The Trustees Dinner Series provides an opportunity for undergraduate students to have intimate and wide-ranging discussions with Princeton professors and other experts in a variety of academic and professional fields. Students and faculty meet over dinner in the Whig Hall James Madison Room throughout the academic year.
If you have any suggestions for speakers that you’d like to see, please go here to suggest them.
Events are by invitation only. Registration will be posted one week before the dinner.
Spring 2011 Events:
Trustees Dinner: Christine Bader – “Manifesto for the Corporate Idealist” (February 7, 2012)
Co-Hosted with VPL
Christine Bader is a Nonresident Senior Fellow with The Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University and a part-time Human Rights Advisor to BSR (Business for Social Responsibility). Until June she was Advisor to the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for business and human rights. From 1999-2008, Christine worked for BP in Indonesia, China, and the UK. With stints in investor relations and corporate planning, she spent most of her time with the company addressing the social impacts of its projects on communities in developing countries. She has also served as an AmeriCorps member with City Year and a special assistant to New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s Chief of Staff and Deputy Mayor. Christine is a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the advisory boards of The Business & Human Rights Resource Centre and The OpEd Project, an initiative to broaden the range of voices in public discourse. She has a BA magna cum laude in American Studies from Amherst College and an MBA from Yale. She lives in New York City.
Dr. Seyyed H. Nasr (February 10, 2012)
Co-Hosted with Muslim Life Program
It is my pleasure to announce that Whig-Clio and the Muslim Life Program are hosting Dr. Seyyed H. Nasr, a preeminent author, scholar, and philosopher of Islam, who will be discussing Islam and modern Muslim theology and ethics. The public conversation begins at 4 PM, Friday, February 10th in Whig Hall.
Walter Isaacson (February 15, 2012)
Co-Hosted with the Princeton Entrepreneurship Club
Whig-Clio will be hosting a public conversation with Walter Isaacson, CEO of the Aspen Institute and best-selling author of Steve Jobs. Before heading the Aspen Institute, he was chairman and CEO of CNN, and editor-in-chief of TIME Magazine. He is also the author of Einstein: His Life and Universe, and Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. Isaacson will be interviewed about writing, the media, technology and more by Professor Evan Thomas, a former editor of Newsweek; Professor Thomas will also moderate a Q+A with the audience.
After the talk, 16 Whig-Clio members will be given the chance to go dinner with Mr. Isaacson at Mediterra, courtesy of Whig-Clio. To apply for this opportunity, please fill out the following form. You must submit your name, email address and a one sentance explanation of why you’d like to attend the event.
Fall 2011 Events:
Jim Shinn is Lecturer at Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science. His research interests include radical innovation, risk management, corporate governance, and decision-making under uncertainty. After several years with Chase Manhattan Bank in New York and Tokyo, Jim served in the East Asia Bureau of the State Department from 1976~79 and then spent fifteen years as a manager and entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. After several years at Advanced Micro Devices, working in the microprocessor division and then running the Japan operations, he co-founded Dialogic, a voice processing software firm, which did an IPO in 1992. After Dialogic he worked with several technology firms as both outside director and investor, including Haystack Labs and Longitude.
Hugh Price – Wednesday, 11/9/2011 at 6 PM
Former president and chief executive officer of the National Urban League, Hugh Price is an expert on education, civil rights, equal opportunity and criminal justice. His 40-year career spans journalism, philanthropy, the law, and social advocacy. Price serves as the Wilson School’s John L.Weinberg/Goldman Sachs Visiting Professor of Public and International Affairs, for a five-year appointment. In the fall of 2008 he will teach two courses; an undergraduate policy task force focusing on childhood obesity, as well as a graduate seminar on philanthropy and non-profits, which will examine whether and how foundations can serve as change agents. While at the School Price will continue to serve as a non-resident senior fellow at Brookings.
Uwe Reinhardt – TBD
Recognized as one of the nation’s leading authorities on health care economics, Reinhardt has been a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences since 1978. He is a past president of the Association of Health Services Research. From 1986 to 1995 he served as a commissioner on the Physician Payment Review Committee, established in 1986 by Congress to advise it on issues related to the payment of physicians. He is a senior associate of the Judge Institute for Management of Cambridge University, UK, and a trustee of Duke University, and the Duke University Health System. Reinhardt is or was a member of numerous editorial boards, among them the Journal of Health Economics, the Milbank Memorial Quarterly, Health Affairs, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. Ph.D. Yale University.
Jeff Nunokawa – TBD
Jeff Nunokawa specializes in English literature from about 1830 till about 1900. His first book, The Afterlife of Property, studies how the novels of Dickens and Eliot labor to preserve the idea of secure possession by overseeing its transfer from the sphere of a cold and uncertain economy to a happier realm of romance. Tame Passions of Wilde: Styles of Manageable of Desire excavates the aspiration to imagine a form of desire as intense as those that compel us, but as light as the daydream or thought experiment safely under our control. He has also written a bunch of articles about this and that aspect of nineteenth century literature.
