The Salisbury Forum opens its 2010 – 2011th season with “Conflict and Peace – Why Should Women Be at the Table?”

The first forum will be held on Friday, September 24 at 7:30 pm,  at The Salisbury School, Seifert Theater. The featured speaker is Maryam Elahi, Human Rights lawyer and Director of the International Women’s Program, Open Society Institute & Soros Foundations Network.

Ms. Elahi is the chair of the International Human Rights Committee of the American Bar Association and has served on numerous boards including the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, the ACLU of CT and AI’s Policy Board. She has written and lectured on wide-range of human rights issues including women’s rights, U.S. and human rights foreign policy, “U.S. and the war on terror” and Middle East issues.

Prior to OSI, Ms. Elahi was the founding director of the Human Rights Program at Trinity College – the first undergraduate college human rights program in the United States. She taught courses on international human rights law at Trinity, as well as, at the Oxford University Summer International Human Rights Program. She served as the Advocacy Director on the Middle East, North Africa and Europe for Amnesty International in DC from 1990 – 1997. During her ten years at Trinity, she traveled extensively to set up international programs with a human rights focus resulting in the establishment of programs in Cape Town, Santiago, Trinidad and Hong Kong.

At Salisbury Forums experts provide their insight, followed by a question and answer period. All forums are free to the public.

From TCExtra.com
Opinion/Viewpoint
No news is not good news
Editorial
06/10/2010

Peter Osnos gave hope to those of us who want to continue to maintain their connections to all kinds of news, whether local, national or international, at the last Salisbury Forum presentation for the season on Friday evening, June 4, at The Hotchkiss School.

Osnos, who is the founder of PublicAffairs Books and former foreign correspondent and editor for The Washington Post, as well as acting as vice chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review, among many other things, has clearly made a serious study of the trends of media over the past few decades. He should know, if anyone does, the directions in which media consumers will look over the next 10 years to find out what’s happening in the world around them.

There are many different ways in which news is now delivered, Osnos said, and we all know there have been monumental changes in communication over the past 10 years. Could the next 10 years bring as many changes as the last 10? It’s probable, according to Osnos, who pointed out that Apple, Microsoft, and Google house the engineers and IT geniuses who have transformed news and information distribution — but don’t create content.

Consumers, however, need to secure the quality of content that they cherish, he said. So, while the ways in which news junkies receive information may be changing dramatically, they still want to receive it, as quickly and easily as possible. There will be many more ways of obtaining news, but the quality of content matters to all consumers of news.

This theory does give hope to those producing a small community weekly newspaper or Web site such as the one you’re reading. The news gathered at smaller outlets in smaller markets is unique, and very meaningful to those of us who choose to live and work in such places. Whether small-town news is available on paper or online, read in print or on an iPhone, it will still be useful, necessary, and hopefully even entertaining to those who consume it. After all, it helps us examine our lives more thoroughly, just as events such as the Salisbury forums do.

Osnos noted that the demand for all news has never been greater, and remains indispensable to our society. While the large news distributors and hardware providers are making money disseminating news, they know they also need quality content in order to maintain their business models. He believes there are real innovators around who are ready to absorb the changes that have to be made, and he is confident that quality books and news, however they’re delivered, have a future. At the same time, some parts of news distribution that consumers expect to be around forever may not be, and may suddenly disappear.

That, in fact, has already happened with some area media, as we saw a string of small weekly newspapers close overnight in neighboring New York state a little over a year ago.

The conversation at the forum featuring Osnos was both enlightening and fascinating, as have been all the other five Salisbury Forum presentations this season. Kudos to President Walter DeMelle and the group of community members on the board who have given their time to make this year’s, and the past five years’, forum events possible. We look forward to their sixth season of provoking thought and discussion on a range of topics that affect all of our lives.

© Copyright 2010 by TCExtra.com

By JANET MANKO
Reprinted with permission, The Lakeville Journal, © Copyright 2010.

