Dartmouth will host a 2024 Election Speaker Series leading up to the Nov. 5 election and beyond, bringing in policy leaders, public officials, and analysts from across the political spectrum to discuss the most pressing issues facing American democracy today.
Among the speakers in the series, which is sponsored by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences and Dartmouth Dialogues, will be Vice President Mike Pence, who will speak at Dartmouth on Oct. 31, five days before the election. Pence is speaking out publicly in favor of conservative values and has said he will not endorse either former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris.
U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, a first-term Democrat from Pennsylvania, will also speak at Dartmouth next month.
And the speaker at the conclusion of the series in February will be Anita Hill, a Brandeis University professor whose testimony in 1991 alleging sexual harassment by Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas sparked a national conversation on the issue.
Other speakers include civil rights leader Sherilynn Ifill, conservative commentator Bill Kristol, and polling expert Harry Enten ’11.
President Sian Leah Beilock says the series is an important addition to Dartmouth Dialogues, which, among other topics, took up the Israeli-Hamas war with invited speakers and faculty members exchanging ideas and sharing perspectives with the whole community.
“These upcoming speakers, and the new Election Series itself, reinforce our commitment to bringing a variety of perspectives to campus as we promote civil dialogue, bridge-building, and finding solutions,” President Beilock says. “In our partisan times, it’s even more important that universities help students learn how to think, not what to think, part of which we do through invited guests from across an ideological spectrum.”
The series is open to Dartmouth students and the general public and is part of a new, one-time-only course on the 2024 election that will give 70 students a chance to interact in a small-group setting with many of the speakers.
The course, cross listed by the Rockefeller Center and the Department of Government, will be taught by Russell Muirhead, the Robert Clements Professor of Democracy and Politics; Herschel Nachlis, associate director and senior policy fellow at the Rockefeller Center, and a research assistant professor of government; and William Wohlforth, the Daniel Webster Professor of Government.
“The team-taught course on ‘The 2024 Election’ will feature some of our most experienced professors at Dartmouth on a critically important topic,” says Rockefeller Center Director Jason Barabas ’93. “The faculty team aims to showcase a range of policy perspectives and issue debates, often by bringing high-level thought leaders to campus. The course will be a great learning opportunity for students, and it fits quite well with the mission of the Rockefeller Center to facilitate cross-cutting dialogues as it helps to prepare the next generation of policy leaders.”
Nachlis praised the efforts of Dartmouth leadership, the Rockefeller Center and its staff, particularly Assistant Director Dvora Greenberg Koelling, who spearheaded the Speaker Series, and the faculty colleagues who collaborated to design the course, professors Muirhead and Wohlforth, for their efforts to make this project a reality.
“I don’t think there’s another course like this anywhere else in the country,” says Nachlis. “To bring to Dartmouth top experts on many aspects of the election from diverse ideologies and identities, and to assemble a teaching team with diverse expertise and interests, all in such a short time, is remarkable. But Russ, Bill, Dvora, and I wanted to engage the campus and community in this hugely important and controversial election.”
A key element of the class and the premise of Dartmouth’s approach to dialogue is that it is built on a foundation of listening and mutual respect, he says.
“Politics is about engaging ideas and people, not shouting them down. A liberal arts education is about engaging ideas and people, not shouting them down. The course reflects that,” Nachlis says.
Also, Dartmouth’s place as a stop for New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary has long brought the presidential election to campus, he says, but in recent years efforts by the Democratic National Committee to reshuffle the primary schedule has called into question New Hampshire’s continued spot at the start of the political calendar.
“Dartmouth has long had a front-row seat to American politics and political campaigns,” Nachlis says. “I think in this class we’re making good on that unique opportunity by bringing some of the best and the brightest to our students and our community, even if presidential politics and national campaigns shift a little bit away from New Hampshire.”
Information about registration, video streams of the events, and full biographies of the speakers are available on the Election Speaker Series website. Here is the series schedule, which is subject to change:
Sherilynn Ifill
Sept. 24, Sherilynn Ifill will speak on “Reimagining a New American Democracy, Racial Equity, and the Constitution,” 5-6 p.m., Filene Auditorium. The inaugural Vernon E. Jordan Jr., Esq., Endowed Chair in Civil Rights at Howard University School of Law, Ifill served as NAACP president and as director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund from 2013 to 2022.
