Seminars at Steamboat

Seminar: U.S.-China Strategic Competition

China’s economic competitiveness and international ambitions often pose a direct challenge to the United States and its global interests. Dr. Kennedy’s long experience in China and his expertise in economics and global governance inform his unique insights into the public policy implications of this strategic competition.

Scott Kennedy is a leading authority on China’s economic policy and its global economic relations.  He has been traveling to China for over 30 years and has interviewed thousands of officials, business executives, lawyers, nonprofit organizations, and scholars. His specific areas of expertise include industrial policy, technology innovation, business lobbying, multinational business challenges in China, global governance, and philanthropy. 

He is currently at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C., where he serves as senior adviser and Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics and is Director of the Project on Chinese Business and Political Economy, 

His articles have appeared in a wide array of policy, popular, and academic venues, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, China Quarterly, and the Journal of Contemporary China. He is currently writing a book tentatively titled The Power of Innovation: The Strategic Importance of China’s High-Tech Drive. He is also the author of China’s Risky Drive into New-Energy Vehicles (CSIS, November 2018), The Fat Tech Dragon: Benchmarking China’s Innovation Drive (CSIS, August 2017), and The Business of Lobbying in China (Harvard University Press, 2008). Reviewing the latter book, the Far Eastern Economic Review observed that “Tucked away in this well-researched, carefully reasoned piece of scholarship are fresh, insightful observations on both economic and political trends in Chinese society…”

Prior to joining CSIS, Kennedy spent 14 years as a professor at Indiana University (IU), where he established the Research Center for Chinese Politics & Business and was the founding academic director of IU’s China Office. 

Kennedy received his Ph.D. in political science from George Washington University, his M.A. in China Studies from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and his B.A. from the University of Virginia.

Seminar: Deeply Divided & Closely Divided: Why the Temperature has Been Rising in American Politics

The substantive disagreements between the political parties have been deepening for half a century. In the late 1980s, moreover, we entered an era of closely contested elections in which control of Congress and the White House has shifted back and forth several times. Dr. Galston will discuss ways in which this combination of deep division and close division has intensified the passion and bitterness that permeate our politics today.

William A. Galston has written 10 books and more than 100 articles in the fields of political theory, public policy, political and moral philosophy, and U.S. politics. He is currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he holds the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in the Governance Studies Program. He also writes a weekly column on Politics & Ideas for the Wall Street Journal.  

Before joining Brookings, Dr. Galston had served as founding director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE); executive director of the National Commission on Civic Renewal; Saul Stern Professor and Acting Dean at the School of Public Policy of the University of Maryland; and director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy. He has also held positions at the University of Texas in Austin, Yale University, and the Roosevelt Center for American Policy Studies. He has been involved in six presidential campaigns including those of Walter Mondale and Al Gore, and served from 1993 to 1995 as Deputy Assistant to President Clinton for Domestic Policy.

Dr. Galston’s books include Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy (Yale, 2018), Public Matters (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), and The Practice of Liberal Pluralism (Cambridge, 2004), 

He holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago and a B.A. from Cornell University, where he became a member of Phi Beta Kappa. His career also includes service in the United States Marine Corps with the rank of Sergeant.

Camille Busette, PhD is the Director of the Race, Prosperity, and Inclusion Initiative, Brookings Intitution’s cross-program initiative focused on issues of equity, racial justice and economic mobility for low-income communities and communities of color. Busette is a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies with affiliated appointments in Economic Studies and the Metropolitan Policy programs at Brookings. Her work has focused on systemic racism, the economic advancement of black and Native American boys, the importance of social relationships to economic mobility, and equity in healthcare and in local and state government policy priorities and builds on her work for low-income populations at EARN (now SaverLife) and the Center for American Progress.

Ambassador Eric Edelman served as U.S. Ambassador to the Republics of Finland and Turkey in the Clinton and Bush Administrations and was Principal Deputy Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs. He has been Chief of Staff to Deputy Secretary of State, special assistant to Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and special assistant to Secretary of State George Shultz. His other assignments include the State Department Operations Center, Prague, Moscow and Tel Aviv, where he was a member of the U.S. Middle East Delegation to the West Bank/Gaza Autonomy Talks.

John D. Leshy is a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. He was Solicitor (General Counsel) of the Interior Department throughout the Clinton Administration. Earlier, he was counsel to the Chair of the Natural Resources Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, a law professor at Arizona State University, Associate Solicitor of Interior for Energy and Resources in the Carter Administration, an attorney-advocate with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and a litigator in the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. He led the Interior Department transition team for Clinton-Gore in 1992 and co-led it for Obama-Biden in 2008. He has been a visiting professor multiple times at Harvard Law School, from which he graduated in 1969, after earning an A.B. at Harvard College. He has served on numerous boards and commissions and published widely on natural resources and on constitutional law, including a book on the Mining Law, and co-author of a casebook on public land and resources law (8th edition forthcoming in 2021), and water law (6th edition, 2018).

The U.S. government owns, and manages for broad public objectives, about 30% of the nation’s land, more than six hundred million acres. These lands and the agencies that manage them—the Forest Service, Park Service, Fish & Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management—are a ubiquitous presence in western communities like Steamboat Springs. With a new administration in the nation’s capital, it is a good time to take a quick look back at the long history of these lands to see what it may tell us about the future. Leshy, whose comprehensive political history of these lands, Our Common Ground, will be published by Yale University Press at year’s end, will mine that history and suggest how Congress and the executive might respond to the numerous challenges facing these lands, especially those related to climate change and the ongoing decline in biodiversity.

Maya MacGuineas is the president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Her areas of expertise include budget, tax and economic policy. As a leading budget expert and a political independent, she has worked closely with members of both parties and serves as a trusted resource on Capitol Hill. She testifies regularly before Congress and oversees a number of the Committee’s projects, including the grassroots coalition Fix the Debt, the Fiscal Institute and FixUS. Her most recent area of focus is on the future of the economy, technology and capitalism.

Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo is a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering and the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations. An epidemiologist by training, her work focuses on global health security, with a focus on pandemic preparedness, outbreak detection and response, health systems as they relate to global health security, biosurveillance, and infectious disease diagnostics.