Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research

The Fiscal Cliff: New Heights of Sensationalism

Wednesday, November 7, 2012
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7:00 p.m.

The media have endlessly raised fears of the government falling off the “fiscal cliff.” This talk will explain why such talk fundamentally misrepresents the short-term budget problem and how the longer term problem has been misrepresented as well.

This event is sponsored by The Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Departments of Economics and Policy Studies and the Keystone Research Center.

Biography (provided by the speaker)
Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. He is the author of The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive, Taking Economics Seriously, False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble Economy, Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy, The United States Since 1980, The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer, Social Security: The Phony Crisis (with Mark Weisbrot), and The Benefits of Full Employment (with Jared Bernstein). He was the editor of Getting Prices Right: The Debate Over the Consumer Read more

Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7:00 p.m.

Panelists

Douglas Edlin – Associate Professor of Political Science
Michael Fratantuono – Associate Professor of International Studies and International Business & Management
Stephanie Gilmore – Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies
Andrew Wolff – Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Studies
Moderated by Andrew Chesley ’13 – President of Student Senate

A panel of Dickinson professors will discuss the important policy positions of each of the presidential candidates. The presentations will be nonpartisan and objective in nature. Topics include health care and insurance, the federal budget and the national economy, women’s rights issues, and foreign policy and national security.

The event is sponsored by The Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues.

Biographies

Douglas E. Edlin received his Ph.D. from Oxford University.  He also holds a J.D. from Cornell, an M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, and a B.A. from Hobart College.  His research and teaching interests are in comparative constitutionalism, the judicial process and judicial review, the legal and policy issues raised by developments in assisted reproductive technology, and the politics of race and gender in the United States.  Along with a number of articles in leading journals, his Read more

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Playwright

The Insubstantial Pageant: Writing for Performance

Thursday, October 18, 2012
Mathers Theatre, 7:30 p.m.

We are born ready to talk and listen, but it takes years to learn to read and write. What is gained and lost when the redolent swirl of human experience is consigned to the abstract, linear, preterite alphabetic code? And what ironies await when the freeze-dried code is reconstituted as live performance?

This event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Norman M. Eberly Writing Center and the Departments of English, American Studies and Theatre & Dance.

Biography (provided by the speaker)
Margaret Edson was born in Washington, DC in 1961.  Between earning degrees in history and literature, she worked on the cancer and AIDS inpatient unit of a major research hospital.  Wit was written in 1991, widely rejected, first produced in 1995, and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1999.  The HBO production won the Emmy Award for Best Film in 2001.  Wit  has received hundreds of productions in dozens of languages and was presented on Broadway in 2012.  The script is used in classes ranging from AP English to medical ethics.

Ms. Edson has Read more

Associate Professor of Science and Technology, Cornell University

Birds, Biology, & Bioterrorism

Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Stern Center, Great Room, 7:00 p.m.

This lecture will discuss the public and policy controversies surrounding the 2012 publication of scientific data on artificially created, mutated H5N1 avian influenza viruses by two prominent virologists. Read more

This event is jointly sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues, Penn State Dickinson School of Law and School of International Affairs and co-sponsored by the Departments of Biology, Chemistry, Political Science and International Studies.

Biography (provided by the speaker)
Kathleen Vogel is an associate professor at Cornell University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Science and Technology Studies and the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies.  Vogel holds a Ph.D. in biological chemistry from Princeton University. Her research focuses on studying the social and technical dimensions of biological weapons threats, and how knowledge is produced in intelligence assessments on threats involving weapons of mass destruction. Prior to joining the Cornell faculty, Vogel was appointed as a William C. Foster Fellow in the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Proliferation Threat Reduction in the Bureau of Nonproliferation. Vogel has also spent time as Read more

Attorney and Constitutional Commentator

A Potemkin Village: The Supreme Court’s Health Care Decision & Faux Federalism

2012 Winfield C. Cook Constitution Address
Monday, October 8, 2012
Great Room, Stern Center, 7:00 p.m.

Mr. Rivkin will analyze the recent Supreme Court decision upholding the Affordable Care Act, in particular Chief Justice John Robert’s pivotal opinion, and explore the decision’s long-term political and policy implications, especially the Court’s apparent willingness to enforce structural federalism-based limitations on congressional powers only if the policy stakes are relatively low, thereby encouraging a system of faux-federalism.

This event is jointly sponsored by The Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues, Penn State Dickinson School of Law and School of International Affairs.

