Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, will speak to the Salisbury Forum on the 18th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. It was the worst act of terrorism carried out by hate group fanatics in The United States until the Twin Towers attacks in 2001. The group monitors hate and extremist groups and warns that the problem is growing worse at an alarming rate. They count more than a thousand such groups from Klansmen, White Nationalists, neo-Confederates, racist skinheads, black nationalists to border vigilantes and others. The SPLC says the  number of hate groups  has grown by 69 per cent since the year 2000.

The SPLC says,”This growth in extremism has been aided by mainstream media figures and politicians who have used their platforms to legitimize false propaganda about immigrants and other minorities and spread the kind of paranoid conspiracy theories on which militia groups thrive.”

The group pioneered the strategy of using the courts to battle organized, violent hate groups. Since then, it has won numerous large damage awards on behalf of victims of hate group violence. These cases are funded entirely by its supporters; it accepts no legal fees from the clients it represents.

Richard Cohen is a graduate of Columbia University and the University of Virginia Law School. He started at the SPLC in 1986 as its legal director after practicing law in Washington D.C. for seven years. Under his guidance, the SPLC has won a series of landmark lawsuits against some of the nation’s most violent white supremacist organizations. He became president of the SPLC in 2003.

Like its predecessors, An Inconvenient Truth, Food Inc. and Waiting For Superman, Last Call At The Oasis is an emotionally involving portrait of the looming crisis surrounding water. Our supplies of water are dwindling as contamination and overuse rises. Based on the book The Ripple Effect by Alex Prud’homme, the documentary by Jessica Yu is an impassioned call to arms.

Beginning in Nevada Last Call At The Oasis says that if Las Vegas continues to use the amount of water required for its dancing fountains and thousands of tourists nearby Lake Mead will be so depleted the Hoover Dam will be unable to generate electricity in four years. In California fishermen and farmers are in a heated debate over using the precious resources of water to irrigate the produce fields of the Central Valley or maintain fragile marine ecosystems.

From polluted wells in Texas to enormous cattle feeding lots in Michigan to the Jordan River the film documents the complicated scientific, environmental and geopolitical issues facing our diminishing water supplies.

Following the screening of the documentary Alex Prud’homme will discuss the issues raised by his book and the film.

Mark Bittman, whose “Minimalist” column ran in the Dining section of the New York Times for more than 13 years, is an Opinion columnist as well as the lead food writer for The Magazine.

Bittman has been urging Americans to change the way we eat for 30 years. In 2009 he published the groundbreaking Food Matters, which explored the crucial connections among food, health, and the environment, and provided tangible guidance for Americans rethinking their diets.  In 2010 he wrote The Food Matters Cookbook.

His  How to Cook Everything is widely considered the new bible of American cooking It demonstrates his unique combination of common sense and non-fussy, unprecious authority. In 2007, Mr. Bittman published How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, now the best-selling book on contemporary vegetarian cooking.

He speaks about food and its role in American culture and health. Bittman translates the critical issues of our day into an argument for better, saner, enjoyable eating.

Chaos reigns. Confusion abounds. Information overload how can I cope? It isn’t the theme of a new Woody Allen movie. It is the real life world in which we all have to make choices about what we buy, how we dress and what information we really need to know. It is also the specialty of our next Forum speaker and author of The Art of Choosing.

 Through entertaining and illuminating stories and examples, Dr. Sheena Iyengar shows how complex our decision-making processes truly are. Are more choices enabling or crippling? Does careful planning always help us make better decisions? How do our environments affect our preferences? Her examination of consumers’ choices exposes the psychological realities that drive the marketing world.

Sheena Iyengar, Ph.D. is the inaugural S.T. Lee Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, with a joint appointment in the Department of Psychology at Columbia University. She is also Director of the Global Leadership Matrix (GLeaM) initiative and Research Director at the Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business at Columbia Business School.

Dr. Iyengar earned a doctorate in Social Psychology at Stanford University. She has a BA in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and a dual BS degree in economics from the Wharton School of Business. She won the Presidential Early Career Award for Social Scientists. She was a Whitebox Advisors Visiting Scholar at the Yale School of Management International Center for Finance.

Her book The Art of Choosing won the Gold Medal in General Business/Economics from Axiom Business Book Awards. It was a Top Ten Business and Investing Books of 2010 at Amazon.com. It was on the Best Business Book of The Year Shortlist 2010 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs. She is a Fellow of The Society for Personality and Social Psychology, a Fellow of the TIAA-CREF Institute and an Academic Member of the Behavioral Finance Forum.

