Einat Wilf, former member of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, spoke about the conditions for peace in Israel at the Center for Jewish Life on Nov.
University psychology professor Susan Fiske, Harvard European studies and sociology professor Michèle Lamont, and Cornell economics professor Ravi Kanbur met in a panel discussion on the afternoon of Nov.
Two days after the U.S. presidential election, Amb. Daniel C. Kurtzer, U.S. ambassador to Israel from 2001-05 and U.S.
The wonderful thing about being a Princeton student is that January 1isn’t the kickoff day for the start of our new year.
Andrew Rosenthal, editorial page editor of The New York Times, spoke on campus Tuesday evening about the current state of news and editorial journalism.
Citizens have a responsibility to be well-informed in order to keep the government in check, New York Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal said in a lecture on campus Tuesday evening.
Reddit founder Ohanian discusses techniques for successful entrepreneurship, power of Internet. While the earth is most certainly round, the Internet is flat and can be the world’s largest stage from which everyone has the opportunity to learn, Alexis Ohanian, the founder of online forum Reddit, told a crowd of Princeton students on Wednesday in a lecture about Reddit’s founding and the field of entrepreneurship. Having grown up with the World Wide Web, younger generations have had the advantage of understanding the Internet better than the “incumbents,” or older generation — a “huge advantage that we all need to capitalize on,” Ohanian said. Ohanian also offered his advice on entrepreneurship by noting that the difference between entrepreneurs is not whether or not one has great ideas.
The government’s mass call tracking program violates fundamental civil liberties and rights to privacy, Catherine Crump, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project argued in a lecture on Thursday. Crump began the lecture with a simple question: “How many of you have cell phones?” Virtually every hand in the room shot up. “It used to be practically impossible for the government to track you without expending tremendous resources,” Crump added.
The relationship between former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney was much more contentious than is commonly believed, Peter Baker, White House correspondent for The New York Times, told a nearly filled Dodds Auditorium in a Tuesday evening lecture.
Harnessing the volatile effects of globalization will demand collaborative changes to the bureaucratic system that currently governs international diplomacy, former head of the World Trade Organization Pascal Lamy argued in a lecture on Wednesday evening. Lamy outlined the various effects of globalization before describing possible avenues — Westphalian, neo-, post- and a-Westphalian — that could be taken to improve the international cooperation system, which he said is “weak” at addressing modern global issues. The lecture included ideas discussed in "Now for the Long Term,"a report released by the Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations, to which Lamy recently contributed. Although increased globalization improves market efficiency and therefore carries great potential for growth and welfare, the benefits of a more integrated global market are “intrinsically connected” to its deficits, including increased inequality, resource depletion and contagion, Lamy explained. “It works because it’s painful, and it’s painful because it works,” he said of globalization, a tradeoff that characterizes the need for global governance. “The international system at the moment is not up to addressing the challenge,” he added. Lamy began by describing the Westphalian approach to international order, which is exemplified by the United Nations, where countries act as sovereign individuals and attempt to construct a common set of international laws. Lamy described the approach as “slow, painful” and “subject to formative diversity,” as sovereign nations inevitably disagree on establishing universal laws due to differences in “ideological, spiritual and cultural approaches to problems.” Lamy then described the neo-Westphalian approach, which does not focus as much on binding nations together through the rules of law and is therefore sometimes more efficient.
Higher education has become dominated by a number of troubling trends over time, and students come to college with little sense of why they are there, Columbia University’s American Studies program director Andrew Delbanco argued in a conversation on Tuesday afternoon. In the course of the lecture, Delbanco and Wilson School professor Stanley Katz touched on a number of subjects about the state of education in the United States, from pre-kindergarten programs to higher education. Delbanco said that Americans increasingly see colleges as lavish institutions that fail to teach students effectively. “They’re wasteful, they’re inefficient, they’re not doing their job, and we have a problem,” he said of ordinary people's view of colleges. This attitude is reinforced by rising tuition fees, which are caused in turn by the increasing privatization of higher education, Delbanco explained. “Our public universities have been gutted,” he said, noting that public funds make up only 6 percent of the University of Virginia’s budget. Katz warned against public universities’ efforts to raise funds in the face of budget shortfalls, either through tuition increases or the admission of more out-of-state students. These strategies undercut the democratic purpose of public education in America, he said. Higher education has developed a “pernicious and perverse obsession with rankings,” Delbanco said.
Heritage Foundation fellowRyan T. Anderson ’04 argued for a traditional conception of marriage as a union between one man and one woman in an event sponsored by the Anscombe Society and the American Whig-Cliosophic Society on Thursday evening.
Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng called for the worldwide recognition of universal human rights and proposed measures to end to the Chinese government’s repression of its people in a lecture delivered at the University Wednesday night. Speaking through a translator, Chen emphasized the need to examine human rights from a global perspective in an increasingly interconnected society.
Before his lecture at the Wilson School on Thursday afternoon, former Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohamed Kamel Amr sat down with The Daily Princetonian to discuss the challenges facing the Egyptian government and the likelihood of a transition to a legitimate constitutional democracy in the wake of former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi’s removal from power in June. The Daily Princetonian:What is the biggest challenge facing the Egyptian government today? Mohamed Kamel Amr:I think the biggest challenge facing Egypt today, it is what they call a “road map” for, you see, moving forward.
While Palestine continues to engage Israel in negotiations for an independent state, the nation cannot make any more territorial concessions, Maen Rashid Areikat, chief representative of the delegation of the Palestinian Liberation Organization to the United States, said in a Monday evening lecture titled, “Twenty Years After Oslo: Lessons Learned and Future Options?” “When we call for the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, in the Gaza Strip, with Jerusalem as its capital, we are accepting a Palestinian state of 22 percent of what used to be historic Palestine," Areikat said before a packed Dodds Auditorium.
“If someone says they don’t like the cute animals on BuzzFeed, you should turn to them and ask if they are a robot,” Jon Steinberg ’99, the president and COO of BuzzFeed, said jokingly during a lecture he delivered on Tuesday night. But it was not just a joke.
