Forum Network

Jim Madigan joined WGBY/57 Public Television in December, 1990, serving first as Senior Producer for Public Affairs and now as Director of Public Affairs. He currently hosts two weekly programs -- *Doctors on Call*, a medical information and call-in program, and *The State We're In*, which focuses on Massachusetts politics as well as national and international affairs.

John S. Carroll retired as editor of the *Los Angeles Times* in July. The paper's managing editor, Dean P. Baquet, will succeed him. Carroll had been with the *Times* since 2000 and was praised as an editor with a broad and deep vision for the newspaper and for his support for aggressive, in-depth reporting. During his tenure as editor, the *Times* won 13 Pulitzer Prizes, the most successful stretch of the paper's 123-year history. And a series on the Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, which provided care so poor that it put the health of some patients in danger, won the Gold Medal for Public Service this year from the Pulitzer board.

Leonard Barkan is the Arthur W. Marks '19 Professor of Comparative Literature. He has been a professor of English and of Art History at universities including Northwestern, Michigan, and NYU. Among his books are The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism and Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture, which won prizes from the Modern Language Association, the College Art Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, Phi Beta Kappa, and the PEN America Center. He is the winner of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been an actor and a director; he is also a regular contributor to publications in both the U.S. and Italy, where he writes on the subject of food and wine. He has recently published Satyr Square, which is an account of art, literature, food, wine, Italy, and himself. His current projects include a scholarly study of the relations among words, images, and pleasure from Plato to the Renaissance, and a book on Michelangelo's drawings and writings.

Dava Sobel has spent her entire professional life writing. Beginning fresh out of college as a technical writer for IBM, she moved quickly into journalism in January of 1970, just in time for the first Earth Day. Her two all-time favorite full-time jobs were as science writer for the *Cornell University News Bureau*, where her beat included everything from astronomy to veterinary medicine, and staff reporter in the Science News department of *The New York Times*, covering psychology and psychiatry. For twenty years she wrote freelance for numerous magazines, most notably *Harvard Magazine*, *Omni*, *Science Digest*, and *Discover*, as well as *Audubon, Life*, and *The New Yorker*. Sobel saw her first total solar eclipse in 1991, as a columnist with *Travel Holiday*, and attended Space Camp for an article in a retirement magazine called "New Choices". Sobel was born in 1947 in the Bronx.

Timothy Patrick McCarthy is a scholar and activist who teaches at Harvard University. After graduating with honors from Harvard, Dr. McCarthy went on to receive his M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in American History from Columbia University. He is a specialist on the history of American race relations and civil rights, democratic social movements, political rhetoric, and media culture. McCarthy is the co-editor of two books, *The Radical Reader* (2003) and *Prophets of Protest* (2006), both of which were published by *The New Press*. An award-winning teacher and public servant, Dr. McCarthy is the Academic Director of the Clemente Course in the Humanities in Dorchester, MA, and the Founding Director of Harvard's Alternative Spring Break Church Rebuilding Project, where he brings students down South each year to help rebuild African-American churches that have been burned in arson attacks. He lectures widely across the country, and is a frequent media commentator.

Professor Peek Schacht knows the world and its workings quite well. She has had a distinguished career in both political and corporate communication and has influenced and experienced Washington and big business from the top-most levels. In 1979, she was national press secretary and communications director for President Jimmy Carter's re-election committee. In the 1980s, she was director of communications for the U.S. Senate Democratic Policy Committee. She later had a 12-year tenure as VP for communications and public affairs strategy for the Coca-Cola Company. Professor Peek Schacht brings this uniquely keen view to shaping the undergraduate program curriculum as well as her Leadership class. "There has been such a renewed interest in social advocacy and political leadership among this generation," she says. "Our program turns their wonderful idealism into a profession that can impact lives."