Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

A long-time resident of Santa Barbara, Congresswoman Lois Capps represents California’s 24th District, which includes San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties, and a portion of Ventura county. She has served in Congress since 1998. 

A nurse and educator by training, Capps’ extensive healthcare background informs her work in Congress where she is a respected and effective leader, especially on issues related to public health. She has successfully spearheaded and passed legislation specifically to address the national nursing shortage, detect and prevent domestic violence against women, curb underage drinking, improve mental health services, provide emergency defibrillators to local communities, improve research on pediatric rare diseases, support greater diversity in clinical trials for more effective treatments, bring CPR instruction to schools, identify and link newborns with hearing loss to services, strengthen Medicare coverage for patients suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease, expand TRICARE health coverage for military mothers, and improve rental car safety to protect consumers.

Capps has also been at the forefront of efforts to protect the environment and promote clean energy and green technology. She has led efforts to prevent new oil and gas drilling off our coast and on the public’s lands, strengthen oil pipeline safety and spill response, protect consumers from shouldering the financial burden of cleaning up water pollution in their water supplies, and conserve wildlife and rare species native to the Central Coast. She has also authored laws to establish a national system for ocean monitoring, expand conservation efforts for our public lands and strengthen labeling standards for organic foods.

Among other commitments, she serves on the powerful Committee on Energy and Commerce where she sits on the Health, Energy & Power, and Environment & the Economy subcommittees and also serves on the Natural Resources Committee where she sits on the Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources, Subcommittee on Federal Lands. Her work on this committee is focused on energy production, fisheries and wildlife, public lands, oceans, and Native Americans.

Capps graduated from Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington with a B.S. in Nursing with honors and worked as a nursing instructor in Portland, Oregon. She earned an M.A. in Religion from Yale University while working as Head Nurse at Yale New Haven Hospital and an M.A. in Education from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has received honorary doctorates from Pacific Lutheran University and Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary. 

Representative Capps’ Athenaeum presentation is sponsored by the Rose Institute of State and Local Government.

John Prendergast is the founding director of the Enough Project, an initiative to end genocide and crimes against humanity. He is also the co-founder of the Sentry, a new investigative initiative focused on dismantling the networks financing conflict and atrocities. Prendergast has worked for the Clinton administration, the State Department, two members of Congress, the National Intelligence Council, UNICEF, Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group, and the U.S. Institute of Peace. During his time in the US state department, Prendergast was an instrumental part of a team which mediated, and ended, the 1998-2000 war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the deadliest war in the world at the time. Since then, Prendergast has made it his mission to combat mass atrocities in Africa.

He is the author or co-author of ten books.  His latest book, Unlikely Brothers: Our Story of Adventure, Loss, and Redemption (2012), is a dual memoir co-authored with his first little brother in the Big Brother program—a program in which he has been involved for over 25 years. His previous two books were co-authored with Don Cheadle, Not On Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond (2007), a New York Times bestseller and NAACP non-fiction book of the year, and The Enough Moment: Fighting to End Africa's Worst Human Rights Crimes (2010). He is also beginning a book project on the Congo with Ryan Gosling and New Yorker writer Kelefa Sanneh.

The recipient of multiple honorary degrees and awards, Prendergast has taught at many American and foreign colleges and universities and is a board member and strategic advisor to Not On Our Watch, the organization founded by George Clooney, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, and Brad Pitt that advocates in support of global human rights. He appears in the Warner Brothers' motion picture "The Good Lie" (2014), starring Reese Witherspoon and is a primary subject of the book by Jane Bussman, A Journey to the Dark Heart of Nameless Unspeakable Evil (2014).

John Prendergast’s Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights.

Food for Thought: Podcast with John Prendergast

As the Mao era fades in popular memory, its history has fallen out of focus and has been infused with myth. Drawing on his recent book, China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed (Harvard 2015), Andrew Walder will take up two related questions. First, what were Mao's intentions and what were the actual outcomes of his radical initiatives? Second, why did these outcomes occur? Mao emerges from the historical record as a radical revolutionary whose initiatives frequently had consequences that he had not intended and that frustrated his designs.

