The lecture is being sponsored by the Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Culture and Society, with the support of the Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center, the program in American studies and Hamilton's departments of English, economics, government, history, philosophy and rhetoric and communication.
Schrag is the author of nine books on American politics, education and other social issues. His most recent book, Paradise Lost: California's Experience, America's Future, was published by the New Press in 1998 and reissued as a paperback by the University of California Press in 1999. It was named as a New York Times "Notable Book" for 1998. He has also written articles for The Atlantic, Harper's, The Nation, The New Republic, Playboy and The American Prospect.
Schrag began his career as a reporter for the El Paso Herald-Post; was associate education editor and executive editor of the Saturday Review; editor of Change Magazine, a journal in higher education; and a contributing editor to a number of other publications. He currently serves as a contributing editor of The American Prospect and also continues to write a weekly column for the Bee.
Schrag has taught at Amherst College, the University of Massachusetts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and at the School of Journalism and the Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1997-98 he was also a visiting scholar at Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies.
A former Guggenheim Fellow, he was Professional Journalism Fellow at Stanford in 1973-74 and a Pulitzer Prize Juror in 1988-89. He now serves on the Advisory Council of the Public Policy Institute of California and is a member of the board of directors of EdSource, which conducts research and published data on schools in California. He is a 1953 graduate of Amherst.
