Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Anthony Jack, sociologist and assistant professor of education at Harvard University, is transforming the way we address diversity and inclusion in education. His new book, "The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges are Failing Disadvantaged Students," reframes the conversation surrounding poverty and higher education. In it, he explains the paths of two uniquely segregated groups. First, the “privileged poor”: students from low-income, diverse backgrounds who attended elite prep or boarding school before attending college. The second are what Jack calls the “doubly disadvantaged”—students who arrive from underprivileged backgrounds without prep or boarding school to soften their college transition. Although both groups come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, the privileged poor have more cultural capital to navigate and succeed—in the college environment and beyond.

“It’s one thing to graduate with a degree from an elite institution, and another thing to graduate with the social capital to activate that degree,”Jack explains. In many ways, rather than close the wealth gap, campus culture at elite schools further alienate poor students by making them feel like they don’t belong. To challenge these deeply ingrained social, cultural, and economic disparities on campus, he argues that we must first begin to question what we take for granted. Jack reveals how organizations—from administrators and association organizers, to educators and student activists—can ask the right questions and bridge the gap.

A 2007 graduate of Amherst College, Jack is a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Recently, he wrote a feature for The New York Times Magazine’s Education Issue, based off his book and life experience as a low-income college student. His research has been cited by The New York Times, the Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, The National Review, The Washington Post, American RadioWorks, WBUR, and MPR. His book "The Privileged Poor," was named the 2018 recipient of the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize by Harvard University Press.

Professor Jack's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored with funding from the Open Academy at CMC.

Samantha Turner leads the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) program at U.S. European Command, and is a go-to practitioner of diversity and inclusion for the department of defense. Turner has served in advisory positions to senior officials in the U.S. government and NATO on WPS policy and strategy in foreign policy. She also serves as an executive coach to diplomats, development experts, and senior defense officials focusing on how leading inclusively, specifically with an intersectional lens, can benefit everyone.

As a U.S. Army reservist, she serves as a civil military liaison officer and gender advisor specializing in infrastructure assessment, WASH, and the operationalization of the women, peace, and security agenda within the military. She earned a certificate in entrepreneurial leadership and innovation from Stanford Graduate School of Business and is an alumna of the United States Military Academy at West Point. Turner spends time speaking internationally, coaching woman veterans in transition, and hiking in the Alps in her free time.

Ms. Turner's Athenaeum presentation is part of the Women in Security series at the Athenaeum this spring.

Tina Daniels ‘93 is director of agency business development, measurement, and analytics for Google. She is a member of the CMC Board of Trustees, the Kravis Leadership Institute Advisory Board, and the Women’s Prison Association & Home in NYC. An economics and government major at CMC, Daniels was editor-in-chief of The Forum, New Student Orientation Chair, and played tennis for CMS. She earned an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Varun Puri ‘16 is an operations manager for the Free Space Optical Communication project at X, formerly known as Google[X]. The project uses invisible lasers to bring high speed broadband internet to previously unconnected regions of the world. Prior to this, Varun worked on special projects across Alphabet, Google's parent company. At CMC, he was part of the debate and mock trial clubs, a Robert Day scholar, class of 2016 Commencement Speaker and a struggling inner tube water polo player. Puri majored in economics and graduated Phi Beta Kappa.

Debra Tolchinsky P'20 is a documentary director/producer, as well as an associate professor at Northwestern University. Tolchinsky was the founding director of Northwestern's MFA in documentary media and is currently the associate chair of the department of Radio-TV-Film. Tolchinsky received an AB from USC's School of Cinematic Arts and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her films have screened nationally and internationally at venues such as the Sundance Film Festival, The John F. Kennedy Center, The Chicago International Film Festival, FIPAdoc, The Italy Innocence Project, and the Supreme Court Institute. In 2017, Tolchinsky garnered an Alice B. Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Fellowship; in 2018, she won a Kartemquin Partner Program Sage Fund grant, and in 2019 she was included on NewCity's Film 50: Chicago's Screen Gems. Most recently, the New York Times released her short documentary, Contaminated Memories, via Op-Docs. Tolchinsky's in-process feature, True Memories and Other Falsehoods, is currently in development with Kartemquin Films.

