Forum Network

Kevin Valentine, Director of Senior Services for the City of East Cleveland

Helen S. Brown, resident of the city of East Cleveland.

Mildred Brewer, councilwoman, ward 4, city of East Cleveland.

Fr. Roy Bourgeois was born in Lutcher, Louisiana in 1938. He graduated from the University of Southwestern Louisiana with a Bachelor of Science degree in geology. After college Fr. Roy served as a Naval Officer for four years--two years at sea, one year at a NATO station in Europe, and one year of shore duty in Vietnam. He received the Purple Heart. After military service, Fr. Roy entered the seminary of the Maryknoll Missionary Order. He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1972, and he went on to work with the poor of Bolivia for five years before being arrested and forced to leave the country, then under the repressive rule of dictator and SOA grad General Hugo Banzer. In 1980 Fr. Roy became involved in issues surrounding US policy in El Salvador after four US churchwomen--two of them his friends--were raped and killed by Salvadoran soldiers. Roy became an outspoken critic of US foreign policy in Latin America. Since then, he has spent over four years in US federal prisons for nonviolent protests against the training of Latin American soldiers at Ft. Benning, Georgia. In 1990, Roy founded the School of Americas Watch, an office that does research on the US Army School of the Americas (SOA), now renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation or WHINSEC, at Fort Benning, Georgia. Each year the school trains hundreds of soldiers from Latin America in combat skills - all paid for by U.S. taxpayers. The School of the Americas Watch, located just outside the main entrance of Fort Benning and in Washington, DC, informs the general public, Congress and the media about the implications of this training on the people of Latin America. Roy has worked on and helped produce several documentary films, including 1983's "Gods of Metal" about the nuclear arms race and 1995's "School of Assassins." Both films received Academy Award nominations. Fr. Roy was the recipient of the 1997 Pax Christi USA Teacher of Peace Award. In December of 1998, Roy testified in Madrid before Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon seeking the extradition of Chile's ex-dictator General Augusto Pinochet. From 1999 to the present time, Roy has and continues to travel extensively, giving talks at universities, churches, and other groups around the country.

Timothy Beal is the Florence Harkness Professor of Religion at Case Western Reserve University. He has published twelve books and many scholarly articles on the cultural history of the Bible, religion and popular culture, and relations between critical theory and academic religious studies. He has also published essays on religion and American culture for The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, and The Cleveland Plain Dealer. He has been featured on national radio shows including NPR’s All Things Considered and The Bob Edwards Show.

William Claspy holds Bachelors and Masters degrees in English from Case Western Reserve University in addition to a Masters in Library Science degree from Kent State University. He has worked for the CWRU University Library since 1988 and is currently the Information Literacy Librarian at the Kelvin Smith Library.

Jon Hanson is the Alfred Smart Professor of Law and the Director of The Project on Law and Mind Sciences (www.lawandmind.com) at Harvard Law School. Professor Hanson graduated from Yale Law School in 1990, clerked for Judge José A. Cabranes, spent one year as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Yale Law School, and then joined the faculty at Harvard Law School in 1992. His teaching and scholarship melds social psychology, social cognition, economics, history, and law. His publications include: *The Blame Frame: Justifying (Racial) Oppression in America*, 41 HARV. C.R.-C.L. L. REV. 413 (2006) (with Kathleen Hanson); *The Illusion of Law: The Legitimating Schemas of Modern Policy and Corporate Law*, 103 U. MICH. L. REV. 1 (2004) (with Ron Chen); *The Situation: An Introduction to the Situational Character, Critical Realism, Power Economics, & Deep Capture*, 152 U. PENN. L. REV. 129 (2003) (with David Yosifon); and *Taking Behavioralism Seriously: Some Evidence of Market Manipulation*, 112 HARV. L. REV. 1420 (1999) (with Doug Kysar). Professor Hanson is currently editing a book, titled Ideology, Psychology, and Law (Oxford University Press) and conducting empirical research examining implicit policy attitudes and motives.

Jane Pauley was the co-host of *Today* from 1976 to 1989. After leaving *Today*, she anchored *Dateline NBC *for more than a decade, and in 2004 became the host of her own daytime program, *The Jane Pauley Show*. That same year, she published her memoir, *Skywriting: A Life Out of the Blue*, which became a *New York Times *bestseller. She is currently a contributor for a new NBC monthly series, *Your Life Calling with Jane Pau*ley.

Alan Khazei co-founded City Year in 1988 and served as its CEO until 2006. He is now the Founder and CEO of "Be the Change," an organization committed to building broadbased non-partisan citizen support for systemic solutions to our nation's problems that leverage the experience of social entrepreneurs, civic and communtiy leaders, and national service alumni. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School.

Edmund Morris has been researching Theodore Roosevelt for 30 years. His first book, *The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt*, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1980; followed by *Theodore Rex*, and now the concluding volume of the trilogy, *Colonel Roosevelt*. Morris is also the author of *Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan *and a brief biography of Beethoven, *The Universal Composer*. Born in Kenya and educated in South Africa, Morris is an accomplished pianist.

Before joining the faculty in 1988, Robert Strassfeld clerked for Judge Harrison L. Winter of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and then practiced for three years at the Washington, D.C. firm, Shea & Gardner. Professor Strassfeld teaches Torts, Federal Courts, Labor Law, and Legal History. He has published articles on theoretical aspects of causation in the George Washington and Fordham law reviews and on law and the Vietnam War in the Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Duke law reviews. He is coauthor of Understanding Labor Law. His current research includes continuing work on the legal history of the Vietnam War and a history of African American lawyers in Cleveland. He received his B.A. in 1976 (Wesleyan University), his M.A. in 1980 (Rochester), and his J.D. in 1984 (Virginia).

Elizabeth Hillman was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She attended Duke University on an Air Force ROTC scholarship, received a degree in electrical engineering, and served as a space operations officer and orbital analyst in Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Base, Colorado Springs. Before joining the Hastings faculty in 2007, she taught history at the U.S. Air Force Academy and law at the Rutgers University School of Law, Camden. She is a board member of the National Institute for Military Justice and legal co-director of the Palm Center, a public policy research institute at UCSB. She frequently lectures on U.S. military justice, policies, and culture, and her scholarship focuses on American military law and history since the mid-20th century. She is now studying the law and politics of strategic bombing and the scourge of military sexual violence. And she still roots for the Steelers.