Story in the Public Square

For generations, a liberal arts education was the gold standard of preparation for career and a well-rounded-life.  For much of the last decade, however, voices—including those of prominent technology leaders—have warned that the jobs of today and tomorrow require education in so-called STEM fields: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.  Not surprisingly, enrollments in liberal arts fields have declined.  Scott Hartley argues that far more than a luxury—the skills and perspective cultivated by a liberal arts education are precisely the skills needed for the modern information economy. 

Scott Hartley is a venture capitalist and the author of “The Fuzzy and the Techie: Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World,” a Financial Times business book of the month. It was also a finalist for the Financial Times and McKinsey & Company’s Bracken Bower Prize an author under 35. He has been a Partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures (MDV), and a Venture Partner at Compound. Prior to venture capital, Hartley worked at Google, Facebook, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and at the White House as a Presidential Innovation Fellow.

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In 2015, the United States and Iran concluded years of difficult diplomacy that froze Iran’s nuclear weapons program for ten years.  Less than two years later, Donald Trump was president and withdrew the United States from that agreement in May of 2018.  IIan Goldenberg warns that while neither the United States nor Iran want a war, the potential for miscalculation and stumbling into war are quite high.

Ilan Goldenberg is Senior Fellow and Director of the Middle East Security Program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).  He is a foreign policy and defense expert with extensive government experience covering Iran’s nuclear program, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the broader challenges facing the Middle East.  Just prior to CNAS, Goldenberg served as the Chief of Staff to the Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations at the U.S. Department of State, playing a key role in supporting Secretary Kerry’s initiative to conduct permanent status peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.  Goldenberg has also served as Policy Director and was one of the founding staff members of the National Security Network.

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On an otherwise typical Friday night in 1994, 17-year-old Joseph Sakran, a high school student in Northern Virginia, was shot through his throat by an errant bullet from a fight at a high school football game.  Trauma surgeons saved his life, launching him on a career as a trauma surgeon and as a leading voice against gun violence. 

Dr. Joseph Sakran is the Director of Emergency General Surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital with additional expertise in General Surgery, Minimally Invasive Surgery, and Robotic and Laparoscopic Surgery.  He also specializes in injury prevention, outcomes research, trauma system development, public policy and advancement of surgery in poor resource settings.  Sakran is one of the nation’s leading professional voices against gun violence, dealing with it as both a public-health and political issue.  He is founder of Docs Demand Action, a “movement of Americans demanding common sense solutions to end gun violence in our nation.”

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The political debate over healthcare in the United States seems cyclical—it rises and falls with America’s political calendar.  Dr. Michael Fine argues that for patients and caregivers, issues like cost, access, and outcomes are real, they are present, and they often have life-and-death consequences.

A former director of the Rhode Island Department of Health, Fine has been a writer, community organizer, family physician and public health official for more than 40 years. In addition to his book, Health Care Revolt: How to Organize, Build a Health Care System, and Resuscitate Democracy―All at the Same Time, he has published widely in the medical literature, mostly about health policy.  He also served as a medical officer in Kenya and worked as a volunteer during the Liberian Civil War, the subject of Abundance, his first novel.

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When Barack Obama became the 44th President of the United States, pundits and leading news outlets heralded the arrival of a “post-racial America.”  Some Americans, however, didn’t see it that way.  Ian Reifowitz discusses the exploitation of race in the Obama years by one of America’s prominent conservative opinion makers, Rush Limbaugh, in his latest book, The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh’s Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump.

Reifowitz is professor of Historical Studies at Empire State College of the State University of New York.  He is a Contributing Editor at Daily Kos and his articles have appeared in numerous outlets, including Daily News, Newsday, and the New Republic. In addition to his latest book, Reifowitz has also authored Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity and Imagining an Austrian Nation: Joseph Samuel Bloch and the Search for a Multiethnic Austrian Identity, 1846–1919. 

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The concept of justice is central to the American experience.  We celebrate it in our monuments and in our history.  But who gets justice, and who defines it are seldom considered questions.  Christopher Brown is a practicing attorney and dystopian novelist who combines his talents in a new novel exploring these concepts in a different America.

Brown is a writer and lawyer whose 2017 debut novel, Tropic of Kansas was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for best science fiction novel of the year.  His latest novel, Rule of Capture, is a dystopian legal thriller that explores the meaning of justice.  Set in the world of Tropic of Kansas, Brown describes Rule of Capture as “Better Call Saul” meets 1984.

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Some Americans will be able to enjoy their golden years.  Others will not. Deborah Carr argues that the biggest factor determining which side of that equation you fall on is your socioeconomic status—that combination of education, income, and occupation that determines your social standing.

Carr is Professor and Chair in the Sociology department at Boston University. Her research focuses on aging and the life course, psycho-social factors and influences on health over the life course, and end-of-life issues.  Her latest book, Golden Years: Social Inequalities in Later Life, delves into the ways that persistent race, class, and gender inequalities shape experiences of old age in the United States.

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Whether to impeach President Donald Trump is an open question in American politics.  Those who favor impeachment point no further than volume II of the Mueller report and its accounts of apparent obstruction of justice by the President.  Others caution that absent the ability to win a conviction in the Senate, impeachment would boomerang and only boost the president’s popularity and likelihood of winning reelection in 2020.  Frank O. Bowman III argues that near-term political calculations are obscuring decisions and that the long history of impeachment strengthens the case for holding the president to account. 

Bowman is the Floyd R. Gibson Missouri Endowed Professor of Law and at Indiana University School of Law and an expert on impeachment dating back to its creation in 14th-century Britain.  In his most recent book, High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump, Bowman provides readers with a deep historical and constitutional analysis of the impeachment clauses.  He includes a coherent theory of when impeachment should be used to protect constitutional order against presidential misconduct with a timely and comprehensive presentation of the case for and against impeachment of President Trump.

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Students of history are taught to see events through the eyes of people living in the era they are studying.  From that perspective, history becomes less predictable, decisions seem less certain, and understanding becomes, in fact, more complete.  Gavriel Rosenfeld brings that discipline to the history of “the Fourth Reich,” a fear that has mobilized and motivated Europe and the world since 1945. 

Rosenfeld is Professor of History at Fairfield University and specializes is the history and memory of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.  His new book, The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present, explores the idea of Nazi return to power and the impact the possibility of a “Fourth Reich” had on postwar Europe.  A timely analysis in the light of recent political extremism, Rosenfeld weaves counterfactual historical possibilities into an extensive history of the German Reich’s origin.   

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Identity politics are typically associated with marginalized groups—communities that have been defined as “other” by the dominant group in a political culture. Ashley Jardina argues that there is an emerging white-identity politics in American society today. 

Jardina is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University.  Her book White Identity Politics explores the nature of racial attitudes, the development of group identities, and the way in which these factors influence political preferences and behavior.  She is primarily interested in how Americans respond to increasing diversity, and her current project explores the conditions under which white racial identification and white consciousness among white Americans is a salient and significant predictor of policies, candidates, and attitudes toward racial and ethnic groups.

 

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