the most-read pieces in the magazine’s history.

In her new book, “Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family,” Slaughter provides a powerful, persuasive, and deeply inclusive vision for how to finish the long struggle for equality between men and women, work and family.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, former dean of the Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, served as the first female Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department. Slaughter is president and CEO of New America, a nonprofit think tank that is dedicated to the renewal of American politics, prosperity, and purpose in the digital age through big ideas, technological innovation, next generation politics, and creative engagement with broad audiences.