Andrew Walder is the Denise O'Leary and Kent Thiry Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and Senior Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. A political sociologist, Walder specializes on the sources of conflict, stability, and change in contemporary China. He received his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Michigan in 1981. Before coming to Stanford, he taught at Columbia, Harvard, and also headed the Division of Social Sciences at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

His recent publications include China Under Mao (Harvard University Press, 2015); and Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement (Harvard University Press, 2009). He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Professor Walder’s Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by CMC’s Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies.

Brandi Hoffine '06 has worked in both the public and private sectors in Washington, D.C. for ten years and has expertise on political communications and strategic messaging. Since August 2014, Hoffine has served as assistant press secretary and spokesperson for the White House where she handles a range of domestic and international policy issues.

Prior to the White House, she was a domestic finance spokesperson for the United States Treasury. She also served as Senator Tim Kaine's communication's director on his successful 2012 campaign for the United States Senate in Virginia. She has also worked in communications and research at the Democratic National Committee, including serving as the deputy national press secretary for the Democratic Party, and in the private sector for Deloitte Consulting.

Originally from Sacramento, Hoffine is a 2006 graduate of Claremont McKenna College.

Michael Shear '90 is the White House correspondent for The New York Times’ Washington bureau where he has worked for the last six years. In this role, he also covered the 2012 presidential campaign. Prior to that, he was a reporter for the Washington Post, where he spent 18 years covering local communities, school districts, state politics, the 2008 presidential campaign, and the first two years of the Obama White House.

A member of the Pulitzer Prize winning team that documented the shootings at the Virginia Tech campus in 2007, Shear is a 1990 graduate of Claremont McKenna College and has a masters in public policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

View Video: YouTube with Michael Shear '90 and Brandi Hoffine '06

Food for Thought: Podcast with Brandi Hoffine '06

Food for Thought: Podcast with Michael Shear '90

Panelists include: Andrew Busch, Crown Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow at CMC; Zachary Courser '99, visiting assistant professor of government and research director for the Dreier Roundtable; Charles Kesler, the Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at CMC, senior fellow of the Claremont Institute, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, and host of The American Mind video series; and ​William Voegeli, senior editor of the Claremont Review of Books and a visiting scholar at CMC's Salvatori Center. 

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore

View Video: YouTube with Trump Phenomenon Panel

Join the Claremont Journal of Law and Public Policy for a presidential debate held between students. The student debaters will argue questions of policy, platforms, and the role of the executive in the 2016 Presidential Election. Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, Donald Trump, and Hillary Clinton will be backed by the student debaters, with the goal of answering the key question 'Why vote for each candidate?'"

View Video: YouTube with Presidential Dialogues

Jane Chang Mi utilizes art to augment her science and engineering background and to work through multi-layered and complex subjects. Mi believes that this approach reduces the constraints of linguistic signifiers, enabling communication across cultures and barriers and permits contact with a greater community. 

An avid and advanced deep sea diver whose experiences in the ocean inform her art, commitments, and vision, Mi's work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, most recently at Beaconsfield Contemporary Art in London and the Honolulu Museum of Art. She has been a visiting artist at the National Gallery in Amman, Jordan sponsored by Art Dubai, a scientist on the Arctic Circle Program departing Spitsbergen, and a fellow at the East West Center at the University of Hawaii.

She is currently a visiting assistant professor at Pepperdine University where she teaches digital arts. 

More information about Mi is available at http://www.janecmi.com 

Rukmini Callimachi joined The New York Times in 2014. Her series of articles, “Underwriting Jihad,” showing how ransoms paid by European governments had become one of the main sources of financing for Al Qaeda, won the George Polk Award in International Reporting. She is also a three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, the winner of the Michael Kelly award, and the first journalist in the 75-year history of the Overseas Press Club to win both the Hal Boyle and the Bob Considine awards the same year.

