Great Questions Raised at CT Forum on Civility

From left to right, The End of Civility? panelists David Gergen, Gina Barreca,
Connie Schultz (screen), Stephen Carter, & Christopher Buckley

Now that our first Forum of the Season, The End of Civility? is over, it's truly "the end of civility" - in one sense, at least.

However, there's no end to the questions we all have about civility. We were inundated with audience questions for the panelists during Intermission - many more questions than we could possibly address in the Q&A during the Forum's second half. For now, we can only imagine Stephen Carter's response to the question, Who are we to judge what is civil behavior? or Christopher Buckley's facial expression when asked, In 20 years, will there be anyone left who knows what civility is?

Here are just a few of the thoughtful and provocative questions that we're continuing to think about and discuss. We hope you do the same!

• Is incivility a leading or trailing social indicator?
• How is the loss of civility linked to a sense of hopelessness, a sense of loss of the "civil contract"?
• How can we be a moral leader around the world when we exhibit such vitriol and lack of civility in our public discourse?
• Is an attitude of "we're all in this together" a central element of a civil society? Have we lost that?
• How do we break the cycle of ever-increasing incivility, disrespect, and intolerance?
• Don't you think there's a huge correlation between the lack of religion and the lack of civility?

Connie Schultz to Moderate CT Forum on Civility

We are thrilled to once again welcome Connie Schultz to The Connecticut Forum as moderator for our first Forum this Season, "The End of Civility?" on Saturday, October 2, 2010.  Panelists for this Forum include David Gergen, Christopher Buckley, Stephen Carter, and Gina Barreca.

A nationally syndicated columnist for The Cleveland Plain Dealer and PARADE magazine's column "Back Page,"  Schultz won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for columns that judges praised for providing “a voice for the underdog and the underprivileged."

During the 2008 presidential race, she was a frequent guest on The Charlie Rose Show and also offered her Midwesterner's perspective on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show, HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher and C-SPAN’s Washington Journal.  

Schultz is the author of two books published by Random House: …And His Lovely Wife, a memoir about her husband Sherrod Brown’s successful 2006 race for the U.S. Senate, and Life Happens – And Other Unavoidable Truths, a collection of essays.

In 2005, Schultz won a Scripps Howard National Journalism Award and a National Headliner Award, both for commentary.  She was a 2003 Pulitzer Prize finalist in feature writing for her series, The Burden of Innocence, which chronicled the ordeal of Michael Green, who was imprisoned for 13 years for a rape he did not commit.  The week after Schultz’s series ran, the real rapist turned himself in after reading her stories.  The series won the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Social Justice Reporting, the National Headliner Award's Best of Show and journalism awards from Harvard and Columbia universities.

In 2004, Schultz won the Batten Medal, which honors "a body of journalistic work that reflects compassion, courage, humanity and a deep concern for the underdog."  Recently, the Urban League of Greater Cleveland awarded Schultz the Whitney M. Young Humanitarian Award.

She has moderated two previous CT Forums: God in 2009 with Rabbi Harold Kushner, Christopher Hitchens, and Reverend Peter Gomes; and A World of Change in 2010 with Bob Woodward and Tina Brown. 

Here's a clip of Connie in action last Season at A World of Change.

Local Author, Academic and Humorist Gina Barreca Joins Civility Panel

The Connecticut Forum Announces:
Gina Barreca to Join David Gergen and Christopher Buckley at
The End of Civility?
Saturday, October 2, 2010

Deemed a “feminist humor maven” by Ms. Magazine and “Very, very funny. For a woman” by Dave Barry, Gina Barreca is most recently the author of It's Not That I'm Bitter: How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Visible Panty Lines and Conquered the World. She has appeared on 20/20, 48 Hours, NPR, the BBC, The Today Show, CNN, Joy Behar, and Oprah to discuss gender, power, politics, and humor.

Her earlier books include the bestselling They Used to Call Me Snow White But I Drifted: Women's Strategic Use of Humor, and Babes in Boyland: A Personal History of Coeducation in the Ivy League; her books have been translated into several languages, including Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, and German. She’s the editor of seventeen books, including The Signet Book of American Humor and The Penguin Book of Women’s Humor as well as The Erotics of Instruction and A Sit-Down With the Sopranos.

You may recognize Barreca's name from her weekly column in The Hartford Courant, "Irreconcilable Differences". She also writes for the "Brainstorm" section of The Chronicle of Higher Education, blogs for Psychology Today, and occasionally spars with her former co-author (of I'm With Stupid: One Man, One Woman, and 10,000 of Misunderstandings between the Sexes Cleared Right Up) Gene Weingarten in his "Below the Beltway" column in The Washington Post. With degrees from Dartmouth College, Cambridge University, and the City University of New York, Barreca is Professor of English and Feminist Theory at the University of Connecticut.

Dr. Barreca on her female students and their fear of not dating:

David Gergen Joins "Civility" Panel

The Connecticut Forum Announces:

David Gergen to be a Panelist at
The End of Civility?
Saturday, October 2.

Few know the political backroom as well as David Gergen. As an adviser to four U.S. presidents and a senior political analyst for CNN, Gergen has made a career of bearing witness to some of the most compelling political figures of our times. In 2000, he published the best-selling book, Eyewitness to Power: The Essence of Leadership, Nixon to Clinton.

These days, Gergen works as a political journalist and analyst. He was the first managing editor of Public Opinion, a magazine affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute, and from 1985-1986 he worked as an editor at U.S. News & World Report, where he remains an editor-at-large. Gergen’s career in television began in 1985, when he joined the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour for Friday night discussions of politics. Today, he appears frequently on CNN as an analyst for Anderson Cooper 360 and The Situation Room.

Gergen is also a professor of public service and the director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, having joined the Harvard faculty in 1999. He is active as a speaker on leadership and sits on many boards, including Teach for America, The Aspen Institute, and the Center for Global Development. He is a member of the Washington D.C. Bar and the Council on Foreign Relations, and holds 18 honorary degrees.

He graduated with honors from both Yale College (1963) and Harvard Law School (1967), and served as an officer in the U.S. Navy. In 1971, Gergen joined the Nixon White House as a staff assistant on the speech writing team, a group of heavyweights that included Pat Buchanan, Ben Stein, and Bill Safire. Two years later, he took over as director. Gergen went on to become the Director of Communications for Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, a counselor on domestic and foreign affairs for Bill Clinton and his Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, and an adviser to the 1980 George H.W. Bush presidential campaign.

For more information on Gergen, visit his website or his Harvard faculty profile.

David Gergen on the issue of civility during the 2008 Presidential Campaign: