As this academic year draws to a close, I would like to draw your attention to just a few of the events organized by the Councils at the MacMillan Center that examined some of the more pressing issues in our world today. Some of the highlights: the Council on Middle East Studies and the Arab Students Association at Yale held a Middle East Teach-In Series; Iran expert Hillary Leverett, a senior fellow at the Jackson Institute and CEO of Strategic Energy and Global Analysis, gave a lecture entitled, “Iran, the Middle East and the Changing Balance of Power;” and in the wake of the devastating March 11 earthquake and tsunami and the ensuing nuclear crisis in Japan, the Council on East Asian Studies worked closely with the Yale Japanese community, student groups, and other units on campus, to organize several events that looked at the impact of those ongoing crises.
In the pages of this newsletter, you also will find just a small sample of the many lectures, conferences, and other events and activities that take place outside of the classrooms here. The MacMillan Center hosted visits from several scholarly luminaries. The Council on East Asian Studies welcomed world-renowned sinologist Rudolf G. Wagner to campus to deliver the 51st Annual Edward H. Hume Memorial Lecture. John Dunn, Emeritus Professor of Political Theory at King’s College, Cambridge, delivered this year’s Henry L. Stimson Lecture on World Affairs, a series of four talks entitled, “Beyond the Democratic Maze,” during two weeks in April. World Bank President Robert Zoellick made his first-ever visit to Yale on February 9 to have a public conversation about the world economic crisis, globalization and related topics with Ernesto Zedillo, Director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization.
While this is the time of the year that many of the academic programs are drawing to a close, the MacMillan Center’s PIER outreach group is gearing up for its summer institutes that will take place July 5-10. They have been providing continuing education and professional development for K-12 educators for more than twenty years. The PIER institutes include lectures and seminars by leading scholars and experts from Yale and other institutions: films, workshops, field trips and site visits, hands-on cultural activities, teaching resource and strategy sessions, and sessions on technological resources for teaching about these world areas. This summer’s institutes are The Changing Face of a Continent: Democracy and Developments in Contemporary Africa; Diverse Landscapes: Exploring the Environment of Silk Road Regions in China; Immigration in Europe: Historical Trends and New Challenges; Colonial Latin America; and Religion and Politics in the Middle East. For details, please visit www.yale.edu/macmillan/pier.
My best wishes to you for an enjoyable summer.
— Ian Shapiro, Henry R. Luce Director