Earlier this spring, she wrote an extensive feature piece on ISIS’s use of birth control to maintain a steady supply of sex slaves. Last summer, she wrote of the lonely young American woman from rural Washington state lured by ISIS. Her insights come not only from dangerous work in the field, but also from meticulous trolling online.

A graduate of Dartmouth College, Callimachi spent ten years at the Associated Press before joining the Times. From 2006 to 2014, she was based in Dakar, Senegal, covering 20 countries as the AP correspondent and West Africa bureau chief.

Ms. Callimachi’s Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights and the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies.

View Video: You Tube with Rukmini Callimachi

Loren J. Samons is professor of classical studies at Boston University, where he has taught ancient history, Greek, Latin, and humanities for almost 25 years. Samons' focus rests in the history of Greece in the fifth and sixth centuries B.C., with particular interests in Athenian politics and imperialism. His current research is concerned in particular with the figures of Pericles and Kimon, Athenian foreign policy, and the composition of Herodotus’ and Thucydides’ histories. He also has interests in the later Roman empire, ancient warfare, and the classical tradition. 

Much of his work, especially the book What's Wrong with Democracy? (2004), focuses on the intersection of democracy and imperialism and on the relationship between ancient and modern government. His most recent book, Pericles and the Conquest of History (2016), continues to trace these themes and to offer potential lessons for contemporary society.

View Video: YouTube with Loren Samons

Ilan Wurman ‘09 graduated from CMC in 2009 with a major in government and physics. In 2013, he graduated from Stanford Law School and is now an attorney at Winston & Strawn LLP in Washington D.C. He was formerly the deputy general counsel of Rand Paul's presidential campaign and associate counsel on Tom Cotton's campaign for U.S. Senate in Arkansas. He has written extensively on constitutional interpretation and administrative law, and his writings have appeared in City Journal, National Affairs, The Weekly Standard, Commentary, and several academic law reviews. 

Wurman’s Athenaeum talk, A Debt Against the Living, is based on a forthcoming book on originalism and the Constitution where he addresses views expressed by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. 

In an oft-quoted letter to Madison, Jefferson asserts that the earth belongs to the living and that we cannot be bound by the "dead hand of the past," that the Constitution must be a "living, breathing" document that is continually updated in modern times. Less familiar, however, is Madison's response to Jefferson. If the earth be the gift of nature to the living, wrote Madison, then it belongs to them in its natural state only; the improvements made by the dead form a debt against the living, who take the benefit of them. This debt cannot be otherwise discharged, he wrote, than by a proportionate obedience to the will of the authors of the improvement—originalism.  

Who is right—Thomas Jefferson or James Madison? 

Wurman’s talk will address this difficult question and offer an answer in favor of Madison, originalism, and the Constitution. 

Ilan Wurman’s Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the Salvatori Center. 

View Video: YouTube with Ilan Wurman '09

Jeffrey Flory joined the Robert Day School in 2013 from the University of Chicago. He uses field experiments to examine questions in development economics, competition incentives, and gender. Flory has received grants from the National Science Foundation, the World Bank, the Department for International Development, and the Lowe Institute of Political Economy. His research has been published in journals such as Review of Economic Studies. 

Joseph W. Dauben is Distinguished Professor of History and History of Science at the City University of New York. He is the author of biographies of Georg Cantor and Abraham Robinson, and most recently, a three-volume Chinese-English dual-language edition of the ancient Chinese classic, The Nine Chapters on the Art of Mathematics (2013), written in collaboration with Guo Shuchun and Xu Yibao. He is a 1966 graduate of CMC where he majored in mathematics. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University.  His areas of interest and research include history of science, history of mathematics; the scientific revolution; sociology of science; intellectual history, 17-18th centuries; history of Chinese science; and history of botany.

Dauben started out as a historian of mathematics with a focus on the modern period in Europe and America. His most famous publication from this part of his career is Georg Cantor: His Mathematics and Philosophy of the Infinite, a highly regarded biography that covers both Cantor's contributions to mathematics, notably set theory and the theory of the infinite, his life, and his theological and philosophical ideas. Dauben then developed an expertise in Chinese mathematics, even learning to speak Chinese, mentoring Chinese students, and publishing on classical and modern mathematics in China. 