Bill Kristol
Sept. 26, Bill Kristol will speak on “The Future of Conservatism, Our Parties, and Our Politics,” 5-6 p.m., Filene Auditorium. Kristol, a founder of the Weekly Standard and frequent media commentator, served as chief of staff to Education Secretary William Bennett in the Reagan Administration and as chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle in the George H.W. Bush administration.
Jennifer Harris
Oct. 10, Jennifer Harris, virtual only, details to come. Harris has served as director of the Economy and Society Initiative at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and was formerly special assistant to the president in the Biden administration. She has also served on the National Security Council and the National Economic Council and was a member of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s policy planning staff in the Obama administration.
Ben Rhodes
Oct. 17, Ben Rhodes will speak on “Foreign Policy, the Obama Administration, and the World as It Is,” 5-6 p.m., Filene Auditorium. Rhodes is a political commentator whose work includes co-hosting the podcast Pod Save the World. He is chair of National Security Action, which he co-founded with current Biden Administration National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in 2018. Rhodes served as a speechwriter and as deputy national security advisor to President Barack Obama.
Elbridge Colby
Oct. 22, Elbridge Colby will speak on “Foreign Policy and Denying China’s Rise,” 5-6 p.m., Filene Auditorium. Colby is co-founder and principal of The Marathon Initiative, a nonprofit policy center developing strategies “to prepare the United States for an era of sustained great power competition” with a significant focus on China. He served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development in the Trump administration.
U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa.
Oct. 23, Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., details to come. Fetterman served as mayor of Braddock, Pa., and was elected lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania in 2018. He won a close-fought race for Senate in 2022 against Republican Mehmet Oz, despite suffering a stroke in May of that year, helping secure the narrow Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate. His iconoclastic politics have been a hallmark of his tenure in which he has broken with both the progressive and centrist wings of his party on a variety of issues.
Vice President Mike Pence
Oct. 31, Vice President Mike Pence will speak on “Conservatism, the Presidency, and the Future of American Democracy,” 5-6 p.m., Hanover Grand Ballroom. The 48th vice president of the United States and 50th governor of Indiana, Pence, a Republican, ran for president this cycle on his conservative record and has said he will not be endorsing either former President Trump or Vice President Harris.
Jeannie Suk Gersen
Jeannie Suk Gersen will speak on “The Supreme Court and the Future of American Democracy,” 5-6 p.m., Filene Auditorium. Gersen is the John H. Watson Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Before joining the Harvard faculty in 2006, she served as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice David Souter and to Judge Harry Edwards on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
Harry Enten ’11
Nov. 14, Harry Enten ’11 “Explaining the 2024 Election,” 5-6 p.m., Filene Auditorium. Enten became one of the early practitioners of data journalism when he was hired as senior political writer at FiveThirtyEight, where founder Nate Silver dubbed him the “Whiz Kid” for his sharp analysis of politics using polling data, demographics and history. Enten is currently senior political data reporter and the host of CNN’s Margins of Error podcast. He will speak at Dartmouth the week after the election to crunch the numbers and add his historical analysis of the results.
Anita Hill
Feb. 20, Anita Hill, 5-6 p.m., Hanover Grand Ballroom. Hill is a 1980 graduate of Yale Law School and a professor of Social Policy, Law, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis. Her talk will explore the 2024 election, women’s rights, and gender politics.
The Election Series, in collaboration with the Hop, will also include a slate of movies via Democracy on Camera. The four films each probe different threats to the democratic system, examining how the weakening of community increases polarization, exposing efforts to erase the separation of church and state, reconsidering how the U.S. could have better responded to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and ending with a classic political detective story. The series will include guest speakers with connections to the topics and will be hosted by Dartmouth faculty.
Democracy on Camera—Loew Auditorium:
Sept. 29 at 4 p.m.: God & Country. Discussion follows with guest speaker attorney Nik Nartowicz ’07 from Americans United.
Oct. 3 at 7 p.m.: War Game with guest speaker retired Major Gen. Linda Singh.
Oct. 8 at 6:30 p.m.: Join or Die with guest speaker Robert Putnam, author of the book Bowling Alone.
Nov. 3 at 4 p.m.: Special free screening of All the President’s Men.