Biography (provided by the speaker)
David B. Rivkin, Jr., is a partner in the Washington office of Baker Hostetler LLP, and co-chairs the firm’s appellate and major motions practice. He is also a visiting fellow at the Center for the National Interest and a contributing editor of the National Review. He specializes in regulatory and litigation work, with a particular emphasis on constitutional, international law and public policy issues.

Mr. Rivkin has been involved in numerous high-profile cases. He has represented the 26 states that have Read more

Professor of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences, Montana State University

Earth’s Icy Biosphere

Thursday, October 4, 2012
Stern Center, Great Room, 7:00 p.m.

Priscu will demonstrate that the Earth’s icy systems, particularly the Antarctic ice sheet and related subglacial environments, hold a large and potentially active carbon pool, comprised of phylogenetically and metabolically diverse prokaryotic organisms. He will then relate these results to our search for life on other icy bodies in our solar system.

This event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Departments of Biology, Earth Sciences, Environmental Studies and Science and The Natural History Sustainability Mosaic.

Biography (provided by the speaker)
Professor Priscu received his M.S. degree from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 1978 where he studied how the ecosystems on the lower Colorado River were influenced by large dams. He then went on to obtain his Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis in 1982 for his work on high altitude lakes. Following his Ph.D. he joined a government laboratory in New Zealand where he was involved with research on the marine and freshwaters of New Zealand. It was during this period that he became interested in Antarctic Read more

Professor of Law, New York Law School

The Ravi/Clementi Case

Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Stern Center, Great Room, 7:00 p.m.

In September 2010, Dharun Ravi used a webcam to spy on his roommate Tyler Clementi having sex with another man in a Rutgers University dorm. Clementi committed suicide a few days later. Abraham will discuss aspects of this case including hate crime, high-tech bullying on college campuses, and privacy.

This event is jointly sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues, Penn State Dickinson School of Law and School of International Affairs and co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology, Women’s and Gender Studies and the Department of American Studies.

Biography (provided by the speaker)
Susan J. Abraham is a professor of law at New York Law School, where she teaches evidence,
advanced appellate advocacy, trial skills, and legal method, and is the faculty advisor to the
Moot Court Association. She is also affiliated with the Justice Action Center, through which she
has collaborated with students and faculty on various public interest projects, most recently co-
authoring an amicus brief to the United States Supreme Court on behalf of the University of Texas in Fisher v. The University of Texas, a Read more

Rajbir Singh Datta

Former National Director, Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund

Manar Waheed

Policy Director, South Asian Americans Leading Together

Erik Love – Moderator

Assistant Professor, Sociology

Thursday, September 6, 2012
Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7:00 p.m.

The Sikh community has dealt with hate and persecution for over 500 years — long before the 9/11 attacks. Representations of hate – like the Wisconsin shooting at a Sikh Gurdwara – will continue until we see each other as an extension of one family, see each other with respect, stand up to hate everywhere and actually live up to the ideals of our Founding Fathers.

This event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues.

Biographies (provided by the speakers)
Rajbir Singh Datta served, from 2005 until 2009, as the national director of the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund (SALDEF), the nation’s oldest Sikh American civil rights organization in the United States. In that role, he was responsible for coordinating policy, legislative, education, and legal assistance programs on behalf of over 700,000 Americans. During his tenure at SALDEF, he conducted multiple briefings on civil rights issues and has addressed audiences about Sikhism, the Sikh American community, Read more

Professor of History and International Affairs, Princeton University

Global Order After the Financial Crisis

Thursday, April 5, 2012
Stern Center, Great Room, 7:00 p.m.

Today there exists a real possibility of deglobalization, not so much because of trade protectionism (that was a principal driving force of the last big episode of deglobalization in the 1920s and 1930s) but from the response to the character of the current crisis, which is primarily a financial one, and which will prompt a new financial nationalism that brings very different policy approaches to those of the past quarter century. In the 1990s, the most dynamic and richest states were generally small open economies: Singapore, Taiwan, Chile, New Zealand, and in Europe the former communist states of Central Europe, Ireland, Austria, and Switzerland. In the world after the financial crisis, the center of economic gravity will shift to really large agglomerations of power. Does this mean that the new world order will inevitably be a China-centered world?

This event is jointly sponsored by The Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues, Penn State Dickinson School Law, the School of International Affairs and Betty R. ’58 and Dan Churchill.

Biography (provided by the speaker)
Harold James is a Read more