Our attention is focused on the election November 6,^th  whether there will be a change in government and, if so, what changes that would mean. Two days later the Chinese Communist Party Congress will meet for its once in a decade change of leadership. Factional infighting is marking this political transition. What changes are made in Beijing are also very important for us.

 James F. Hoge, Chairman of Human Rights Watch and former editor of Foreign Affairs magazine says the U.S.-China relationship is vital to the prosperity and security of both countries, the Asian region and the globe

 The Chinese economy is the second biggest in the world and could surpass the United States in the next 10 to 15 years. China passed the U.S. as the world’s biggest car market three years ago and in three more years Chinese Consumers may buy more cars than those in the U.S., Germany and Japan combined. China holds more than 20 per cent of all foreign-owned U.S. Treasury securities.

 “Both countries cooperate on a number of economic issues and some security ones. But the relationship is increasingly marked by tension, disagreement and competiveness,” Hoge says. “There is rising concern over China’s slowing economy, its growing nationalism and its neighbors’ alarm over Chinese claims to adjacent seas,” he says.

 China recently put its first aircraft carrier into service. Although officials say it will be used for training purposes delivery of the ship comes at a time China and Japan are in a dispute over some islands in the East China Sea. There are also overlapping territorial claims between China and several Southeast Asian nations.

 “The United States is publicly expanding its ties to other Asian countries and shifting military resources to the region,” Hoge reports. “Fresh tensions are being generated by the political transitions underway in both countries this fall,” he says. China is the target of trade threats. The United States has launched a wide-ranging trade complaint against China’s support for the export of car parts. China then filed a complaint at the World Trade Organization challenging the new U.S. law on tariffs designed to combat such export subsidies.

 Peacefully accommodating fresh aspirants to international leadership has often proved elusive. Hoge says, “The challenge is to strengthen the mutual benefits that can flow from this key relationship and avoid the triggers that might precipitate hostile confrontations.”

 Prior to joining Foreign Affairs” in 1992 James F. Hoge spent three decades in newspaper journalism as a Washington correspondent, then as editor and publisher of the Chicago Sun Times and finally as publisher and president of The New York Daily News. He has been a Fellow at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, the Freedom Forum Media Center at Columbia University and on the American Political Science Association’s Congressional program. He is chairman of the International Center for Journalists and a director of the Center for Global Affairs at New York University.

Dear Friend of the Salisbury Forum:

I am writing to make sure you know that we have our second Forum of this year on Friday, October 15th, at 7:30 PM. The Forum topic is “THE U.S. and CHINA – A QUESTION OF OUR COMMON INTERESTS” and our great privilege is to present ORVILLE SCHELL as the speaker. His talk will be in the Katherine M. Elfers Hall of the Easter Eastman Music Center at the Hotchkiss School. A reception for the audience will follow sponsored by the Center for Global Understanding and Independent Thinking.

About the Speaker:

Orville Schell is a renowned China expert/journalist with a unique understanding of China and exceptional access to China’s next generation of leaders. The author of fourteen books, nine of them about China, and the contributor to numerous edited volumes, his most recent books are Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri la from the Himalayas to Hollywood, The China Reader: The Reform Years, and Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China’s Leaders.

In 2007, Orville Schell became director of the new Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society. Prior to that, Schell served as Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

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

We hope you will join us at this Salisbury Forum.

Walter DeMelle
President

Friday, April 20, 2012 7:30PM, Elfers Hall, Eastman Music Center, The Hotchkiss School. 

Paul M. Kennedy, J. Richardson Dilworth professor of British history at Yale University. Author of 19 books including The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, The Parliament of Man, and soon to be released The Engineers of Victory.

Who really won World War II? Was it Roosevelt or Churchill or Marshall or Eisenhower? It was none of the above according to British historian Paul Kennedy. They may have drafted the grand alliances or formulated the master strategies, but it was thousands of men and women assigned specific tasks who had to solve the problems of an incredibly complex worldwide endeavor and make feasible the efforts of millions of Allied soldiers, sailors and airmen. They weren’t the inventors of new weapons or systems. They were tinkerers. Like Steve Jobs in the modern era they had the imagination, vision and flexibility to learn from their mistakes and increase the value of existing technology to unheard of levels.

 Because of their build up of military power in the 1930s the Axis powers gained stunning successes in the early years of the war. The Allies may have had greater resources, but when they convened the Casablanca conference in January 1943 the Allies faced enormous challenges. However, in the next 17 months the tides were turned in the greatest conflict known to human history. What Kennedy examines is how those successes were engineered and by whom. “In this sense,” he says “engineers” are not strictly meant here as people possessing a B.Sc. or Ph.D. in Engineering (although the founder of the Seabees, Admiral Ben Moreell, and the inventor of the mine-detector, Josef Kosacki, certainly did), but as those falling into the Webster Dictionary’s wider definition: “a person who carries through an enterprise through skillful or artful contrivance”.