Content warning: This talk will include a detailed account of a sexual assault.

Poet, essayist, and critic Vijay Seshadri was born in India and came to the United States at the age of five. He earned a BA from Oberlin College and an MFA from Columbia University.

Seshadri is the author of "Wild Kingdom" (1996); "The Long Meadow" (2003), which won the James Laughlin Award; and "3 Sections" (2013), which won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. The Pulitzer committee described the book as “a compelling collection of poems that examine human consciousness, from birth to dementia, in a voice that is by turns witty and grave, compassionate and remorseless.”

Seshadri has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the NEA, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has worked as an editor at the New Yorker and has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, where he currently directs the graduate non-fiction writing program.

(Source: The Poetry Foundation website)

Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan

This panel discussion features four CMC alums, all humanities majors, who have gone on to a variety of successful careers in the law.. After describing their backgrounds at CMC, the panelists will discuss a range of topics from how their time at CMC prepared them for their legal careers, to a specific way in which they use their humanities background in their professional life, to instances of both failure and successes they have faced. Panelists include the Honorable Suzanne Segal ’82 (history), US Magistrate Judge; Andrew Stroud ’83 (literature), partner at Hanson Bridgett; Elizabeth Casey ’85 (philosophy), executive vice president and associate general counsel, Fox Corporation; and Jennifer Roche ’96 (PPE), senior counsel, Proskauer. The panel will be moderated by James Burgess ’84 (philosophy and political science), partner, Sheppard Mullin, and member of the Gould Center Board of Advisors.

This panel is co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at CMC.

(Parents Dining Room)

Jack Miles, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Religious Studies at the University of California, Irvine, has written on religion, politics, and culture for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The World Post and many other publications. His book “God: A Biography” won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996. “The Norton Anthology of World Religions,” of which he was general editor, was published in 2014 in hardcover and in 2015 in a six-volume paperback edition. A MacArthur Fellow during the years 2003-2007, he is most recently the author of “God in the Qur’an” (2018) and “Religion As We Know It: An Origin Story” (2019).

Professor Jack Miles's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored with funding from the Open Academy at CMC.

Katherine B. Forrest P '22 is a partner in Cravath’s litigation department. She most recently served as a U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of New York and was the former deputy assistant attorney general in the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Over the course of her career, Forrest has been regarded as a leader in legal issues relating to technology, including the digital environment, big data, and artificial intelligence. She regularly speaks on these topics and has a forthcoming book on artificial intelligence and justice issues. Forrest is a regular technology columnist for the New York Law Journal (“NYLJ”), and recently authored a chapter on emerging issues in copyright law and artificial intelligence in The Law of Artificial Intelligence and Smart Machines.

Forrest received a B.A. with honors from Wesleyan University and a J.D. from NYU School of Law where she co-teaches a course on Quantitative Methods and the Law.

Ms. Forrest is the featured speaker for CMC’s 2020 Family Weekend.


View Video: YouTube with Katherine Forrest P'22

Food for Thought: Podcast with Katherine Forrest P'22

 

President and chief investment officer of Semper Augustus Investments Group, Chris Bloomstran has 29 years of professional investment experience with a value-driven approach to fundamental equity and industry research. Semper Augustus manages concentrated, all-cap portfolios with typically long holding periods and a general benchmark and geographical agnosticism. The investment process maintains business quality at a high level and stresses the importance of price below intrinsic value. The approach is eclectic, resulting in ownership in some businesses ideally held forever, now fashionably compounders. They own some things cyclically, will own the long side of merger arbitrage, and occasionally have the chance to opportunistically put money to work in oddball special situations with extremely low risk and high upside.

Bloomstran received his bachelor of science in finance from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he also played football. He served as president of the Board of Directors for the CFA Society of St. Louis and has been a director on the board since 2001. Bloomstran has judged the local CFA Institute’s Global Investment Challenge for many years and has been honored to judge the Regional and the Global Finals since 2016. A member of the CFA Institute, he earned his Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation in 1994.