Michael Oppenheimer – TBD
Michael Oppenheimer is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and the Department of Geosciences at Princeton University. He is the Director of the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy (STEP) at the Woodrow Wilson School and Faculty Associate of the Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences Program, Princeton Environmental Institute, and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. Oppenheimer joined the Princeton faculty after more than two decades with The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), a non-governmental, environmental organization, where he served as chief scientist and manager of the Climate and Air Program. He continues to serve as a science advisor to EDF.
Nan Keohane – TBD
Nannerl O. Keohane is Laurance S. Rockefeller Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Woodrow Wilson School and the Center for Human Values. She served as President of Wellesley College and Duke University, and has taught at Swarthmore, Stanford, and the University of Pennsylvania. She has published the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton 1980) and Higher Ground: Ethics and Leadership in the Modern University (Duke 2006), as well as essays on feminism, the history of political thought and higher education. As a political theorist, her major teaching and research interests are in leadership and inequality, with a particular emphasis on gender issues and the role of institutions, law and public policy in creating (or obstructing) opportunities for women around the world.
Previous Events – Spring 2011:
Professor Alan Blinder - Wednesday, 2/23/2011 at 6 PM
Alan S. Blinder has been on the Princeton faculty since 1971, taking time off from January 1993 through January 1996 for service in the U.S. government—first as a member of President Clinton’s original Council of Economic Advisers, and then as Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. In addition to his academic writings [books, academic articles] and his best-selling introductory textbook, he has written many newspaper and magazine columns and op-eds and, in recent years, has been a regular columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He also appears frequently on television on PBS, CNBC, CNN, Bloomberg, and others. Dr. Blinder is a past president of the Eastern Economic Association, past vice president of the American Economic Association, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer – Wednesday, 3/2/2011 at 6 PM
Following a 29-year career in the U.S. Foreign Service, Daniel C. Kurtzer retired in 2005 with the rank of Career-Minister. From 2001-2005 he served as the United States Ambassador to Israel and from 1997-2001 as the United States Ambassador to Egypt. Kurtzer received several of the U.S. Government’s most prestigious awards, including the President’s Distinguished Service Award, the Department of State Distinguished Service Award, the National Intelligence Community’s Award for Achievement, and the Director General of the Foreign Service Award for Political Reporting. Since leaving government service, Kurtzer has served as an advisor to the Iraq Study Group, as a member of the Board of the American University in Cairo, as the first Commissioner of the professional Israel Baseball League, and as a member of the New Jersey-Israel Commission. He is the co-author ofNegotiating Arab-Israeli Peace: American Leadership in the Middle East. Ph.D. Columbia University.
Professor Paul DiMaggio – Thursday, 3/24/2011 at 6 PM
Paul DiMaggio is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Sociology and Research Director of the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at the Woodrow Wilson School. He has studied topics ranging from the way in which law and public policy influence the transformation of organizational fields to the relationship between contract and informal social ties in professional and service markets. Currently he is studying legislative debates over “net neutrality” and community wireless in order to understand how legal and political factors shape the development of technology.
Professor Paul Miles – Wednesday, 4/6/2011 at 6 PM
Paul Miles teaches American diplomatic history at Princeton University. A graduate of the United States Military Academy, he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, where he read modern history. As an army captain in Vietnam in 1965, Miles commanded a construction and combat support company, and was awarded the Wheeler Medal from the Society of Military Engineers for his work at Cam Ranh Bay. He returned to Vietnam in 1973 and was a member of the military delegation that represented the Saigon command at the Paris peace talks. He retired as a colonel in 1990, then completed doctoral studies that he had begun at Princeton. The author of FDR’s Admiral: William Leahy and the Making of Grand Strategy in World War II, published by the Naval Institute Press, he has taught in Princeton’s history department since 1998.
Professor Aaron Friedberg – Wednesday, 4/20/2011 at 6 PM
Aaron Friedberg’s areas of interest include international relations, international security in East Asia, foreign policy, and defense policy. Friedberg has been a fellow at the Smithsonian Institution’s Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Norwegian Nobel Institute, and Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs, and has served as a consultant to several agencies of the U.S. government. In 2001-2002 he was the first holder of the Henry Alfred Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Library of Congress. In 2003-2005 he served as a deputy assistant for National Security Affairs in the Office of the Vice President.
Anthony K. “Van” Jones – Monday, 4/25/2011 at 6 PM
Van Jones is a globally recognized, award-winning pioneer in human rights and the clean-energy economy. He is the best-selling author of the definitive book on green jobs, The Green-Collar Economy. He served as the green jobs advisor in the Obama White House in 2009. Van is currently a senior fellow at the Center For American Progress. Additionally, he is a senior policy advisor at Green For All. Van also holds a joint appointment at Princeton University, as a distinguished visiting fellow in both the Center for African American Studies and in the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. While best known for his promotion of green jobs, Van has been hard at work for nearly two decades, fashioning solutions to some of urban America’s toughest problems. In addition to Green For All, he is the co-founder of two social justice organizations: the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and Color of Change.