 Most of us have read about or seen movies about the breaking of the Enigma Code or the inspiration for the bouncing dam buster bombs or the creation of unusual tanks that could push through coastal minefields, barbed wire or hedgerows. But Kennedy says we have rarely stepped back and understood how their work surfaced, was cultivated or how these various eccentric pieces of the jigsaw-puzzle fitted into the whole. Think about the enormity of the tasks they faced. How to move millions of soldiers across oceans, how to plan five simultaneous landings on D-Day or create a powerful radar system that could be inserted in the nose of a long-range patrol aircraft and turn the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic.

This is the story Kennedy tells of how small groups of individuals and institutions, both civilian and military, succeeded in achieving victory in the critical middle years of the war. It is about what the military-operational problems were and who the problem solvers were, how they got things done and why their work constitutes an important field of study.

Sunday, February 26, 2012, Film Screening @ 11:30AM The Moviehouse, Millerton, NY

‘Human Terrain’ is an expose of the U.S. effort to enlist America’s best and the brightest in a global struggle for the hearts and minds of its enemies. After winning the short battle of ’shock and awe’ in Iraq, but losing the long war to bring democracy and peace to the Middle East, the U.S. military began a controversial program to ‘operationalize’ culture as an instrument of irregular warfare. With the ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ that produced hi-tech, low-casualty victories in Panama, Bosnia, and Kosovo tarnished by long and costly counter-insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army and Marine Corps enlist anthropologists, political scientists, historians, and other academics in ‘Human Terrain Systems’ for the global war on terror.

Filmmakers James Der Derian, David Udris and Michael Udris track this major shift in U.S. military policy as it ripples through American universities and civil society. Simultaneously a road-trip into the heart of the war machine and a critical investigation of academic collaboration with the military, ‘Human Terrain’ traces a new ‘revolution in military affairs’ after U.S. policies based on virtual technologies and virtuous ideologies fail to create peace, and foot soldiers are left to clean up the mess.

Anthony Kronman, Ph.D., Sterling Professor of Law, Yale University, presented a stimulating lecture December, 2, 2011, on disenchantment as defined by Max Weber, the German philospher where scientific understanding is more highly prized than belief. Dr. Kronman pointed out that during the first two hundred years of university education in America students were taught knowledge that had been accumulated in a classical context. The base of that education was religion. In the last hundred years, he said, universities have departed from the ideal of learning the great philosophies of the ages. Instead the emphasis is on finding new knowledge. For example, he pointed to the demand on doctrinal candidates to produce a body of new knowledge based on their research rather than demonstrating their grasp of all that has come before. The problem for students and for society is that striving for secular success leaves the individual with no grounding in the everlasting and no ties with the continuity of a divinity.

7:30PM, Seifert Theater, Salisbury School, Salisbury, CT

Anthony T. Kronman, J.D., Ph.D., Author, Sterling Professor of Law (Yale Law School) Visiting Global Professor (NYU) Teacher in the Directed Studies Program (Yale)

Why are we here? Anthony Kronman says our colleges and universities are ignoring life’s biggest questions and we all pay the price. Students today find an academic environment richer than any have known before. They will find courses devoted to every question under the sun. But the questions that are missing deal with the meaning of life, what one should care about and why and what living is for.

Dr. Kronman says that in a shift of historic importance. America’s colleges and universities have largely abandoned the idea that life’s most important question is an appropriate subject for the classroom. In doing so, he says, “They have betrayed their students by depriving them of the chance to explore it in an organized way before they are caught up in their careers and preoccupied with the urgent business of living itself.”

Our top universities have embraced a research driven ideal, he says. In the process they have badly weakened the humanities, the disciplines with the oldest and deepest connections to this question, leaving them directionless and vulnerable to being hijacked for political ends. “In the sciences the adoption of the research ideal has produced astounding results” he says. “Our knowledge of the natural and social worlds,and ability to control them, is a direct result of the modern system of academic research.”  He describes political correctness as a stifling culture of moral and political uniformity based on progressive ideals. But he says, “Political correctness is only a symptom, a discouraging response to a larger sense of directionlessness in the humanities.”

“America’s entire leadership class now goes to college. Infusing higher education with a new and vibrant humanism will produce benefits not only for the future leaders of business and government but for society at large,” he says. It will give us, he says, ”A richer and more open debate about ultimate values; an electorate less likely to be cowed into thinking that only the faithful have the right to invoke them; a humbler regard for the mystery of life in a world increasingly dominated by technocratic reason.”

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