FALLS VILLAGE — The amphitheater in Room 133 at Housatonic Valley Regional High School overflowed with adults and students on Friday evening, May 14, as the Salisbury Forum explored freedom of speech in an event called, “The Constitution in Our Midst.”

Two documentary films were presented by the teams of Housatonic students who had created them. The students, all members of the senior class and all enrolled in a media studies class taught by John Duval, had been mentored by documentary film producers Dominique Lasseur and Catherine Tatge of Cornwall.

After the films were screened, members of the audience had a chance to ask the students about their projects, and about the social issues that inspired them.

One film, “No Speech Zone,” was about the back-to-school speech made in September on television by President Barack Obama. The students who made this film interviewed community members, including fellow high schoolers, about the speech, and the fact that no one asked their opinion about whether the speech should be shown at school.

The group that made this film included students Zach Ackerman, Elizabeth Cuoco, Tyler Gelbar, Emma Osborne, Kayla Robinson, Dylan Morehouse and Justin Taylor.

The other film, “The D Word,” was about a lawsuit filed by Connecticut high school student Avery Doninger against her school. She had posted comments critical of her school superintendent on her Internet blog. School administrators saw it and took punitive action.

This film was made by Housatonic students Madeleine Bambery, Steven Bartomioli, Bill Bunce, Alyse Couture, Nick Dignacco and Ryan King.

The upshot of the post-screening discussions was that students, parents and teachers would welcome more opportunities for open discussions, such as that at the forum.

For more on the forum, read the editorial below:

Housy students find their voices
Editorial
May, 20, 2010
Reprinted with permission, The Lakeville Journal, © Copyright 2010.

Some smart, talented Housatonic Valley Regional High School students were given an unusual opportunity to show their skills at The Salisbury Forum Friday night, May 14, which was held at their school. (See story above, which appeared on the front page.) They presented to the adults of their community some very strong opinions, questions and answers, all through the filter of a lens: Two teams of students produced their own documentary films, on topics of their own choosing, relating to their rights as citizens which are afforded them through the U.S. Constitution. The two films which came out of this initiative, “The D-Word” and “No Speech Zone”, were screened at the event.

There were, of course, adults who should be recognized who gave their time to mentor the student teams and gave them the chance to produce the documentaries. The Connecticut Project for the Constitution, Global Village Media, The Salisbury Forum, the administration at Region One and many more all came together to give the students who stepped forward support for this project.

But the real credit for the outcome must be given to the students themselves, who worked very hard to produce 25 to 30 hours of recorded interviews, and who did research and visited with community and educational leaders to learn about their topics. Those many hours of video were edited down to about 20 minutes for their final products, not an easy task.

However, the student filmmakers had to have learned much in the process which could not have been easily communicated in a classroom situation. They were required to remove themselves from their comfort zone and go out into the community to find information on their topics. As Harold Schramm, professor emeritus at Western Connecticut State University and co-founder of Connecticut Project for the Constitution, said in introducing the event on Friday, the qualities of a documentary filmmaker are the same as the qualities of a good citizen.

Those qualities include curiosity, open-mindedness, the ability to understand both sides of an issue and to empathize even if not in agreement with one side or the other. The students who worked on the documentaries will be able to take what they’ve learned and apply it to many aspects of their lives in the years to come, but most especially to their role as active, responsible U.S. citizens.

The two documentaries covered topics that these students will find continue to be relevant in adult life. “The D-Word” dealt with the issue of free speech, and “No Speech Zone” with the issue of information being withheld from high-school students by adults without any discussion. Should students be able to make statements online, from home, that could be seen as insulting or disruptive in school? Should students have been allowed to see the speech given by President Obama at the beginning of this school year, in real time in their classrooms? These were the questions the students sought to answer through this project, and they may well have been surprised themselves by some of what they found.

