Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center

Richard Donovan, vice president of forestry for Rainforest Alliance, will give a talk, “Rainforest Alliance, Conservation and Sustainable Forestry in Latin America,” on Monday, April 1, at noon, in the Kennedy Science Auditorium, Taylor Science Center. The lecture is free and open to the public.

This past weekend, Hamilton College held a series of events to kick off its spring social entrepreneurship programming.  The Levitt Center – in conjunction with the Career Center and the COOP – sponsored various talks and information sessions to get students thinking about social innovation.

Breena Holland, associate professor of political science and the environmental initiative at Lehigh University, takes a different approach to academic research than many of her colleagues. Holland is less interested in massive data driven studies and more concerned with the real world impact of her work. That’s why much of her time has been spent conducting research intended to directly benefit underprivileged members of Lehigh’s local community of Bethlehem, Pa.  Holland was a guest speaker in the Levitt Center Sustainability series on Feb. 7.

Author and University of Pennsylvania professor Annette Lareau came to Hamilton on Nov. 14 to lecture on her study of social stratification in America.  Lareau is the Stanley I. Shear Professor of Sociology in the School of Arts and Sciences at Penn.  She is best known for her book Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life.  Her lecture was part of the Levitt Center’s Inequality and Equity series.

Author and University of Pennsylvania professor Annette Lareau will give a lecture titled “Unequal Childhoods” on Wednesday, Nov. 14, at 7:30 p.m., in the Fillius Events Barn.  Lareau is the Stanley I. Sheer Professor of Sociology in the School of Arts and Sciences at Penn.  The lecture, part of the Levitt Center’s Inequality and Equity series, is free and open to the public.

When Prudence Bushnell, a former U.S. ambassador and CEO of Sage Associates was growing up, there were no female leaders for her to look up to. Those women who did assume a leadership position were often ridiculed or not taken seriously. Despite this lack of role models, Bushnell became a leader for hundreds of Foreign Service workers, and she has served as the dean of the Leadership and Management School at the Foreign Service Institute.

Prudence Bushnell, a former U.S. ambassador and CEO of Sage Associates, will present a lecture titled “What does leadership look like and how do you learn it?” on Monday, Oct. 22, at 4:15 p.m., in the Red Pit, KJ.  Sage Associates is a management and leadership consulting firm which emphasizes the importance of personal leadership. Her lecture, which is sponsored by the Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center, is free and open to the public.

Few family names around Hamilton’s campus are as instantly recognizable as Arthur Levitt’s. The Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center honoring the late Arthur Levitt Sr. supports student-led research and hosts its own speaker series, among many other programs. The 15 members of Hamilton’s New York Program had the opportunity on Sept. 19 to meet with his son, Arthur Levitt Jr., a generous Hamilton benefactor and former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

At a time when many consider climate change to be one of the most pressing challenges facing the world’s population, it remains unclear which course of action will do the most good for the planet and its inhabitants. Michael Greenstone, the 3M Professor of Environmental Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and director of the Hamilton Project, discussed this issue during a lecture from The Sustainability Program of the Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center.

Psychology major Beril Esen ’13 spent the early months of this summer conducting a study on the recently discovered concept of defensive self-esteem. But when her psychology research ended in late June, her academic plans for the summer were hardly complete. Esen was also awarded a Summer Research Fellowship by the Levitt Center for Public Affairs to study the issue of domestic violence in her native city of Istanbul, Turkey.

A Levitt Public Service internship this summer has solidified Jose Vazquez’s ’15 desire to pursue a career in education policy and reform. Vazquez is in Washington D.C. as an intern for The Heart of America Foundation, a non-profit organization that builds libraries for under-resourced schools across the nation.  The organization partners with Target and embarks on their 15th year anniversary building 150+ libraries nationwide.

Whenever a financial institution nears bankruptcy and requests federal bailout funds, it often claims to be “too big to fail.” Unlike the Titanic’s designers who believed that she was too big to physically sink, financial executives hold no illusions about their firms’ lack of invincibility.

Catherine Gold ’14 took advantage of the Career Center’s HamiltonExplore career shadowing program in January by spending a day with Meg Harrison ’91, patient services manager at the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society in New York City. Now, six months later Gold is a Levitt Public Service Intern there, thanks in large part to the connection she made through HamiltonExplore.