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Jamie J. Fader, author and assistant professor at the School of Criminal Justice at the University at Albany, spoke to members of the Hamilton community about her book, Falling Back: Incarceration and Transitions to Adulthood among Urban Youth (Rutgers University Press, 2013), as part of the Levitt Center's speaker series on Oct. 8.

As Fallcoming Weekend approaches, Hamilton alumni have begun to trickle back to campus. Among the first to return were Dr. Michael Kelberman ’80, Karen McDonnell ’91, Alysia Mihalakos ’01, Allison Demas ’07 and James Liebow ’13. On Sept. 26, these five alumni addressed public health in America during a panel discussion led by Professor of Biology Herm Lehman.

Members of the Hamilton College community gathered on Sept. 16 to hear a talk by Ambassador Prudence Bushnell, a woman known internationally for her distinguished career as a U.S. diplomat and leadership expert. Bushnell’s lecture was titled “Transformational Leadership In Foreign Affairs, Where Is It?” and was sponsored by the Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center.

Lehigh University political science and environmental initiative professor Breena Holland will present a lecture titled “Public Health and Environmental Justice in an Era of De-Industrialization: A Role for Community-Engaged Academic Research” on Thursday, Feb. 7, at 7:30 p.m., in the Taylor Science Center’s Kennedy Auditorium (G027). Her lecture is part of the Levitt Center’s Sustainability Series and is free and open to the public.

To conclude its program series on Security, the Levitt Center brought John Dehn to campus to present a lecture titled “War and the Constitution: Military Commissions, Targeted Killing of Citizens, and Other Hard Cases.” Dehn – a senior fellow at the West Point Center for the Rule of Law at the United States Military Academy – discussed the philosophical, constitutional and legal underpinnings of the doctrine and law of war and the implications they have on the international system, as well as on due process rights of American citizens and foreigners involved in war.

Author Michael Egan preceded his April 18 lecture, “The History of Now: Decoding Environmental Sustainability,” by taking a refreshing bike ride with Professor of English Onno Oerlemanns.  Later in his talk Egan mentioned that all five of his family members bike to work or school nearly every day.

“Today, more than 50 percent of humanity lives in cities,” said Edward Glaeser, professor of economics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University.  And while Mohandas Gandhi once intimated that the strength of a country “lives in its villages,” Glaeser explained that he respectfully disagreed, and that “there is no future in rural poverty.”  Rather, it is the city, an urban development defined largely by “high proximity, closeness and density of people,” which enables the “creation of the chains of collaborative brilliance that drive success.”

In his Levitt Speaker Series lecture on April 5, Peter Demerath, a University of Minnesota professor of organizational leadership, policy and development, discussed educational inequality and the reproduction of class status. Demerath drew on four years of personal research experience at a public high school in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio.

Since gaining nationhood in the 18th century, the United States has been directly involved in dozens of armed military conflicts. The standard that the government has used and still uses to justify military engagements is the just war theory, which posits that a nation can, morally, only become involved in a military conflict that adheres to a set of ethical criteria. Andrew Fiala, professor of philosophy and director of the Ethics Center at California State University, Fresno, discussed the theory on March 1.

“With the backdrop of the Occupy Wall Street Protests, it’s not as hard to draw people into a discussion of inequality,” said Jacob Hacker in his lecture on Nov. 14.  Hacker, the Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science at Yale University and director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, gave a lecture for the Levitt Center’s Inequality and Equity Series.