One clear realization was that as high school students, they are not easily given the chance to voice their opinions openly and honestly in their day-to-day lives. Even as they enter the adult world, these students will find that free speech and open information are not rights that are as automatic as might be expected. The Freedom of Information law in Connecticut is only 35 years old this year, and every year there is some reason to feel that the power of the law is eroding on the one hand, yet on the other hand being upheld by those who firmly believe in the importance of open information.

These students will find in the future that they will need to continue to be vigilant in order to support and maintain their rights as citizens. They’ve made a good start.

By Bruce T. Paddock

April, 15, 2010

Reprinted with permission, The Lakeville Journal, © Copyright 2010.

SALISBURY — The Salisbury Forum brought two favorite guests back for an appearance last Friday, April 9, at Salisbury School.

For journalist and best-selling author Todd Brewster, it was a second appearance in Salisbury, while Yale Law School professor and constitutional scholar Akhil Reed Amar was back for his fourth visit.

At a Forum event in October 2008, Amar and Brewster discussed what the Constitution does and does not say about the presidency, as well as what qualities American voters have historically tended to look for when choosing a president.

For Friday’s presentation, “The Presidency in the Age of Obama,” the two men discussed 10 moments that they felt defined the young Obama presidency, and that would be seen in years to come as also defining the era in which they occurred.

Some of the moments, such as the inauguration and the passage of health-care reform, were obvious choices.

Others, such as Obama’s first meeting with Gen. Stanley McChrystal on Oct. 1, 2009, were perhaps less so. One or two (“The Tea Party”) weren’t technically moments.

For each one, first Brewster and then Amar explained what he felt the event had to tell us about the president and about the country. The common theme running through all the discussions was the many burdens that Obama finds himself under.

One example was the Beer Summit, in which Obama invited black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James Crowley, the white police officer who arrested Gates in his home, to share a beer at the White House.

According to Amar and Brewster, the incident showed that the first African-American president had become the arbiter of all things racial in the country.

Despite the political topic, both men were generally politically neutral. For example, while Amar made no attempt to hide his negative feelings about the Tea Party, his criticism focused solely on what he considers their misunderstanding of the Constitution and of American history, not on their political positions.

In the brief question-and-answer period that followed the talk, audience members asked about health-care reform and about the Supreme Court. The final question of the evening, about the deterioration of the political debate in recent years, served as a segue to the next Salisbury Forum event, in which local students will show documentary films they made as part of a program with Global Village Media and the Connecticut Project for the Constitution. The latter organization was co-founded by Brewster, and is dedicated to improving the quality of public dialogue about constitutional issues. “The Constitution in Our Midst,” will be held at Housatonic Valley Regional High School in Falls Village on Friday, May 14, at 7:30 p.m.

By Patrick L. Sullivan, October, 22, 2009
Reprinted with permission, The Lakeville Journal, © Copyright 2009.

SALISBURY — Jeffrey Sachs, an economist, and Bill Blakemore of ABC News delivered a rather gloomy assessment of the state of the planet at the opening of this season’s lectures sponsored by the Salisbury Forum Friday, Oct. 16.
The talk was held at the Salisbury School. Blakemore “interviewed” Sachs on “Four Global Crises: Money, Security, Heat, Psychology.”

Sachs, director of The Earth Institute, professor at Columbia University and an advisor to the United Nations, began by responding to Blakemore’s question of the economic impact of global warming, saying that insurance companies are paying billions of dollars in climate-related claims.

But the conversation quickly branched out in several directions.

“We’re a very crowded planet now, from 3 billion in 1965 to 7 billion today,” he stated. “This massive increase in population, plus the desire for a higher standard of living on a crowded, productive planet is happening very fast.

“We don’t know how to handle it.”

Of the recession, Sachs said the problems are “not impossible to solve. A good brainstorming society would take up the challenge. America has been able to rally in the past.”

Referring back to the environment, “the key idea is to find technologies that can keep existing living standards without the high costs to the planet. And we need a new type of economy that gives the right signals.”
Sachs said he was in favor of developing not just wind and solar power, but nuclear as well.
“I don’t like not having electricity, by the way. We’d better get back to nuclear, which we suspended 30 years ago after Three-Mile Island.”

