Fall 2009
Tough Choices in Tough Times: National Security, the Economy, and the Limits of Government
Reed’s 2009 Public Policy Lecture Series continues its annual tradition of bringing compelling speakers to campus to address important issues of politics, policy, and political change.
This year’s series addresses the opportunities and limits of governmental power in periods of crisis and change, focusing on national security and the economy. Our first two speakers, New York University professor of history Linda Gordon and NPR chief legal affairs correspondent Ari Shapiro, will explore the tensions between democracy, legality, and national security. In our second set of lectures, UC Berkeley professor of economics Brad DeLong and New York Times national economic correspondent Peter Goodman ’89 will turn our attention to whether and how the U.S. government can do anything to change the trajectory of a staggering global economy.
Linda Gordon
“Impounded: Dorothea Lange’s Censored Images of Japanese American Internment”
Friday, October 9, 4:30 p.m., Vollum lecture hall
Linda Gordon, professor of history at New York University, studies the roots of contemporary social policy debates, particularly as they concern gender and family issues. She has authored books on the history of working women in the U.S., birth control, family violence, and welfare, and edited books on welfare and the women’s movement. In 1999, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, Gordon’s book about a vigilante action against Mexican Americans, won the Bancroft prize for best book in American history and the Beveridge prize for best book on the history of the western hemisphere. While working on a project about photographer Dorothea Lange and American democracy (Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, forthcoming, October 2009), Gordon discovered a group of Lange photographs, long unnoticed and never published, of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Although commissioned by the U.S. Army, the photographs had been impounded because they were too critical of the internment policy. Gordon selected 119 of these images and published them, with introductory essays by herself and historian Gary Okihiro, as Impounded: Dorothea Lange and Japanese Americans in World War II (2006).
Presented in partnership with Reed's American studies program, Portland State University's Friends of History, and the Elizabeth C. Ducey Lecture Fund.
Linda Gordon is also speaking about Dorothea Lange at Portland State University and Wordstock 2009.
Listen to the lecture
Ari Shapiro
“Inheriting the War on Terror: President Obama and National Security”
Thursday, October 15, 7 p.m., Kaul Auditorium
Portland native Ari Shapiro, NPR’s award-winning legal affairs correspondent, reports on the Department of Justice and national legal affairs for NPR’s newsmagazines, including Morning Edition and All Things Considered. His recent reporting has focused on legal controversies over national security issues, including domestic surveillance, interrogation policies, and access to federal courts by enemy combatants. The first NPR reporter to be made a correspondent before age 30, Shapiro has received the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award for his coverage of New Orleans’ disordered legal system following Hurricane Katrina and the Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize for his investigation of methamphetamine use and HIV transmission. In 2008, the Columbia Journalism Review honored Shapiro with a “laurel” for excellent reporting on his investigation of disability benefits for injured veterans at an Army base in upstate New York.
Sponsored by the Richard Metz Kenin Memorial Lecture Fund.
Brad DeLong
“Financial Crisis and the Macroeconomy, 1825-Present”
Saturday, November 7, 2 p.m., Vollum lecture hall
J. Bradford DeLong, who served during the Clinton administration as deputy assistant secretary of economic policy for the U.S. Department of the Treasury, is professor of economics at UC Berkeley, chair of UC Berkeley’s political economy major, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. He has written on the evolution and functioning of the U.S. and other nations’ stock markets, the dynamics of long-run economic growth, the making of economic policy, the changing nature of the American business cycle, and the history of economic thought. Before joining the Treasury Department, DeLong was Danziger Associate Professor in the economics department at Harvard University. He has also been a John M. Olin Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, an assistant professor of economics at Boston University, and a lecturer in the department of economics at MIT.
Presented in partnership with the economics department and Reed's Parent & Family Weekend. Sponsored by the Walter Krause Fund for Lectures in Economics.
Peter Goodman ’89
“The End of Easy Money”
Thursday, November 19, 7 p.m., Vollum lecture hall
Peter S. Goodman has been a national economic correspondent for the New York Times since 2007. He began his career as a freelancer in Southeast Asia writing for several American newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times and the Dallas Morning News, before working for a decade as a staff writer at the Washington Post, for which he spent five years in China as the newspaper’s Asian economic correspondent and five in New York as the international economics correspondent. Goodman was part of a team of New York Times reporters whose 2008 series, The Reckoning, on the origins of the financial crisis, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The same series garnered a Loeb award, the so-called Pulitzer of business and economic reporting. While at the Post, Goodman won the 2005 Hugo Shong Journalist of the Year Award, conferred by Boston University’s school of communications for the best reporting from Asia, for a series on China’s impacts on the global economy. Goodman's book, Past Due: The End of Easy Money and the Renewal of the American Economy, about how Main Street was hit by—and might recover from—the financial crisis, is being published by Times Books in 2009.
Sponsored by the Munk-Darling Lecture Fund in International Relations.