Re: YPO Educational Program Overview

On Aug 7, 2007, at 6:00 PM, Barrett Brown wrote:

Middle East Event

With the debate over U.S. Middle East policy intensifying ahead of the '08 elections, it's our honor to host a presentation by the man whose unique role in defining the nature of Iraq's governing body renders him among the most interesting and lucid sources on a topic of pressing national concern. Noah Feldman is perhaps best known for having served in an advisory capacity to Coalition Provisional Authority head Paul Bremer in the early days of the U.S.-led occupation, during which time he was involved in the development of the nascent Iraqi government's first constitution.

It was a natural choice for an unusual task. As a Rhodes Scholar and former Supreme Court clerk who holds degrees from Yale, Harvard, and Oxford and who currently serves as the Cecelia Goetz Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law in addition to his role as a senior adjunct fellow on the Council of Foreign Relations, Feldman has focused much of his scholarship on two fields of study which might at first appear to be mutually exclusive: American constitutional law in general and the implications of the Establishment Clause in particular, and the feasibility of democracy with Islamic characteristics. As Feldman has argued in such books as After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), Divided by God: America's Church-State Problem and What We Should Do About It ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005), and What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building(Princeton University Press, 2004), each of these issues may have deep implications for the other and, with care, may be successfully navigated.

Educational Event

When Erin Guwell's teaching stint at a Long Beach high school in 1994 led to her being assigned to preside over a classroom made up of what school administrators had written off as "unteachable," "at-risk" students, she was astonished and somewhat disheartened to discover that almost none of them had even heard of the Holocaust. But nearly all of them, as she soon learned, had been shot at; many had the scars to prove it. Likewise, each student in the racially diverse classroom was quite familiar with ethnically-inspired hatred and the disasters to which such things may lead. In fact, Gruwell realized, the students did in fact understand the Holocaust they just didn't know it yet.

In the ensuing school years, Gruwell's classroom transformed itself from an unmanageable drop-off point for allegedly hopeless kids to one of the nation's greatest educational success stories. As her students learned to refocus their vision from the present to the future by learning from the past, they likewise learned to embrace their differences and accept responsibility for their own lives. Calling themselves The Freedom Writers, they even collaborated on an eponymous book. Today, The Freedom Writers Foundation provides scholarships and undertakes outreach programs in order to assist similarly "at-risk" kids.

We're pleased to play host to the accomplished Erin Gruwell, who will be the keynote speaker at this year's educational event.

Global Warming

No issue other than that of climate change has been the subject of so much international attention over the last few years and within the U.S. in particular, few issues have been as, ahem, heatedly debated. With the wonkish disputes that tend to arise among climatologists on the one hand and the considerably less-informed arguments that tend to arise among pundits on the other, the subject of global warming has found itself wedged quite firmly between the realms of science and politics; inevitably, this has done little to lower the rhetorical temperatures. This state of affairs leaves our esteemed guest speaker quite steamed indeed.

As the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Dr. Richard Lindzen has published peer-reviewed papers on such nuanced topics of climatological interest as Hadley circulation, mid-latitude weather, monsoon meteorology, and planetary waves, among many other things. He's also been quite vocal in his opposition to the notion that global warming is an established certainty, having written on such topics forNewsweek and The Wall Street Journal, and is even taking cash bets that temperatures will actually be cooler twenty years hence.

Aside from his professional qualifications and his ability to convey difficult subject matter to laymen, Dr. Lindzen also happens to be a notoriously proficient public speaker; one journalist noted after an interview that "he speaks in full, impeccably logical paragraphs." Thus is that we expect Dr. Lindzen's presentation - entitled Global Warming: Myth or Fiction? - to make for an intriguing evening.

Barone on the 2008 Election

Though Michael Barone is not himself a walking reference book, he does in fact write such things. As the principal author of The Almanac of American Politics, the nation's most complete and authoritative guide to state and federal level government, Barone is among the better informed of our Republic's political animals; and as a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report as well as an occasional contributor to Fox News Channel and other media, he's rarely stingy with the factoids. In books like Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan (Free Press, 1990) and Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Uprising That Inspired America's Founding Father (Crown Publishers, 2007), Barone takes a long view of American political history, and draws from an unusually deep well of historical context in doing so.

In his capacity as keynote speaker for our presidential election program, Barone will be lending us his insight into the annals of U.S. political history in order to shed light on what awaits us in 2008. As we enter a double-primary presidential election season possessed of a staggering number of candidates from both parties not counting the holdouts who have yet to announce Barone's assistance in making sense of the matter will no doubt be much appreciated.

Zoo Event

Have your kids ever played tug-of-war with an orangutan? Fed a buffalo straight from their hands? Gotten up-close and personal with a walrus? If so, does Child Protective Services know about any of this? Don't worry; we won't tell.

No? They haven't? Well, here's their chance.

Our event at the Houston Zoo promises to be among the most memorable family outings of the year, as we've arranged to have the zookeepers provide our attendees with an unprecedented level of access to the zoo's wilder inhabitants. You and your family will go where guests normally can't, see what guests normally won't, and do what guests normally don't. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do the zoo from a whole different view, and it's followed in turn by an elegant dinner aside the resident reflection pond.

You might want to wash your hands first.