Failure to do so leaves us with what he called “the inertia of coal plants, which are certainly dangerous.”

On politics, Sachs was acerbic. “It’s like science fiction, watching lobbyists eat up Congress each year.” In talking with Obama administration officials, Sachs said “it’s top-to-bottom special interests.

“And there’s not a serious thought in Congress.”

Sachs said he was “disgusted” at a recent briefing on the political prospects of the Cap and Trade legislation in the Senate. “I learned what every senator is demanding as his pound of flesh. ‘The World’s Greatest Deliberative Body’ is wrecked right now.”

Sachs advocated a wholesale change in America’s foreign policy.

“These problems are not unsolvable but they’re tough. None of them will be solved militarily. We can’t win the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. The only thing we can do is work with other countries.

“The problem isn’t that we’re doomed, the problem is to open our eyes.”

The evening ended with a question from the audience about the concept of national security in an interconnected world.

Sachs said the core of most problems worldwide is hunger, lack of jobs and lack of education.

“Anybody who spends a day in a camel herder village will tell you: Don’t send the Army, send the Army Corps of Engineers.”

Recent Salisbury Forum speaker and FRONTLINE producer, Martin Smith, has a documentary airing on Tuesday, October 13, 2009, at 9P.M. ET on PBS: Obama’s War.

Tens of thousands of fresh American troops are now on the move in Afghanistan, led by a new commander and armed with a counter-insurgency plan that builds on the lessons of Iraq. But can U.S. forces succeed in a land long known as the “graveyard of empires?” FRONTLINE correspondent Martin Smith makes the dangerous journey to the front lines of America’s biggest fight. For a preview and more, visit www.frontline.org.

7:30 p.m. at Housatonic Valley Regional High School on November 6, 2009

Doris Meissner, former commissioner of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and Senior Fellow of the Migration Policy Institute will speak on “Immigration in America: What’s in Store?”

As a Senior Fellow at MPI, Doris Meissner directs MPI’s work on US immigration policy. She also contributes to the Institute’s work on immigration and national security, the politics of immigration, administering immigration systems and government agencies, and cooperation with other countries.

Ms. Meissner has authored and co-authored numerous reports, articles, and op-eds and is frequently quoted in the media. She recently served as director of MPI’s Independent Task Force on Immigration and America’s Future, a bipartisan group of distinguished leaders. The group’s report and recommendations address how to harness the advantages of immigration for a 21st century economy and society.

From 1993 to 2000, she served in the Clinton administration as Commissioner of the INS, then part of the US Department of Justice. Her accomplishments included reforming the nation’s asylum system; creating new strategies for managing US borders; improving services for immigrants; and shaping new responses to migration and humanitarian emergencies. She first joined the Department of Justice in 1973 as a White House Fellow and special assistant to the Attorney General and then served in various senior policy posts at Justice, including acting commissioner and executive associate commissioner of INS.

In 1986, she joined the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as a senior associate. Ms. Meissner created the Endowment’s Immigration Policy Project, which became MPI in 2001.

Ms. Meissner’s board memberships include vice-chair of CARE-USA and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), University of Wisconsin (UW)-Madison. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Inter-American Dialogue, and the Pacific Council on International Policy. She is also a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA).

Her most recent awards are the Legacy of Leadership Award given by the White House Fellows Foundation and the UW Alumni Association’s Distinguished Alumni Award.

She earned BA and MA degrees at UW-Madison, where she began her professional career as assistant director of student financial aids. She was also the first executive director of the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC).

