Sheila Bair Lecture

Sheila Bair, 19th Chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), will be speaking November 20th as part of Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School “Leaders and Legends” speaker series, scheduled for the 3rd Thursday of every month beginning in October 2008.

Johns Hopkins University recently consolidated various educational programs in the business domain and created the Carey Business School (named after the Trustee who created the endowment to do this).  Critical to the School’s success will be its ability to understand the realities of the “marketplace” and to integrate its activities with the real world. To that effect, the new Dean, Yash Gupta, has started a “Leaders and Legends” speaker series that will showcase prominent leaders and allow them to share their experience and thoughts on current, relevant topics and issues facing the global economy.

With the financial crisis, Bair has frequently been in the news and I suspect that she is the star of the "Leaders and Legends" series. What you might not know about Bair is that she is the author of two books that teach children about financial management: Rock, Brock, And the Savings Shock and Isabel's Car Wash.

Before her appointment to the FDIC, Ms. Bair was the Dean's Professor of Financial Regulatory Policy for the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and she has had extensive experience in the financial industry.

Each 8am lecture (generally the 3rd Thursday of every month) is preceded by breakfast at 7:30am and takes place at the Renaissance Hotel at 202 E. Pratt Street, Baltimore. Tickets cost $35/person and may be purchased here.

Scheduled Dates
October 16, 2008 – General James Cartwright, Vice Chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff
November 20, 2008 - Sheila Bair, Chairman of the FDIC
December 18, 2008 - Mike Griffin, Administrator of NASA
January 15, 2009 - Ed Nusbaum, CEO of Grant Thornton
February 19, 2009 - Chris Inglis, Deputy Director, NSA
March 19, 2009 – Robert Stevens, Chairman, President and CEO of Lockheed Martin
April 16, 2009 - To be determined
May 14, 2009 (different week due to JHU Commencement) - To be determined
June 18, 2009 - To be determined

Valerie Plame Lecture

Just as Kareem Abdul Jabbar will be speaking at Hopkins next week (on October 28, 2008) as part of the Milton S. Eisenhower Speakers Symposium "A More Perfect Union: Partnership, Progress and Prosperity in a Changing America," so shall Valerie Plame (on October 30, 2008).

Author of Fair Game: How a Top CIA Agent Was Betrayed by Her Own Government, Plame features heavily in Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War by Michael Isikoff and David Corn.

Click here to read about Hubris (an excerpt may be found here) and click here to read an excerpt from Fair Game.


Doors will open at 7:30 pm at Shriver Hall on the Homewood Campus the talk begins at 8:00 pm and will be followed by a reception in the Clipper Room.

This event is free and open to the public.

Shriver Hall Auditorium is on the university’s Homewood campus, 3400 N. Charles St., in Baltimore.

Visitor parking is available in the South Garage, 3101 Wyman Park Drive, Baltimore, Md. 21211.

Kareem Abdul Jabbar Lecture

Kareem Abdul Jabbar -- Basketball Hall-of-Famer, Author, Actor, and Humanitarian -- will be speaking at Hopkins on October 28, 2008 as part of the Milton S. Eisenhower Speakers Symposium "A More Perfect Union: Partnership, Progress and Prosperity in a Changing America."

I had no idea he had written so many books:

• A Season on the Reservation
• Black Profiles in Courage
• Brothers in Arms
• Kareem
• On the Shoulders of Giants

Doors will open at 7:30 pm at Shriver Hall on the Homewood Campus and the talk begins at 8:00 pm.

Seating is free and open to the public.

Shriver Hall Auditorium is on the university’s Homewood campus, 3400 N. Charles St., in Baltimore.

A reception in the Clipper Room follows the event.

Visitor parking is available in the South Garage, 3101 Wyman Park Drive, Baltimore, Md. 21211.

Ta-Nehisi Coates Lecture

Yet another author lecture, this one by a Baltimore native!

The acclaimed journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, will be reading from and signing copies of his debut book, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, at 1 PM tomorrow (Thursday, September 25, 2008) at the Johns Hopkins University Homewood Campus Bookstore, 3330 St. Paul Street, Baltimore, MD 21218.

Here's what Baltimore City Paper has to say about this book (City Paper awarded it the 2008 Best Book About Baltimore Award):

Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of the more nimble-minded American cultural critics and observers writing today, grew up in Baltimore in the 1980s, a hardscrabble and personally fraught adolescence that he recounts in The Beautiful Struggle. But Coates' memoir isn't some navel-gazing coming of age discovery; it's a thoughtfully considered examination of what it's like to grow up young and black in a midsized, post-industrial American city and a breathtaking portrait of a father who dedicated his life to making sure his urban African-American sons became proud, educated, and responsible black men. Best of all, Coates writes in a gripping, lyrical cadence that proves, yet again, that writing can sing and bounce with the life-giving pulse of hip-hop's vital beat. Exquisite.

This talk is free and open to the public.

Click here to read an excerpt from The Beautiful Struggle or click here to read the author's blog on The Atlantic website.

Rakesh Khurana Lecture

Just heard that Rakesh Khurana, author of From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession and associate professor in organizational behavior at Harvard Business School, will be speaking at Hopkins tomorrow (Sept 25) at 5pm for the "The Inaugural Carey Business School Dean's Lecture."

To view the table of contents, click here; download the Introduction in PDF format here.

Click here to register.