Bloomstran writes extensively on Berkshire Hathaway, and more broadly on thematic topics related to the stock market and the economy. His annual year-end letter is widely read among the value investing community. Recent interviews include an “Invest Like the Best” podcast episode and an interview with the Investment Masters Class in Australia. He much enjoys giving back through mentorship and loves speaking regularly at many colleges and universities. Most recently he was honored to speak at Columbia Business School’s Heilbrunn Center for Graham & Dodd Investing.

Mr. Bloomstran will deliver the keynote for the 2020 Claremont Finance Conference.

Richard Johnson ‘01 is senior director for fuel cycle and verification at the Nuclear Threat Initiative ("NTI"). Previously, he served as the deputy lead coordinator (acting) for Iran Nuclear Implementation at the U.S. Department of State, having also served as assistant coordinator for Iran Nuclear Issues. Prior to working at the Department of State, Johnson was director for nonproliferation at the National Security Council in the Obama Administration.

Johnson held numerous positions at the Department of State, including as special assistant to Secretary Hillary Clinton's special advisor for nonproliferation and arms control and as nonproliferation officer for the Office of Korean Affairs, as well as a posting to the U.S. embassy in Beijing.

Johnson has been involved deeply in Iran and North Korea nuclear issues, including as a member of the U.S. delegations to the JCPOA Joint Commission and the Six-Party Talks. On assignment to the Department of Energy/National Nuclear Security Administration, Johnson was a U.S. nuclear disablement monitor at the Yongbyon nuclear facility in the DPRK. 

He also previously served as senior legislative aide and field representative for California Assembly member Carol Liu. He graduated as valedictorian from Claremont McKenna College and later earned his master’s degree at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Johnson is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was a Presidential Management Fellow, as well as a one-time Jeopardy champion.

Mr. Johnson's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the President's Leadership Fund.

View Video: YouTube with Richard Johnson '01

Shane Barter is associate professor at Soka University of America.  Earning his PhD from the University of British Columbia, he has worked for Forum-Asia, the Carter Center, European Union, and Canadian Government, the latter including observing the Summer 2019 Ukrainian elections.  Dr. Barter's research focuses on Southeast Asian politics, namely armed conflicts in Indonesia.  He has authored books on civil strategies in civil war, the Pacific Basin, and internal migration, as well as published articles related to separatism, post-conflict elections, civilians in war, and more.  He has just completed a visiting scholar position at Australian National University, part of a research project on territorial autonomy.

Professor Barter's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by CIRS, the Claremont International Relations Society.

A widely-requested speaker, Reginald "Dwayne" Betts has given lectures on topics ranging from mass incarceration to contemporary poetry and the intersection of literature and advocacy. Betts has given commencement speeches at Quinnipiac University and Warren Wilson College and has lectured widely at universities and conferences, including Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, the University of Maryland, the Beyond the Bench conference, and a wide range of organizations across the country.

His work in public defense, his years of advocacy, and Betts’s own experiences as a teenager in maximum security prisons uniquely position him to speak to the failures of the current criminal justice system and present encouraging ideas for change. That work prompted President Barack Obama to appoint Betts to the Coordinating Council of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and more recently for Governor Ned Lamont of Connecticut to appoint him to the Criminal Justice Commission, the state body responsible for hiring prosecutors in Connecticut.

Named a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2018 NEA Fellow, Betts poetry has been long praised. His writing has generated national attention and earned him a Soros Justice Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Ruth Lily Fellowship, an NAACP Image Award, and New America Fellowship. Betts has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Washington Post, as well as being interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air, The Travis Smiley Show and several other national shows. He holds a B.A. from the University of Maryland; an M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College, where he was a Holden Fellow; and, a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was awarded the Israel H. Perez Prize for best student note or comment appearing in the Yale Law Journal. He is a Ph. D. in Law candidate at Yale and as a Liman Fellow, he spent a year representing clients in the New Haven Public Defender’s Office.

Mr. Betts’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Center for Writing and Public Discourse and the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, both at CMC. The program is also a part of the series highlighting the Justice Education Initiative at The Claremont Colleges.

Photo credit: Mamadi Doumbouya

Food for Thought: Podcast with R. Dwayne Betts

Sally C. Pipes is president, CEO, and Thomas W. Smith Fellow in Health Care Policy at the Pacific Research Institute, a San Francisco-based think tank founded in 1979. Prior to becoming president of PRI in 1991, she was assistant director of the Fraser Institute, based in Vancouver, Canada.

