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Terry Rhodes, Dean, UNC College of Arts & Sciences invites you to join the UNC Program for Public Discourse & UNC Center for Bioethics. What Principles Should Guide our Lock-Down Strategies for COVID-19, Now and in the Future? Thoughtfully exploring perspectives with leading experts in the protection of civil liberties, economic security, and public health priority in a time of COVID-19.

George Annas, M.D., MPH, Warren Distinguished Professor at Boston University, is director of the Center for Health Law, Ethics & Human Rights of Boston University School of Public Health and professor in the Boston University School of Medicine and School of Law. He is the author or editor of 20 books on health law and bioethics, and for 25 years wrote a regular feature in the New England Journal of Medicine on “Health Law, Ethics & Human Rights.” He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the National Academy of Medicine and a former member of the National Academies’ Committee on Human Rights.

Kevin M. Murphy , Ph.D., is the George J. Stigler Distinguished Service Professor of Economics and a MacArthur Fellow at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, as well as a faculty research associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research. He primarily studies the empirical analysis of inequality, unemployment and relative wages as well as the economics of growth and development and the economic value of improvements in health and longevity. A fellow of the Econometric Society and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Murphy is the author of two books and numerous academic articles and research papers found in prestigious publications.

Audrey Pettifor, Ph.D., is a professor of epidemiology at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on determinants of HIV/STI infection in sub-Saharan Africa and interventions to prevent infection and link individuals to care and treatment. She is currently leading a study to examine COVID-19 among faculty, staff and students involved in and supporting research on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus.

Myron S. Cohen, M.D., is the Yeargan-Bate Eminent Professor of Medicine, Microbiology and Immunology, and Epidemiology; the associate vice chancellor for global health; and director of the Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases, IGHID, at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians and the Infectious Disease Society of America. While Cohen focuses on the transmission and prevention of transmission of HIV, recently, he has played an active role in development of the COVID-19 prevention activities. He serves on the NIH ACTIV Committee, a public-private partnership to organize COVID-19 research, and on the executive committee of the NIAID COVID Prevention Network. Cohen has led research on the use of monoclonal antibodies for the prevention and early treatment of COVID-19.

Date: July 28, 2020

Times: 05:30 pm – 07:00 pm

Audience: Public Event

Venue: Online

On February 19th, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Program for Public Discourse will convene this forum on "Meritocracy in Higher Education." The event will be hosted by Sarah Treul, a political scientist at UNC, and feature the New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat, the anthropologist Caitlin Zaloom, the philosopher Anastasia Berg, and the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams.

Caitlin Zaloom is a cultural anthropologist and an associate professor of Social & Cultural Analysis at New York University. She studies the cultural dimensions of finance, technology, and economic life. Her latest book, Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost, explores how the financial pressures of paying for college affect middle-class families. Zaloom is also author of Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London, Editor in Chief of Public Books, and co-editor of the recent volumes Think in Public and Antidemocracy in America. Zaloom’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and her work has been featured in outlets including The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, NPR, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Times Higher Education.

Ross Gregory Douthat is an American conservative political analyst, blogger, author and New York Times columnist. He was a senior editor of The Atlantic. He has written on a variety of conservative topics, including the state of Christianity in America and "sustainable decadence" in contemporary society. Douthat attended Hamden Hall, a private high school in Hamden, Connecticut. He graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University in 2002, where he was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. While there he contributed to The Harvard Crimson and edited The Harvard Salient.

Thomas Chatterton Williams, is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Harper’s. Williams is the author of two memoirs, Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White, which recount his struggles with racial identity as a teen-ager and as an adult. The son of a Black father and a white mother, he describes himself in his second book as "an ex-black man." He is known for his critique of Ta-Nehisi Coates, whom Williams believes overemphasizes race and racism, creating "a fantasy that flattens psychological and material difference within and between groups.

Anastasia Berg started as Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the fall of 2020. She spent the previous three years as a Postdoctoral Junior Research Fellow in Philosophy at Corpus Christi College, the University of Cambridge. She holds a BA from Harvard and an MA and joint degree Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought and the Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago. Her academic research interests lie at the intersection of contemporary moral philosophy, metaethics and moral psychology and the history of moral philosophy, especially Kant and post-Kantian German Idealism, but also Aristotle and Heidegger.

Sarah A. Treul is an Associate Professor specializing in American political institutions, with an emphasis on the U.S. Congress and courts. She earned her B.A. in Political Science and Psychology from Wellesley College and her M.A and Ph.D., both in Political Science, from the University of Minnesota. Her research interests include the voting behavior of U.S. senators, bicameralism, and state delegations in Congress. She is currently working on a project analyzing how a decline in state economic interests has contributed to polarization in Congress.

Date: February 19, 2020

Times: 05:30 pm – 07:00 pm

Audience: Public Event

Venue: Howell Hall

Join CNN’s principal legal analyst for impeachment and UNC law professor Michael Gerhardt and presidential historian William Leuchtenburg as they discuss everything you need to know about the law and history surrounding impeachment in the United States. The discussion will be moderated by Dean of the Law School Martin Brinkley and will take place in the Nelson Mandela Auditorium. A reception with food and beverages will follow.

Michael Gerhardt is the Burton Craige Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence at the UNC School of Law. Gerhardt’s extensive public service has included his testifying more than a dozen times before Congress, including as the only joint witness in the Clinton impeachment proceedings in the House; speaking behind closed doors to the entire House of Representatives about the history of impeachment in 1998; and serving as special counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee for seven of the nine sitting Supreme Court justices. He has written two leading books on impeachment and has been CNN’s principal legal analyst on impeachment for the proceedings against Presidents Clinton and Trump.

William Leuchtenburg is the William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus of History at UNC-Chapel Hill. A scholar of the life and career of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Leuchtenburg has written more than a dozen books on 20th century history, including the Bancroft Prize-winning Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940. In 2007, he received the North Carolina award for literature. Leuchtenburg is a past president of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians and the Society of American Historians.

Martin Brinkley is Dean and the Arch T. Allen Distinguished Professor of Law at UNC School of Law. He has research interests in American legal history and the legal history of ancient Greece and Rome. Brinkley was elected to membership in the American Law Institute in 2003 and served as president of the North Carolina Bar Association from 2011 to 2012. In 2017, he received the Bar Association’s H. Brent McKnight Renaissance Lawyer Award.

Date: December 3, 2019

Times: 05:30 pm – 07:00 pm

Audience: Public Event

Venue: Nelson Mandela Auditorium, FedEx Global Education Center

Join us on November 12 in Murphey 116 for a panel discussion on ideological package deals and heterodoxy within political movements. Our panelists for the evening will be Justin Giboney and Jonathan V. Last, and the conversation will be moderated by Dr. Molly Worthen. The event will begin at 5:30 PM and last until approximately 7:00 PM.

Justin Giboney is an attorney and political strategist in Atlanta, Georgia. He is also the co-founder and president of the AND Campaign, a coalition of urban Christians who are determined to address the sociopolitical arena with the compassion and conviction of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Giboney has managed successful campaigns for elected officials in the state and referendums relating to the city’s transportation and water infrastructure. He served as the co-chair of Obama for America’s Gen44-Atlanta initiative, and in 2012 and 2016 Georgia’s 5th congressional district elected him as a delegate for the Democratic National Convention. A former Vanderbilt University football player and law student, Giboney served on the Urban League of Greater Atlanta Board of Directors. He has written op-eds for publications such as Christianity Today and The Hill.

Jonathan V. Last is an American journalist and author. Last currently serves as executive editor of The Bulwark and co-host of the popular Sub-Beacon podcast and previously worked as a senior writer and later digital editor at The Weekly Standard. In addition, Last contributes to the Wall Street Journal and other major publications and is the author of What to Expect When No One’s Expecting, a book on the under-population problem facing the United States. He has also edited three books on virtue: The Christmas Virtues, The Dadly Virtues, and The Seven Deadly Virtues.

Molly Worthen is an associate professor of history at UNC and a freelance journalist. She received her B.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University. Her research focuses on North American religious and intellectual history. Her most recent book, Apostles of Reason, examines American evangelical intellectual life since 1945, especially the internal conflicts among different evangelical subcultures. Her first book, The Man On Whom Nothing Was Lost, is a behind-the-scenes study of American diplomacy and higher education told through the lens of biography. Her current book project focuses on the history of charisma in America. Worthen teaches courses on North American religious and intellectual culture and global Christianity, and she won the 2017 Tanner Award for Teaching Excellence. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and has written about religion and politics for The New Yorker, Slate, The American Prospect, Foreign Policy, and other publications.

Date: November 12, 2019

Times: 05:30 pm – 07:00 pm

Audience: Public Event

Venue: Murphey Hall