News

Student sightings of Secret Service agents in academic buildings raised excitement across campus and heralded the arrival of this year’s inaugural Common Ground event, as Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack ’72 was one of the featured speakers.

Hamilton alumnus and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack ’72 and Rep. G.T. Thompson, chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture, will kick off Hamilton’s 2023-24 Common Ground series with a discussion about bipartisanship, agriculture, and climate. The event will take place on Tuesday, Sept. 5, at 7 p.m. in Wellin Hall. Edvige Jean-François ’90, a media consultant and award-winning journalist, will moderate.

This collaboration will connect Hamilton’s Common Ground program and Bipartisan Policy Center’s (BPC) University Partnership Program to encourage civil discourse and bring bipartisanship outside the beltway through robust intellectual exchange. Hamilton is the first liberal arts college to partner with BPC.

As algorithms and online platforms come to define our daily lives, how do we navigate the social responsibilities of platforms and our own online freedoms?  These were questions addressed at the Common Ground panel on March 27. Guest speakers were Shoshana Weissmann, the digital director of the think tank R Street, and David Brody, the managing attorney of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law’s Digital Justice Initiative. Professor of Government Robert Martin moderated the conversation.

“What Does Freedom Mean in Online Speech?,” Hamilton’s next Common Ground presentation, will take place on Monday, March 27, at 7 p.m. in the Fillius Events Barn. The program, which is free and open to the public, features two experts who will examine the issue of online speech from different perspectives.

The Common Ground series returned to Hamilton on February 22 with panelists discussing the question, "Who should set the rules regarding privacy and data? "

Former foreign minister of Russia Andrei Kozyrev and University of Rhode Island scholar Nicolai Petro discussed the war in Ukraine with Professor of Government Alan Cafruny on Nov. 15.

Author, foreign policy expert, and Washington Post columnist Max Boot joined Professors Ty Seidule and Maurice Isserman to discuss the ongoing war in Ukraine on Oct. 25.

Christina Romer, a professor of economics at University of California, Berkeley, and former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under the Obama administration, engaged in a dialogue with Greg Mankiw, a Harvard University professor of economics and former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush.

The Hamilton College Common Ground program on income inequality, scheduled for Thursday, March 12, has been canceled. The speakers scheduled to participate in the program have postponed their travel to campus. Hamilton College is working with them to reschedule the program in the fall.