Suggested Reading

Who Are New England’s Immigrants?
By Mamie Marcuss with Ricardo Borgos
Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Fall 2004
http://www.bos.frb.org/commdev/c&b/2004/fall/Immigrants.pdf

Frequently Requested Statistics on Immigrants and Immigration in the United States
By Aaron Terrazas and Jeanne Batalova
Migration Policy Institute, October 2009
http://www.migrationinformation.org/USfocus/display.cfm?id=747

Immigrants and Health Care Reform: What’s Really at Stake
By Randy Capps, Marc R. Rosenblum, and Michael Fix
Migration Policy Institute, October 2009
http://www.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/healthcare-Oct09.pdf

Migration and the Global Recession: A Report Commissioned by the BBC World Service
By Michael Fix, Demetrios G. Papademetriou, Jeanne Batalova, Aaron Terrazas, Serena Yi-Ying Lin, and Michelle Mittelstadt
Migration Policy Institute, September 2009
http://www.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/MPI-BBCreport-Sept09.pdf

Immigrants and the Current Economic Crisis: Research Evidence, Policy Challenges, and Implications
By Demetrios G. Papademetriou and Aaron Terrazas 
Migration Policy Institute, January 2009
http://www.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/lmi_recessionJan09.pdf

DHS and Immigration: Taking Stock and Correcting Course
By Doris Meissner and Donald Kerwin
Migration Policy Institute, February 2009
http://www.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/DHS_Feb09.pdf

Uneven Progress: The Employment Pathways of Skilled Immigrants in the United States
By Jeanne Batalova and Michael Fix with Peter A. Creticos
Migration Policy Institute, October 2008
http://www.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/BrainWasteOct08.pdf

Spotlight on Refugees and Asylees in the United States
By Jeanne Batalova
Migration Policy Institute, July 2009
http://www.migrationinformation.org/USfocus/display.cfm?id=734

Resources

Source US Immigration Policy Resources PDF (222 KB)

MPI Data Hub Connecticut Immigration Statistics PDF (126.5 KB)

MPI Data Hub Massachusetts Immigration Statistics PDF (127.1 KB)

MPI Data Hub United States Immigration Statistics PDF (124.1 KB)

7:30 p.m. at Salisbury School’s Seifert Theater on October 16, 2009

Jeffrey Sachs, renowned author and economist, and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, with Bill Blakemore, ABC News correspondent, will speak on 4 Global Crises: Money, Security, Heat &  Psychology.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is also Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. From 2002 to 2006, he was Director of the UN Millennium Project and Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals, the internationally agreed goals to reduce extreme poverty, disease, and hunger by the year 2015. Sachs is also President and Co-Founder of Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit organization aimed at ending extreme global poverty.

He is widely considered to be the leading international economic advisor of his generation. For more than 20 years Professor Sachs has been in the forefront of the challenges of economic development, poverty alleviation, and enlightened globalization, promoting policies to help all parts of the world to benefit from expanding economic opportunities and wellbeing. He is also one of the leading voices for combining economic development with environmental sustainability, and as Director of the Earth Institute leads large-scale efforts to promote the mitigation of human-induced climate change.

In 2004 and 2005 he was named among the 100 most influential leaders in the world by Time Magazine. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan, a high civilian honor bestowed by the Indian Government, in 2007. Sachs lectures constantly around the world and was the 2007 BBC Reith Lecturer. He is author of hundreds of scholarly articles and many books, including the New York Times bestsellers Common Wealth (Penguin, 2008) and The End of Poverty (Penguin, 2005). Sachs is a member of the Institute of Medicine and is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Prior to joining Columbia, he spent over twenty years at Harvard University, most recently as Director of the Center for International Development. A native of Detroit, Michigan, Sachs received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard University.

Bill Blakemore is an American broadcast journalist. Blakemore has been a reporter for ABC News for more than 35 years, covering a wide variety of stories. He has spearheaded ABC’s coverage of global warming, traveling from the tropics to polar regions to report on the impacts and dangers of climate change, as well as possible solutions for it.

Blakemore helped create ABC’s new multiplatform exploration of global warming in TV, Internet, podcast, radio and print formats. He began focusing on global warming even as he was finishing his 27-year coverage of the entire papacy of Pope John Paul II. Blakemore was part of the ABC News team that won the duPont-Columbia Award for its live coverage in Rome of John Paul’s funeral and his successor’s election.