An expert on health care and health care reform, she has been featured in multiple national media outlets and publications. A regular commentator on the shortcomings of Medicare For All, Pipes writes a bi-weekly health care column for Forbes.com and for the Washington Examiner’s blog “Beltway Confidential.” In 2018 alone, she published over 300 health care op-eds, many of which were reprinted and retweeted.

Pipes’ views on health care also appeared in a special report of the world’s 30 leading health care experts published by Forbes.com entitled, “Solutions: Health Care” and in Steve Forbes’ latest book How Capitalism Can Save Us. A seasoned and gifted debater, Pipes been invited to many high-level discussions and debates about healthcare reform where she eloquently argues against single payer type of systems.

Pipes served as one of Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s four health care advisors in his bid for the Republican nomination for president in 2008. She was featured in Michael Moore’s movie “Sicko” and has participated in prominent public forums, testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the House Oversight Committee, the Senate HELP Committee, and in the California, Maine, and Oregon legislatures.

Author of several books on health care, Encounter Books will publish her next book False Premise, False Promise: The Disastrous Reality of Medicare for All in early 2020. Pipes serves on multiple boards, including BRI, a Federalist Society-type organization for medical students across America, which she founded in 2008.

Recipient of an honorary Ph.D. from Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy in 2018, she also received the Roe Award at the 2004 annual meeting of State Policy Network. The award is a tribute to an individual in the state public policy movement who has a passion for liberty, a willingness to work for it, and noteworthy achievement in turning dreams into realities. Human Events named her one of the Top 10 Women in the Conservative Movement in America, among other national accolades.

Pipes, a former Canadian, became an American citizen in 2006 and is a member of the Mont Pelerin Society, an international society of economists.

Ms. Pipes's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored with funding from the Open Academy at CMC.

View Video: YouTube with Sally Pipes

Minsuk Cho founded the Seoul-based firm Mass Studies in 2003. He has been committed to the discourse of architecture through socio-cultural and urban research, and mostly built works, which have been recognized globally. Representative works include the Pixel House, Missing Matrix, Bundle Matrix, Shanghai Expo 2010: Korea Pavilion, Daum Space.1, Tea Stone/Innisfree, Southcape, Dome-ino, the Daejeon University Student Dormitory. Current in-progress projects include the new Seoul Cinematheque (Montage 4:5), the Danginri Cultural Space (Danginri Podium and Promenade), and the Yang-dong District Main Street (Sowol Forest) and the recently selected design for the Yeonhui Public Housing Complex. Active beyond his practice, he co-curated the 2011 Gwangju Design Biennale, and was the commissioner and co-curator of the Korean Pavilion for the 14th International Architecture Exhibition - la Biennale di Venezia, which was awarded the Gold Lion for Best National Participation. In late 2014, PLATEAU Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, held their first ever architecture exhibition, highlighting his works in a solo exhibition titled "Before/After: Mass Studies Does Architecture." Cho is an active lecturer and speaker at symposiums worldwide.

Mr. Cho's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Hive of the 5Cs and EnviroLab Asia.

Photo credit: Nina Ahn

Nikole Hannah-Jones is an award-winning investigative reporter who covers civil rights and racial injustice for The New York Times Magazine. Hannah-Jones got hooked on journalism when she joined her high school newspaper and began writing about students, who just like her, were bused across town as part of a voluntary school desegregation program.

Prior to joining the Times, Hannah-Jones worked as an investigative reporter at ProPublica in New York City, where she spent three years chronicling the way official policy created and maintains segration in housing and schools. Before that, she reported for the largest daily newspaper in the Pacific Northwest, The Oregonian, in Portland, Oregon, where she covered numerous beats, including demographics, the census, and county government. She started her journalism career covering the majority-black Durham Public Schools for The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina.

A 2017 MacArthur Award recipient for her work in “reshaping national conversations around education reform,” Hannah-Jones received her B.A. from Notre Dame and an M.A. from the University of North Carolina.

Ms. Hannah-Jones will deliver the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies' 2020 Golo Mann Lecture.  

Photo credit: John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
 

Food for Thought: Podcast with Nikole Hannah-Jones