KSG EVENTS

Kansas City Star Reporter Wins Goldsmith Prize Karen Dillon, a Kansas City Star reporter, won the $25,000 Goldsmith Prize for her investigative report “To Protect and Collect,” which examined a controversial police practice of keeping money seized during drug raids. The Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, awarded by the Shorenstein Center, honors journalism that promotes more effective and ethical conduct of government.

Role of the Supreme Court Orrin Hatch, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, spoke in the ARCO Forum of the need to keep politics out of the Supreme Court. “It is very unwise to view the court as a political body, essentially as another Senate,” he said. “I think it is of paramount importance to view the court in terms of its principled role in our system of checks and balances.”

Who Was Behind the Economic Boom of the 1990s? The Who’s Who of economists behind the economic boom of the 1990s gathered together at the Kennedy School this spring to explore the causes and consequences of U.S. economic growth in the last decade.

Former Treasury Secretary and current president of Harvard University Lawrence Summers and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin were just two of the well-known economists to take part in this Center for Business and Government conference.

STUDENT NEWS

Presidential Interns Selected Encouraging students to enter the public sector is a priority at the Kennedy School, and news that 35 students — the largest number ever selected from the school — were chosen as presidential management interns is certainly encouraging. The PMI program, established by Executive Order in 1977, and administered by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, is designed to attract the best and brightest graduate students all over the country into federal service.

WAPPP Honors Students Her passion for working with inner-city youth and her commitment to improving quality of life in the inner city have earned Lynne Lyman MPA 2001 the Barbara Jordan Award, which recognizes outstanding student leadership of a graduating woman student. Lyman has worked extensively in mentoring and tutoring programs and in local politics in the Los Angeles area before coming to the school.

Therese Leung’s MPP 2001 WAPPP award-winning PAE, “Building Assets for Women”, provided Boston’s Center for Women and Enterprise (CWE) with a feasibility study about offering Individual Development Accounts (IDA), savings accounts that provide matching funds from government and foundations. Leung also designed an IDA program for CWE to launch in two years.

ACADEMIC NEWS

Rwandan Tragedy An excerpt from Samantha Power’s soon-to-be-published book, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, due out in March 2002, appears in the September issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Power, executive director the Carr Center for Human Rights, chronicles the United States’ tepid response to the 1994 slaughter of 800,000 Tutsi in Rwanda, describing it as the “fastest, most efficient killing spree of the 20th century.”

Of the Internet Persuasion “The Art and Science of Persuasion” — KSG’s first distance learning course — will begin January 2002. Taught by Professor Gary Orren, this online course will use Harvard’s case method to teach the art of persuasion. Orren’s class features a persuasion self-assessment tool.