A recipient of many international prestigious awards including delivering an invited lecture at the 1998 International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin on Karl Marx's mathematical work, Dauben became an honorary member of the Institute for History of Natural Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2002. In January of 2012 he received the American Mathematical Society’s Albert Leon Whiteman Memorial Prize for History of Mathematics.

View Video: YouTube with Joseph Dauben '66

Award-winning composer Koji Nakano’s music reflects the relationship between beauty, form and imperfection through the formality of music. In 2008, he became the first composer to receive the S&R Washington Award Grand Prize. Nakano has been recognized as one of the major voices among Asian composers of his generation.  

Nakano currently divides his time between USA and Asia as a composer, scholar and an educator. As the co-founder of the Asian Young Musicians’ Connection, he promotes new music by commissioning emerging composers to create music for worldwide professional musicians for its regular concerts, lectures and workshops.  

This fall, Nakano is the Scripps Erma Taylor O’Brien Distinguished Visiting Professor at Scripps College.

California has the nation's most extensive system of direct democracy, as citizens regularly exercise the power to determine important policy issues by direct popular vote. In this election, Californians will vote on an astounding 17 propositions. The topics cover a broad range of subjects, including among other things, the death penalty, legalizing marijuana, criminal sentencing, firearms and ammunition sales, bond funding, cigarette tax, income tax, and open government measures. Two of the state's leading political commentators, Bob Stern and Tony Quinn, will provide expert analysis of these consequential choices. Professor Ken Miller will moderate the discussion and also present the Rose Institute’s Video Voter series of informational videos produced by Rose Institute students.

Bob Stern is the co-founder and former president of the Center for Governmental Studies, a California think tank focused on political reform. Stern has been called “the godfather of modern political reform in California.” He began drafting and analyzing political reform laws as a staff attorney for the California Legislature’s Assembly Elections Committee; he then served as the Elections Counsel to the California Secretary of State’s office. He has drafted numerous state initiatives, and was a principal drafter of the City of Los Angeles’ Ethics and Public Campaign Financing laws in 1990. He is a graduate of Pomona College and Stanford Law.

Tony Quinn is co-editor of the California Target Book, a non-partisan almanac of California politics. Quinn is an authority on California political trends and demographics. He served three years as an assistant to the California Attorney General, is a former director of the Office of Economic Research in the Department of Commerce, and for five years served as a member of the California Fair Political Practices Commission. Dr. Quinn has written extensively on California politics and elections. He holds degrees from Georgetown University, University of Texas, and Claremont Graduate University.

Ken Miller is a member of the government department at CMC and is the associate director of the Rose Institute. His research focuses on state government institutions, with emphasis on direct democracy (initiative, referendum, and recall) and the interaction between law and politics. 

This Athenaeum panel discussion is co-sponsored by the Rose Institute for State and Local Government.

View Video: YouTube with Bob Stern and Tony Quinn

Linda Cruse is an international aid worker, disaster management specialist, author, inspirational speaker, creator of the Emergency Zen thought leadership series, social entrepreneur, and founder of Be the Change: Business Leaders on The Frontline and the 21-Day Global Impact Challenge. In 2014 she was appointed a senior fellow in the College of Business and Law at the University of Canterbury New Zealand. 

Cruse’s 17 years of frontline humanitarian aid work has taken her to every continent in the world where she has assisted in some of the world’s most catastrophic natural and humanitarian disasters including the Asian tsunami, the Pakistani earthquake, two Philippine super-typhoons, the Nepal earthquake, the Ecuador earthquake, refugee camps in Uganda, and more.

Cruse’s area of expertise lies in bridging the gap between the private and public sectors and creating health, education, and business synergies to cultivate innovative opportunities for sustainable employment and income generation. Her trademark is her ability to engage the entrepreneurial skills and business acumen of the private sector to solve seemingly intractable problems on the frontline.

Ms. Cruse’s talk is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights.