Conference Digests - More Information

Reversing the Decline in Community. Greetings and welcome to all of you who are interested in what's happening to our communities and what we might do about it. While most of us seem to appreciate the need for a greater sense of community, much of what we have included in our lives, from TVs to cars, has managed to reduce our sense of community. We are very fortunate to have author Ralph Keyes as the leader of this conference. Ralph is an accomplished author with a long time interest in community, having written the groundbreaking "We, the Lonely People", and a number of other books that deal with contemporary culture as well.

November 2007 The Crisis in Journalism. This conference focuses on the recent and severe decline in professional journalism. Several factors, including the loss of readership and advertising to web-based publications, and particularly in the case of broadcast news organizations, the domination by giant corporations generally occupied in unrelated fields, has resulted in increasingly superficial, tabloid-like, market-oriented news. This development could possibly mean the complete loss of investigative journalism, a serious threat to our democracy. We are most fortunate to have author and veteran journalist James Goldsborough as the leader of this discussion. Jim spent 15 years of his distinguished career headquartered in Paris reporting, from forty countries no less, for The International Herald Tribune and Newsweek magazine. He has also worked for several other newspapers, first as a reporter and then as a columnist. He currently writes a column for The Voice of San Diego, the first experiment in regional investigative online reporting.

September 2007 The Power of Design, deals with design in the public interest—a field that may prove to be the most promising of all our disciplines in addressing the most pressing and often most stubborn human problems. The conference is led by Richard Farson, psychologist, author, educator, and president of the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute (WBSI), the sponsoring organization of the ILF. Farson is the author of the critically-acclaimed bestseller, "Management of the Absurd: Paradoxes in Leadership," now in twelve languages, and the more recently published work on success and failure, with co-author Ralph Keyes, "Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins: The Paradox of Innovation"

Long interested in the field of design, Farson was the founding dean of the School of Design at the California Institute of the Arts, and a 30 year member of the Board of Directors of the International Design Conference in Aspen, of which he was president for seven years. In 1999 he was elected as the one Public Director (non-architect) to the national Board of Directors of the American Institute of Architects.

June 2007 Medicine as Metaphor. To deal with what is happening in modern medicine and all its social and political ramifications as well as its scientific and professional practice issues we have as our leader one of America's top physicians, ILF Fellow Leonard Laster. Len joined us at WBSI during the time of our School of Management and Strategic Studies while he was president of the Oregon Health Sciences Center. Prior to that he had been Associate Director of the National Institute of Health, and after his Oregon stint he became Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where he is now a distinguished professor. He has also been a close observer of the developments in the Middle East, and because of the current events there you can look forward to a most stimulating conference.

April 2007 Our new conference is sure to be interesting because it is both topical and urgent. The conference is Iran at the Crossroads and will deal with the full range of concerns about Iran that the world now shares including the nuclear issue, support for terrorism including Hezbollah, the current social climate in Iran and life after the theocratic state. We are fortunate in having as our leader Dr. Farhad Saba, who was born in Iran and served in the reign of the Shah as national head of educational broadcasting. He came to the US a number of years ago and is now Professor of Educational Technology at San Diego State University and a good friend of WBSI. We connected with Fred (Farhad) some years back because, like WBSI, he was a pioneer in online distance education and now heads a company, Distance-Educator.com. He has been a close observer of the developments in the Middle East, and because of the current events there you can look forward to a most stimulating conference.

February 2007 Two Cultures, was led by Carol Anne Bundy. Educated as a lawyer, Carol Anne collaborated with Jonas Salk during the last five years of his life as together they explored the larger issues of the evolution of society. Unfortunately, Jonas died before they were able to publish together, but since his death she has continued to pursue some of those same interests, resulting in two volumes about to be published.

The subject of C.P. Snow's landmark 1959 essay "The Two Cultures" held that the division between sciences and the humanities was a major hindrance to solving world problems. The precepts of this iconic work, which Snow wanted to title "Of Rich and of Poor," have reverberated throughout international academic circles for decades and was resonant with the motivation that inspired scientist and thinker Dr. Jonas Salk to found the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California in the 1960s. It is this issue to which we will turn our attention in the conference.

November 2006 The Policy Implications of Homelessness. We are fortunate to have as our leader Patricia Leslie, Director of the Social Work Program in the Department of Sociology and Social Work at Point Loma Nazarene University. Over the past twenty years she has had extensive experience with both private and public sector agencies, with a special emphasis on programs and services for homeless families and individuals. The intent of the conference is to explore homelessness from a variety of perspectives—on both macro and micro levels (social institutions and policies as well as individual dynamics and experiences). Although the primary issue may seem to simply be one of housing, Leslie also asks if homelessness may be the result of competing ideologies and questions what causes homelessness to "grow."

September 2006 The Future of Newspapers (and Journalism), draws upon the extensive experience of James Goldsborough. Jim has a most impressive record of achievements. He has written on national and foreign affairs for four decades, both from the United States and abroad, where he worked as a foreign correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, International Herald Tribune and Newsweek Magazine for 14 years, reporting from more than 40 countries. He is a former Edward R. Murrow Fellow at New York’s Council on Foreign Relations and senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is author of "Rebel Europe: Living with a Changing Continent" which was received with raves from the critics. He has a degree in economics from UCLA, attended UC Berkeley Law School and has written numerous articles in leading publications, including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Politique Etrangere, the New York Times Magazine, Fortune, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times and the Readers Digest. Jim brings great depth to our discussion of a subject that is critical to the future of our democratic society, but clearly not receiving the attention it deserves.

July 2006 Can Democracy survive in the 21st century, represents something new and very special for the ILF. We are undertaking this conference in collaboration with a group of faculty and students from the Harvard Business School. Second, in this conference we seek to generate not only wisdom, but fresh ideas that can be communicated to policymakers. To develop such a product, our leaders will assume somewhat different, but overlapping, responsibilities. Daniel Quinn Mills, Alfred J. Weatherhead Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School Quinn leading with content, and Donald Straus, former president of the American Arbitration Association. facilitating with process interventions.

For these reasons, and for the topicality, popular appeal, and make-or-break importance of our conference theme for the future of democracy in America, and therefore around the world, we consider this to be a tremendously interesting and valuable conference.

May 2006 The Roots of Polarization, moderated by Ralph Keyes His writing (thirteen books) is always out front of everyone else. From his earliest work, such as We the Lonely People in which he documents the erosion of community, and his extremely popular Is There Life After High School? (a serious study that was nevertheless made into a terrific Broadway musical) in which he recognizes the developmental importance of late adolescence, a fresh viewpoint that has since been documented by research, to his most recent book, The Post Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life, he has not only been ahead of the pack, but continually confronting the crucial issues of our time. The crucial issue he deals with in this conference is the fact that the US is dangerously polarized in many ways, politics particularly. And when the US is in danger, so are other nations. We need to understand the causes of this polarization, and that's what Keyes will be exploring in this conference--the social forces that promote polarization, inner urges that lead us to separate clearly from them, and the technological developments that facilitate polarization.

December 2005
The Pursuit of Wisdom. Since wisdom is intended to be the main product of the deliberations of the International Leadership Forum, it seemed a worthwhile exercise to examine just what we mean by that term. The resulting discussion yielded many surprises, and considerable wisdom along the way. Leading this discussion is Richard Farson, psychologist, author, educator, and president of the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute (WBSI), the sponsoring organization of the ILF. Farson is the author of the critically-acclaimed bestseller, "Management of the Absurd: Paradoxes in Leadership," now in twelve languages, and the more recently published work on success and failure, with co-author Ralph Keyes, "Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins: The Paradox of Innovation".

July 2005
Global Warming: Environmental Crisis? Leading us in this discussion are two ILF Fellows who have been following, and contributing to, this scientific debate for many years, and do not find themselves in the mainstream of environmentalists' thinking. Caltech trained scientist and engineer, ILF Fellow Douglas Strain, Founding Chairman of ElectroScientific Industries, a company rated as among the 100 best to work for in America, has long followed the development of energy programs and environmental concerns.ILF Fellow George Taylor, his colleague in the leadership of this conference, is the State Climatologist for Oregon, and a faculty member at Oregon State University's College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences. He manages the Oregon Climate Service, the state repository of weather and climate information. The author of more than 200 reports, symposium articles and journal articles, George is past president of the American Association of State Climatologists. This conference, as effectively as any the ILF has ever held, not only makes possible a true dialogue between scientists of highly differing persuasions, but brings together the two cultures of science and the humanities and social sciences to illuminate this extremely controversial subject.

May 2005
The Legacy of Nuremberg, moderated by ILF Fellow Norbert Ehrenfreund, a Superior Court judge, long on the bench in San Diego and now officially retired, he continues to serve on assignment throughout the state. He is a recipient of the American Bar Association's prestigious Award of Judicial Excellence, given annually to one judge in the United States as trial judge of the year. On behalf of the US government he has conducted conferences with judges and lawyers in Portugal and Poland on democratic systems of justice. He received his law degree from Stanford, a Master's Degree in political science from Columbia, and a B. A in journalism from the University of Missouri. In World War II he served as a combat artillery officer in the European campaign and was decorated with the Bronze Star. Following the war he worked as a journalist for the American newspaper Stars and Stripes, and among other assignments covered the famed Nuremberg trial of Nazi leaders. He has recently completed a lecture tour of Europe discussing that trial, and is finishing a book about it. The Nuremberg trial represents the first effort to bring the application of justice to war crimes, considered by many to be history’s most important achievement in international justice. This conference examined closely the central, and most troubling, issue involved with war crimes--the victor trying the vanquished--and generated policy recommendations responsive to that concern for the International Criminal Court. With the trial of Saddam Hussein coming up, we could not have a timelier subject, nor a better leader for our discussion

March 2005
Power and Property in the Information Society, moderated by Walter Truett Anderson, author, political scientist, social psychologist, and current president of the World Academy of Art and Science. He is joined in the leadership of this examination of intellectual property by four outstanding specialists in this troubling area: Canadian economist Arthur Cordell, editor of Info Trends, focusing on economic, social and political implications of information technology; graphic designer Andrew Peter Fenton, Head of Interactive for the advertising giant, Saatchi and Saatchi Group UK, and interested in all issues relating to knowledge accessibility and transfer; theoretical physicist David Peat (also trained in Jungian psychology) is director of the Pari Center for New Learning, in Tuscany, Italy. Author most recently of From Chaos to Uncertainty: The Story of Science and Ideas in the 21st Century, he is particularly interested in the future of knowledge in the information society. This conference presents a valuable examination of the psychology, politics and economics of information access, transfer, protection, piracy and corruption.

January 2005
The Transition in Iraq We are proud to have ILF Fellow Harlan Cleveland for the leadership of this most important, and most challenging, discussion. He is familiar with the responsibility of rebuilding a war torn country, as he played such a role for post WWII Italy. There he led the kind of advanced planning that apparently has been missing in the US invasion of Iraq. He served the Kennedy and Johnson administrations as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations and Ambassador to NATO. Among his other credentials: Princeton graduate, Rhodes Scholar, editor and publisher, Reporter Magazine, Dean, Maxwell School of Public Policy at Syracuse University, President, Univ. of Hawaii, Director, International Programs, Aspen Institute, Dean, Hubert Humphrey Institute for Public Affairs, Univ. of Minnesota, and President, World Academy of Art and Science. In addition he has published several books and many articles on leadership and world affairs.

May 2004
Biosynergy and the Future of Humankind It is a special pleasure to introduce Anthony Rose to this group. Tony is an old friend and former staff member at WBSI in the sixties when he was a post-doctoral fellow working with Carl Rogers, having just completed his Ph.D. in psychology at UCLA. While a student there, he taught the first lab course given in animal behavior, and that interest has stayed with him all these years. As a social psychologist, the primates he is most interested in, of course, are humans, in particular how and why we continue to endanger ourselves and the rest of life on this planet, and what we might do about it. As head of the Biosynergy Institute he has studied people and primates in Africa, Central America and Asia. His inquiries into the bushmeat crisis have focused on commercial hunting and conservation values in west and central Africa. He's written three books and scores of articles. In short, he's done his homework, and we are very fortunate to have him help us think through the human dimensions of wildlife and wilderness conservation.

March 2004
New Approaches to Israel and the Middle East Our relationship to Israel and its neighboring nations is clearly central to the War on Terrorism, and the need for fresh insight to these matters is urgent. In this issue, two ILF Fellows joined forces to lead the conference. Psychologist and broad ranging intellectual Douglass Carmichael, who has paid close attention to the ancient and modern history of Israel's development in the politics of the Middle East, served as our content leader. Donald Straus, former president of the American Arbitration Association, and an experienced mediator, facilitated the process. Recognizing the difficulty our policymakers have in discussing this emotionally loaded and politically sensitive subject, we constructed a special conference to help us to dig deeply, maintain a focus, and deal with the potentially highly polarized feelings that this subject can generate with the diverse makeup of the participants in ILF conferences.

January 2004
Leadership in the 21st Century In this issue ILF Fellow Harlan Cleveland leads the conference into a profound and broad examination of Leadership in the 21st century. In the section titled Roles, Titles and Hierarchy", Harlan opens with: "There are four simple steps in my argument: Step #1: Nobody's in charge. Therefore (Step #2) everybody has a chance to be partly in charge. But (Step #3) most people will not, for one reason or another, reach for that brass ring. Consequently, (Step #4) those who do will find that they are "leaders." Harlan brings impressive credentials to the task, having served in different positions with three presidents, including Ambassador to NATO under Presidents Johnson and Nixon and as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs in the Kennedy administration. A graduate of Princeton University and a Rhodes Scholar, he was the University of Hawaii's President (1969-74) and founding Dean of the University of Minnesota's Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs.

November 2003
Rethinking Islamist Terrorism This issue features our conference on Rethinking Our Response to Islamist Terrorism. The initial material was supplied by ILF Fellow Daniel Yankelovich from a draft portion of the report he is preparing on an alternative to the war on terrorism as an opening stimulus for the conference. Dan is a noted pioneer in survey research, and through his work in that field he has kept his finger on the pulse not only the American public, but on the populations of other countries as well. No one better understands the public's moods and trends. As a result, Dan has become one of the most respected commentators on current events. Dan's draft opens with. "As we continue to pursue Al Qaeda, we must at the same time fashion a compelling message to Muslims in general, and Islamists in particular, that lays out the incentives for them to curb terrorism. We must send the Muslim community a single, coherent message of unmistakable clarity and cogency, backed up by consistent policy and action.".

October 2003
Technology & Leadership In this edition of the Digest, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang leads the conference into an inquiry of the role Information Technology plays in leadership at the strategy and decision-making levels. Alex is a visiting scholar in the Science, Technology, and Society program at Stanford University, and a research affiliate at Institute for the Future, a think tank in Menlo Park. The author of Making the Macintosh: Technology and Culture in Silicon Valley, he also serves on the Editorial Board of American Scholar (the official journal of Phi Beta Kappa), and on the guiding committee of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation's Unleashing the Humanities: The Doctorate Beyond the Academy.

September 2003
Youth and Human Rights" In this edition of the Digest, we direct our attention to the way in which adolescents are regarded in the US and elsewhere. The conference was led by Mike Males, a longtime social activist in the civil rights movements. Males is now a Senior Researcher at the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, and a faculty member in the sociology department at the University of California Santa Cruz. Currently preparing a text on adolescent sociology, he has authored several other books dealing with the subject of this conference, including Kids and Guns: How Politicians, Experts and the Press Fabricate Fear of Youth, Framing Youth: Ten Myths about the Next Generation, and The Scapegoat Generation: America's War on Adolescents.

August 2003
Markets and Democracy: Is that All? In this edition of the Digest, rather than focusing our attention on a specific social issue, we are looking at the container itself - the system in which all the issues arise. Douglass Carmichael, psychoanalyst, policy consultant, Fellow of the ILF, and social critic led the conference. Douglass works across institutions and organizations, locally and internationally, on issues of the social consequences of economic policy and the implications of future change for individual, social, political, and organizational development. He brings to the discussion a keen appreciation for the scope of the question and unflagging energy as he challenges the idea that free markets and democracy represent the end of history, the winning paradigm. 

June 2003
"The Developing and Deepening Conflict" is actually an amalgam of two conferences, "The Developing Conflict" and "The Deepening Conflict", both centered in the unfolding of the conflict in Iraq. The conference was led by Farhad (Fred) Saba, who was born and raised in Iran, and formerly head of educational broadcasting for that country. He is now a professor of educational technology at San Diego State University. He brings to this discussion a deep understanding of the Arab world, and his moderation is invaluable as we probe legal, moral and ethical questions surrounding the conflict, and examine the reactions of the world, possible implications for the USA as a continuing member of the global community, and speculation about the post-war future of Iraq.

May 2003
"The Inevitability and Desirability of Globalization," led by Walter Truett Anderson, a distinguished political scientist and social psychologist, president of the World Academy of Art and Science, and the author, most recently, of All Connected Now: Life in the First Global Civilization. If we consider globalization as an ongoing process in which connections are made among systems that were once relatively separate, and in which boundaries often change, move, or disappear - and if it is a process that shows no signs of stopping or even of slowing down - what do we do? How would we think about US foreign policy in such a context? What can we do about various environmental threats, or the well-being of people in poor and/or relatively isolated areas? Those are just a few of the many questions we tackle in this illuminating conference.

April 2003
The Crisis in Public Education in the USA
Can America hope to retain its position of global leadership if public education fails? The crisis is real. The players in this perilous drama are diverse - teachers, students, parents, community, government, business, the "system" itself. Each vigorously pursues its separate agenda and goals. Is there light at the end of the tunnel? Paul Houston, Executive Director of the American Association of School Administrators, the institution representing the 14,000 school superintendents, leads the ILF Fellows in an illuminating exploration into public education that is both disturbing and heartening.

Interviews - More Information

April 2008
Interview with Michael Kahn
Dr. Kahn entered Harvard at the beginning of World War II, but dropped out soon to join the Air Force, becoming a B-24 bomber pilot flying missions over Germany. He returned to Harvard for his bachelors degree then became an actor. After a number of years in that profession, he returned to Harvard to get a PhD in psychology. He taught there, then at Yale, then at the University of Texas, then at the University of California Santa Cruz, where he is Professor Emeritus of Psychology. After an early retirement he moved to San Francisco and taught at Antioch University and then at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He is an adored teacher, an expert on Freud, on psychotherapy, on small group behavior, and practically every subject his broad ranging intellect touches. The Christopher Reynolds Foundation he heads is working to end the war in Iraq and straighten out our relations with Cuba.

November 2007
Interview with Lawrence Solomon Dr. Solomon, one of the first professionals chosen for the WBSI staff back in 1959, is an industrial psychologist, author, educator and consultant, who built an international reputation as an expert in team building, conflict resolution, and the management of change. In addition to his long service to WBSI, where he headed several of the Institute's most innovative research programs, he has taught industrial and organizational psychology as a professor at the California School of Professional Psychology.

September 2007
Lincoln Bloomfield. An emeritus professor of political science at MIT, Linc has a distinguished career not only in education and writing but four years in the Navy (WWII), 11 years in the State Department, later White House service on the National Security Council as Director of Global Issues. So he is no stranger to the heated policy wars among the top policymakers. His latest book is Accidental Encounters With History, and some lessons learned (Cohasset: Hot House Press, 2005). Linc is a policy heavyweight and we are fortunate indeed to have him as an ILF Fellow and our interviewee this week.

June 2007
Mary Douglas died May 16, peacefully in a hospital near her home in London. Mary was certainly one of the greatest anthropologists who ever lived, and we were fortunate indeed to have her as an ILF Fellow. A product of Oxford, she taught at University of London, and wrote some of the classics in anthropology, notably Purity and Danger. She was the founder and leader of a network of scholars around the world who pursued her views of cultural theory. In her recent years she had accepted visiting appointments in schools of religion and theology at Princeton and Northwestern, and at the time of her death, was writing about several books in the Old Testament with an eye toward solving the riddle of the food proscriptions described in Leviticus as "the abominations".

Mary was simply one of the most knowledgeable, smartest and wisest social scientists of her times. Her ability to quickly get to the core of social issues was astounding. And, she was a simply delightful person. We will miss her presence and her brilliance in equal measure.

In memoriam we are republishing an interview with her that took place in 2003.

April 2007
interview with Mike Males. Mike has authored many unconventional articles on youth issues such as crime, drug abuse, pregnancy, and economics, with recent articles published in the Western Criminology Review, Scribner's Encyclopedia on Violence in America, The Lancet, American Journal of Public Health, and Journal of School Health; texts such as Youth Violence and Crime, and the popular press, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post.

Long a social activist in the civil rights movements, Mike is now a Senior Researcher at the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, and a faculty member in the sociology department at the University of California Santa Cruz. Currently preparing a text on adolescent sociology, he has authored several other books dealing with youth, including Kids and Guns: How Politicians, Experts and the Press Fabricate Fear of Youth, Framing Youth: Ten Myths about the Next Generation, and The Scapegoat Generation: America's War on Adolescents. "

February 2007
Interview with Ralph Keyes the author of thirteen books. His bestseller Is There Life After High School? was made into a Broadway musical that is still produced in this country and abroad. Chancing It was a New York Times “Notable Book.” Timelock was selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club and excerpted in Reader’s Digest. John Jakes called The Courage to Write “one of the two or three best books on writing I’ve ever read.” Keyes has appeared on Oprah Winfrey, The Today Show, The Tonight Show, ABC World News Tonight, and 20/20.

His latest book The Quote Verifier discusses quotations that are easy to cite but hard to confirm. Whenever possible it gives the correct wording and attribution of hundreds of quotations, old and new, whose origins are unclear. The Quote Verifier examines not only classic misquotes such as “War is hell,” and "Play it again, Sam," but more surprising ones such as ""Ain't I a woman?" and "Golf is a good walk spoiled." The Quote Verifier also explores popular quotations of uncertain origin, such as "The opera ain't over 'till the fat lady sings," "No one on his deathbed ever said he wished he'd spent more time at the office," and "Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small."

November 2006
Interview with Harlan Cleveland, political scientist and public executive, and President Emeritus of the World Academy of Art and Science. A Princeton University graduate and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in the 1930s, he was an economic warfare specialist (in Washington, D.C.), economic director of the Allied Control Commission in Italy, and United Nations relief administrator (in Italy and China) in the 1940s; a foreign aid manager (the Marshall Plan), magazine editor and publisher (The Reporter), and graduate school dean (the Maxwell Graduate School of Public Affairs at Syracuse University) in the 1950s. In the 1960s he served as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs under President John F. Kennedy and as U.S. Ambassador to NATO under President Lyndon Johnson. From 1969 to 1974 he was President of the University of Hawaii. From 1974 to 1980 he built and managed the Program in International Affairs for The Aspen Institute. In 1980 he moved to the University of Minnesota to start the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, serving as its Dean until 1987.

Harlan has written hundreds of articles in newspapers, magazines, and journals; and authored or co-authored a dozen books on executive leadership and international affairs, most recently Nobody in Charge (2002). He has received 22 honorary degrees and numerous awards, including the Medal of Freedom, Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson Award, and the Prix de Talloires, a Switzerland-based prize for "accomplished generalists."

September 2006
Interview with Walter Anderson, president of the World Academy of Art and Science. Walter has published 17 books on a range of subjects including political and cultural change, psychology, human evolution, Buddhism, biotechnology, and world politics. Many of these have been republished in foreign-language editions in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America. His best-known book, Reality Isn't What It Used To Be, has been in print for over 13 years and was honored as "one of the 100 most important books about the future." He serves on the editorial boards of The Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Constructivism in the Social Sciences, and Futures. He writes occasional articles and reviews for these publications, and also for magazines such as Mother Jones, Reason, Psychotherapy Networker, and Time.

July 2006
Interview with Dr. Douglass Carmichael consultant, psychotherapist, teacher, speaker, and writer. This interview seeks to focus our attention on history, not as an abstract study of the past, but rather with an eye toward increasing our powers of discrimination in order to better interpret history as an ongoing, dynamic interaction with the present. With a background in physics and psychoanalysis, and a keen interest in technology, the humanities, and social issues, Dr. Carmichael brings a particularly broad viewpoint to an examination of the role history can play in our ongoing social perceptions.

December 2005
Interview with Gloria Feldt
Former President and CEO of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and a Fellow of the ILF, Gloria Feldt is also the author of the recently published, "Behind Every Choice Is A Story". The timing for this interview coincided with several events which moved abortion to the front pages again, just as it is now again in the forefront of the Supreme Court nominations. In this interview, Gloria reveals the positive impact of planned parenthood on society and economics globally, and sounds an alarm at the potential ramifications of the abortion ban bill coming out of Congress.

July 2005
Interview with Constance Ahrons.
With this interview we get right to the core of social issues, the changing nature of family. The policy implications are profound and extensive. To discuss it with us we are indeed fortunate to have ILF Fellow Constance Ahrons, whose brilliant research has thrown a completely new light on marriage, divorce and most recently on the misunderstanding of the effects of divorce on children. She is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of Southern California, and former head of its training program in marriage and family therapy. With her books, The Good Divorce and most recently We're Still Family, she has compellingly shown that the popular ideas about the damage done to the children of divorce are largely unfounded. To add further expertise to this interview, Connie is joined by two of her most esteemed colleagues, Stephanie Coontz, Professor of History and Family Studies, The Evergreen State College and Steven Mintz, Professor of History at the University of Houston.

May 2005
Interview with Mary Boone. A leading organizational consultant, she is the author of Leadership and the Computer, and Managing Interactively. When Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the US House of Representatives, he gave out a list of required reading, mainly of classics such as the Federalist Papers, but included Mary Boone’s Leadership and the Computer because it drew a picture of what the implications of the new technology would be on global leadership. A Fellow of the ILF, she is one of the important contributors to our understanding of contemporary leadership, especially as it is influenced by new interactive technology. In this interview we have the opportunity to explore her interest in identifying the differences in the leadership required depending upon the complexity of the context.

March 2005
Interview with Mary Catherine Bateson. We are honored to present a conversation with one of the world’s most distinguished cultural anthropologists, Mary Catherine Bateson. Robinson Professor of Anthropology and English Emeritus at George Mason University, she has taught and conducted research at several other outstanding universities, including Harvard, Radcliffe, Spelman, Amherst (where she was dean of the faculty), and most recently served a three-year visiting professorship at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Among those academic appointments were positions at the University of Northern Iran, where she was dean of humanities and social studies, at Damavand College in Tehran, and in the Philippines at Ateno de Manila University. The daughter of famed anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, it is now recognized that her work matches their monumental contributions. In a broad ranging conversation, Dr. Bateson provides uncommon wisdom on ways our society is going to have to adapt and change.

January 2005
Interview with Charles Lindblom. Sterling Professor of Economics and Political Science Emeritus at Yale University and former director of Yale's Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Charles Lindblom is a longtime friend of WBSI, having been an outstanding member of our School of Management and Strategic Studies faculty. He is widely recognized as the world authority on politics and markets, and wrote the classic text with that title, among many other books and articles. Educated at Stanford and the University of Chicago, he taught at the University of Minnesota before going to Yale. He made himself available to us for questioning and responding to comments on the full range of issues surrounding the controversial place of market systems in our political economy.

May 2004
Interview with Eleanor Goldstein. It is with special pleasure that I can introduce Eleanor to those of you who don't know her. She is a woman of many talents. Knowing about her having started, run, and sold a leading business in the field of education, and through her books and articles having pioneered the field of false memory syndrome, I was surprised when she told me that she once wrote a textbook in economics, that was published in Russia, of all places. Having sold only the database part of her business, she remains deeply involved in electronic publishing, automated libraries, and other cutting edge technologies. I know you will find her to be a wise and witty and most responsive interviewee.

March 2004
Interview with Rodrigo Arboleda Halaby
An important contributor to progress all over the globe, especially in his home country of Colombia, ILF Fellow Rodrigo Arboleda Halaby has been a successful architect, business leader, consultant, and is currently a Visiting Scholar at the distinguished MIT Media Lab, where he conducts a program using advanced technology to bring educational experiences to children who have never had an opportunity to learn at a high level. In this interview he shares with us a vision of a future that is bold, hopeful, and on the cutting edge of technology. He calls it Education for Peace: Creating conditions for peace through digital learning and broadband connectivity.

January 2004
Interview with Ray Alden
Until his retirement, Ray Alden served as one of America's top corporate leaders. After graduation from Stanford, and Naval service, he began his career as a professional radio engineer and spent most of it in the telephone industry. At the Hawaiian Telephone Company he was Chief Engineer and then Vice President, Operations. He was President of United Telecommunications, Inc. (now renamed Sprint Corporation) for eight years, then Vice Chairman for three years, remaining as a director until 1987. He has served on the boards of several companies and two years on the Telecommunications Advisory Board of the State of California. Ray opens the interview with: "Recently, in an advertisement, I saw a quotation attributed to Samuel Butler: "All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it." Our economic culture is designed to make us dissatisfied, and to keep us that way -- permanently. An enormous advertising industry is dedicated to that task, and many enterprises depend upon such advertising for their success.

November 2003
Interview with Harlan Cleveland
ILF Fellow Harlan Cleveland has served in different positions with three Presidents, including Ambassador to NATO under Presidents Johnson and Nixon and as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs in the Kennedy administration. A graduate of Princeton University and a Rhodes Scholar, he was the University of Hawaii's President (1969-74) and founding Dean of the University of Minnesota's Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. He is a Fellow and past President of the World Academy of Art and Science, and a Charter Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. Harlan Cleveland has authored hundreds of magazine and journal articles, and eleven books, mostly on executive leadership and world affairs.

October 2003
Interview with Hallock Hoffman
After college, ILF fellow Hallock Hoffman became a flight instructor, and when WWII broke out, was given a commission in the Army Air Corps, and spent the war teaching flying and ferrying planes to the European theatre. In 1954 Hallock joined Robert Hutchins at the Ford Foundation's Fund for the Republic. In 1974 he co-founded the Fielding Institute, one of the most important graduate schools in psychology and the social sciences, based mainly on distance education. Along the way he was chairman of the Pacifica Foundation, the parent of two of the leading public broadcasting stations. Our interview with Hallock provides rich historical detail on the Marshall plan, which his father headed, and on the Fund for the Republic.

September 2003
Interview with Douglas Strain
ILF fellow Douglas Strain, is a top technologist/industiralist and the founding chairman of ElectroScientific Industries in Portland, Oregon, a successful business in laser technology, and a company highly regarded for its enlightened management.He has received numerous awards including the Bausch and Lomb National Science Award, Certificate of Achievement from the Office of Scientitifc Research and Development and Northwest Management Man of the Year. Our interview with Douglas provides unique insight into what led him to a career in science, what has shaped his company's success in management, and a glimpse of what tehcnology of the future may hold in store for us

August 2003
Interview with Gloria Feldt
President and CEO of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and Fellow of the ILF Gloria Feldt, is also the author of the recently published, "Behind Every Choice Is A Story". The timing for this interview coincides with several current events which have thrust abortion to the front pages again. In this interview, Gloria reveals the positive impact of planned parenthood on society and economics globally, and sounds an alarm at the potential ramifications of the abortion ban bill coming out of Congress.

June 2003
Interview with Ambassador Jivan Tabibian
Currently the Ambassador of Armenia to Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia, Jivan Tabibian is a Princeton-educated political scientist, who became interested in social design, serving on the faculties at USC, UCLA and the California Institute of the Arts. In our interview, the ambassador brings to our attention some of the subtleties of real world politics as he discusses conditions of paradox, ambiguity, ambivalence, contradiction, and even incoherence that underlie the surface issues of free-markets, asymmetric power relations, and uneven benefit/cost distribution of globalization. He shares an astute awareness of how dominance vs. vulnerability creates concrete conditions of unmanageable change, economic collapse, intra-state violence and an international legal political system whose capacity to adapt is seriously challenged.

May 2003  
Interview with Rushworth Kidder
Well known through his many writings, Rush Kidder is President of the Institute for Global Ethics, a longtime columnist for the Christian Science Monitor, and a perceptive reporter and thoughtful analyst with vast experience in tracking worldwide political, economic, and cultural trends. In his book, "Shared Values for a Troubled World" Rush questioned whether there is a common ground of values that could bring the world's peoples together instead of driving them apart. He discovered eight moral values that will shape our global future - Love, Truthfulness, Fairness, Freedom, Unity, Tolerance, Responsibility, and Respect for Life. Our interview opens with the suggestion that "we, the peoples" are not living up very well to these "widely-held" moral values.

April 2003
Interview with Mary Douglas
If a survey were taken, Mary Douglas would appear on everyone's short list of the great living anthropologists. Educated at Oxford, she has long been on the faculty of the University of London. In recent years she has had visiting professorships in the departments of religion at Princeton and Northwestern. Her book, Purity and Danger is only one of the classic texts she has contributed to the field. The focus of the interview is our current concern about terrorism, and how to better understand the threat we all seem to fear from religious fundamentalism, not just from groups in the Middle East, but also from the rapidly growing fundamentalist religions in the US. Mary joined us from her home in London.

Commentaries - More Information

Commentary—Have You Ever Wondered By ILF Fellow John Vasconcellos, a lawyer, lifelong California legislator, former California State Senator, where he headed the powerful Ways and Means Committee, and a major political influence. Now retired because of term limits he heads a movement called the Politics of Trust. http://www.politicsoftrust.net/.

Commentary—Talking Back to Your Television Set 37 Years Later by Nicholas Johnson, who has for many years been on the faculty of the University of Iowa School of Law, but no doubt gained the most national attention when he served as a maverick FCC Commissioner in the Johnson administration. The range of his career activities is amazing--syndicated columnist, public lecturer, Congressional candidate, network TV host, school board member, co-director of a health policy institute, law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science and the author of several books, the best known being the one he most interestingly updates in this commentaryk.

Commentary—Present at the Demise:
Antioch College, 1852-2008 by Ralph Keyes, an ILF Fellow, and Antioch alumnus is the author of thirteen books. His bestseller
Is There Life After High School? was made into a Broadway musical that is still produced in this country and abroad. Chancing It was a New York Times “Notable Book.” Timelock was selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club and excerpted in Reader’s Digest. John Jakes called The Courage to Write “one of the two or three best books on writing I’ve ever read.” Keyes has appeared on Oprah Winfrey, The Today Show, The Tonight Show, ABC World News Tonight, and 20/20.

His latest book The Quote Verifier discusses quotations that are easy to cite but hard to confirm. Whenever possible it gives the correct wording and attribution of hundreds of quotations, old and new, whose origins are unclear. The Quote Verifier examines not only classic misquotes such as “War is hell,” and "Play it again, Sam," but more surprising ones such as ""Ain't I a woman?" and "Golf is a good walk spoiled." The Quote Verifier also explores popular quotations of uncertain origin, such as "The opera ain't over 'till the fat lady sings," "No one on his deathbed ever said he wished he'd spent more time at the office," and "Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small."

Commentary—The Seven Deadly Sins of No Child Left Behind by Paul Houston, an ILF Fellow, Paul is the Executive Director of the American Association of School Administrators, the organization that represents all of the fourteen thousand superintendents of schools in the US. With a doctorate in education, he has grown through the ranks, been a superintendent himself, and now sits in one of the most powerful seats in American education.

Dr. Houston wastes no words and is blunt in his assessment of the NCLB act " It is now universally accepted, even by those who authored the bill, that NCLB is flawed and needs fixing. In fact, describing the law as flawed might be charitable. If you take the definition of "sin" as a "shameful offense," then it could be argued that NCLB is full of sin because it has proved itself to be an offense against good education." This critique is a must read for anyone interested in education today.

Commentary—The Play of Imagination: Extending the Literary Mind by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown. Currently a visiting scholar at USC,

ILF Fellow John Seely Brown was the Chief Scientist at Xerox when the computer graphical user interface (GUI or point and click) and the mouse were developed. These two innovations were among the most significant of many technological advances that drove the PC from something for hobbyists to the ubiquitous modern day appliances that are found today in nearly every home and business around the globe. To say that Brown has been on the cutting edge of computer technology would be an understatement of the first order.

Douglas Thomas is currently working on Technology and New Media: An Introduction, a survey of recent approaches to technology and new media and their impacts of society and Viral Style: Information, Subculture, and the Politics of Infection, a book which examines the underground production of computer viruses as well as cultural representations of and responses to them. He is co-editor of Cybercrime: Law Enforcement, Security and Surveillance in the Information Age (with Brian D. Loader, Routledge, 2000) and Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears That Shape New Technologies (with Marita Sturken and Sandra Ball-Rokeach,

In September 2006 they co-authored a working paper titled: The Play of Imagination: Extending the Literary Mind which we are privileged to make available here. This is an exceptional paper on the relevance and importance to society of internet game playing. While many people may dismiss these games as trivial, JSB points out that the kind of learning that happens in these spaces is fundamentally different from the learning experiences associated with standard pedagogical practice. Further, he asserts, they are already having a major impact on how people organize and bond even though they've never actually met fact to face.

February 2007 Why Iranians are Visiting Persopolis These Days by Dr. Farhad Saba, who was born in Iran and served in the reign of the Shah as national head of educational broadcasting. He came to the US a number of years ago and is now Professor of Educational Technology at San Diego State University and a good friend of WBSI. We connected with Fred (Farhad) some years back because, like WBSI, he was a pioneer in online distance education and now heads a company, Distance-Educator.com

In this commentary, Fred gives us a concise history of Iran as a political entity and sheds light on the internal political dynamics that currently operate within the country. A keen observer of the developments in Iran for the last several decades he is able to clarify the distinction between the Iranian people as a cultural group and the religious zealots in the form of the ayatollahs who have usurped the state to further the agenda of a minority group in the country.

November 2006 General Semantics: The Ultimate Interdisciplinary Tools by Nicholas Johnson, who currently teaches law, is a columnist and public lecturer, computer enthusiast, and fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science. He has formerly, among many other things, served as co-director of a public health public policy institute, network TV host, congressional candidate, author of books, articles and a nationally syndicated column, FCC Commissioner, school board member , and law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. Nick's father, Wendell Johnson, a professor at the University of Iowa, was one of the founders of the field of General Semantics.

"General semantics is, of course, many things—in fact, so much so that my college friends and I had difficulty getting academic credit for the work we were doing in our general semantics study group. We represented virtually every college and department at the University of Texas. Indeed, one of general semantics’ great strengths over the years has been the near universal professional and academic applicability of the insights it makes possible.

"But we all got the same response from our department heads and deans: ‘This is all very well, but in what department does it really belong?’ Fortunately, a wise chancellor of the Texas system, Harry Ransom, listened, understood, chuckled at our experience with the frustrations that were so familiar in his daily job, and concluded that, departments aside, general semantics clearly belonged at the University of Texas."

September 2006 - Going Nuclear: A Green Makes the Case. By Patrick Moore co-founder of Greepeace "In the early 1970s when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots. That's the conviction that inspired Greenpeace's first voyage up the spectacular rocky northwest coast to protest the testing of U.S. hydrogen bombs in Alaska's Aleutian Islands. Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change." The world changes and the simple obvious truth is that we need to keep an open mind to change. Nuclear energy has changed over the past 30 years and Patrick Moore provides an excellent review of these changes and the value they hold for us.

July 2006 - Equity in California Higher Education by Richard Atkinson." Can we be "completely fair," in Lyndon Johnson's terms, without attention to race and ethnicity? In considering this question, we now have the benefit of several decades of experience with efforts to remedy the educational inequalities of American life. We also have the example of California, the nation's most diverse state and the first to abolish affirmative action."

An internationally respected scholar and scientist, Dr. Richard Atkinson served as the seventeenth president of the University of California from 1995 to 2003. Before becoming president of the UC System, he served as chancellor of UC San Diego; prior to that he served as director of the National Science Foundation and was a long-term member of the faculty at Stanford University.

May 2006
Environmentalism as Religion.This commentary was transcribed from a talk Michael Crichton gave to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco September 15, 2003. He opens with the intriguing and challenging statement "The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance."

December 2005
Commentary - Democrats' Newest Old Idea: Bash Youth. Long a social activist in the civil rights movements, and certainly one of the most effective advocates of youth rights, Mike Males is now a Senior Researcher at the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, and a faculty member in the sociology department at the University of California Santa Cruz where he teaches adolescent sociology. He has authored several books dealing with the subject of this commentary, including Kids and Guns: How Politicians, Experts and the Press Fabricate Fear of Youth, Framing Youth: Ten Myths about the Next Generation, and The Scapegoat Generation: America's War on Adolescents. In this commentary he deals compellingly with the opportunity politicians are missing as they ignore the arguments for lowering the voting age.

July 2005
For this issue's commentary we are pleased to present a commencement address given to this year's graduating class at the University of Michigan, by our distinguished colleague in the International Leadership Forum, John Seely Brown. It would be difficult to find a scientific leader who has shepherded more exciting technical innovations, and who is in closer touch with the developments that are radically altering society today. He is probably best known for his longtime role as Corporate Vice President and Chief Scientist for Xerox and Director of its Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC) where he led a team that made possible networked computing and ubiquitous computing and social software. His aim was always to humanize technology at the individual, organizational and societal level. Among his books are The Social Life of Information, Seeing Differently: Insight on Innovation, and most recently, The Only Sustainable Edge.

May 2005
Science Policy in the 21^st Century by Michael Crichton.This highly controversial commentary was transcribed from his talk to the American Enterprise Institute/Brookings Institution Joint Committee on Regulation in Washington, DC on January 25, 2005. In his talk, ILF Fellow Crichton elaborates on issues addressed in his recent best selling novel, State of Fear. He raises the troubling specter of our political process and environmental activism possibly corrupting the integrity of the scientific research used to inform policy decisions.

March 2005
Concepts of National Interest. Commentary By Lincoln Bloomfield. Dr Bloomfield, Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has held key government posts as a member of the US Department of State, and as Director of Foreign Affairs for the National Security Council. His commentary is excerpted from his forthcoming book, Accidental Encounters with History, and deals with both the issues of balance in international relations and the various ways in which the concept of “national interest” has been used and misused to further political agendas. We are proud to have his views presented here.

January 2005
America and the Future of Iraq. Michael Provence is Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of California, San Diego. He earned a PhD in Modern Middle Eastern History from the University of Chicago, and was a two-time Fulbright scholar in Syria and a Mellon Fellow. He is the author of the forthcoming book, The Great Syrian Revolt, and several articles on the colonial Middle East of the 1920s. He is a frequent public lecturer and media commentator on Middle Eastern history and politics.

May 2004
Dark and Light – The Strange Case of the Decline of Illustration
I’ve discovered that the best way to start a talk is with a joke you like, then try to build your speech around it. So the joke:

A magician performing in a small theatre announces, "Tonight I’m going to perform a brand new trick, never seen before anywhere in the world. I’ll need a bit of assistance from someone in the audience. You, young man, could you come up and help me?"

The young man, a sturdy six footer, joins the magician on stage. The magician says, "I’d like you to take this sledge hammer and hit me directly on top of my head with all your strength". The young man, a bit confused says, "I can’t do that sir, I’d kill you". "Not to worry" says the magician with a confident smile, "Just hit me right on top of the head." The young man reluctantly picks up the sledge hammer and hits the magician with all his might. The magician goes down like a pile of bricks and lies quivering on the floor. The paramedics are called immediately and take the unconscious magician away in an ambulance..................

March 2004
Why Speculate?
After graduating from the Harvard Medical School, teaching anthropology at Cambridge, and serving as a Fellow at the Salk Institute, Michael Crichton embarked full-time on a career as a writer and filmmaker. Called "the father of the techno-thriller," his twenty novels include The Andromeda Strain (written while he was still a medical student), Congo, Jurassic Park and Timeline. He has also written four books of non-fiction: Electronic Life, Five Patients, Travels, and Jasper Johns. Now an ILF Fellow, he is the only person to have had, at the same time, the number one book, the number one movie, and the number one TV show in the United States. This commentary was first presented as the keynote address at the ILF annual meeting. He opens with "My topic for today is the prevalence of speculation in media. What does it mean? Why has it become so ubiquitous? Should we do something about it? If so, what? And why? Should we care at all? Isn't speculation valuable? Isn't it natural?

January 2004
The Perilous Fragility of America
Psychologist, author, lecturer, and educator, Dr. Richard Farson is co-founder and president of the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, serving also as director of its International Leadership Forum. He has been a Naval Officer, dean of the school of environmental design at the California Institute of the Arts, president of Esalen Institute, a faculty member of the Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center, and a Fellow on the Human Relations Faculty of the Harvard Business School. His recent books are the critically-acclaimed bestseller, "Management of the Absurd: Paradoxes in Leadership,” now published in twelve languages, and, with co-author and ILF Fellow Ralph Keyes, the highly praised “Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins: The Paradox of Innovation”. An article based on that book won the McKinsey award for the best Harvard Business Review article published in 2002, the one "most likely to have a major influence on managers worldwide.

November 2003
The Dangers of “Moral Clarity”:
Ideals and Realities in American Foreign Policy
A professor of history and humanities at Reed College Edward B. Segel received his A.B. degree in History from Harvard in 1960, and his Ph.D. in History from the University of California at Berkeley in 1969. His courses include European Diplomatic History in the 19th and 20th Centuries, War and Society in Europe from the 18th to the 20th Centuries, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and Modern British History.

October 2003
Global Citizenship
While the basic idea of membership in a universal society that transcends all others is as old as the Stoics of ancient Greece and Rome, Walter Truett Anderson explores its revival today as part of a widespread move toward new social contracts and new ways for people to understand their political allegiances, rights and obligations. Walter Anderson is a distinguished political scientist and social psychologist, president of the World Academy of Art and Science, and the author, most recently, of All Connected Now: Life in the First Global Civilization.

September 2003
Democracy and Capitalism
John Hart is an ILF Fellow, and the president and CEO of PICO Holdings, Inc., a globally diversified holding company. PICO seeks to acquire businesses and interests in businesses that are identified as undervalued - as based on the private market value of its assets, earnings, and cash flow. Additionally, the business must have special qualities such as unique assets, a potential catalyst for change, or be in an industry with attractive economics. The primary objective is to generate superior long-term growth in shareholders' equity. Mr. Hart graduated from Pomona College with a degree in Economics. In this concise commentary, John addresses, from a capitalist point of view, the premise of last month's conference "Markets and Democracy: Is that All?".

August 2003
A Strategy for Curbing Islamist Terrorism
Daniel Yankelovich, one of America's leading social scientists, is a major developer of the field of survey research. His outstanding achievements in that work, and the understanding of shifting public attitudes that he has gained, have made him a highly respected figure in academic, political and corporate circles. Founder of the well-known research organization, Yankelovich, Skelly and White, and co-founder of the nonprofit Public Agenda, Dan is now Chairman of Viewpoint Learning — a company devoted to the use of dialogue in the search for better solutions to challenging social problems. Author of many books and articles, his most recent book is The Magic of Dialogue. An ILF Fellow and WBSI Trustee, Dan has given us this excerpt from a larger report he is preparing that describes an alternative approach to the current war on terrorism.

June 2003
On The Media
An award-winning author, journalist and political correspondent, James Goldsborough is well qualified to comment on the media. The major portion of his career was spent in Europe as a political columnist and European correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, as Paris bureau chief for Newsweek, and as European Project Director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. For the past twelve years he has been foreign affairs columnist for the San Diego Union-Tribune In this penetrating commentary, Goldsborough indicts the U.S. media for its lack of in-depth reporting on the Iraq war.

May 2003
Unending History
Psychoanalyst, policy consultant, and social critic, Douglass Carmichael works across institutions and organizations, locally and internationally, on issues of the social consequences of economic policy and the implications of future change for individual, social, political, and organizational development. In his commentary Douglass points us toward reexamining the logical outcomes of democracy and the free market system. While these systems, on the surface, offer great hope for a better future for the world, they also contain the potential for severe damage if not constrained with the necessary checks and balances.

April 2003
Harlan Cleveland
The Transatlantic Erosion
What might be the possible reaction of NATO to an American tone of voice that has seemed repeatedly to say, "If we can't get our way on this, we'll simply act on our own." Harlan Cleveland, former US Ambassador to NATO, provides unique insight into the role of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the Iraq crisis -- and, by extension, the future of NATO in world politics. This commentary developed from comments he made in an ILF conference, and is now published in World Paper, a global periodical that appears on five continents in eight languages. It will also be published in the American Oxonian, the journal of the American Association of Rhodes Scholars (of which the author is a member) Spring issue, sent next month to all present and former Rhodes Scholars.

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The International Leadership Forum is dedicated to bettering society by eliciting the individual and collective wisdom of top leaders on the great issues of our times, and communicating that wisdom to policymakers and to the general public.

The ILF Digest is published regularly based on Conference Digests, Interviews, and Commentary from the Fellows of this global, non-partisan think tank.