A senator and a scholar, both of whom have helped shape the national debate over important issues of the day, will visit the University in upcoming weeks as guests of the Chubb Fellowship at Timothy Dwight College.
Senator Phil Gramm (R-Texas) will present a lecture on "Investment-Based Social Security and Medicare" at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 19, in Rm. 127 of Law School, 127 Wall St.
Henry Louis ("Skip") Gates Jr., the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, will discuss "The Black-Jewish Relationship" at 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 24, in the Law School's Levinson Auditorium. This talk was originally scheduled for the fall, but was delayed due to scheduling conflicts.
Both events are free and open to the public.
Senator Gramm. Senator Phil Gramm first won election to Congress as a Democrat in 1978, and was re-elected in 1980 and 1982. In 1983, when the Democratic leadership removed him from the House Budget Committee after he coauthored the Reagan economic program, he resigned and went back to Texas to run as a Republican. He was the first Republican in the 100-year history of his district to win a seat in the House.
Gramm is now in his third term in the Senate, where he is active in efforts to put the funding for Medicare on a firmer basis and to win approval for the balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. In 1984, he was elected with the most votes that any candidate for statewide office had ever received in the history of Texas. In 1990, he was re-elected with the highest percentage of votes any Senate candidate had received in a Texas general election in more than 50 years.
Three pieces of landmark economic legislation bear his name: the Gramm-Latta Budget and the Gramm-Latta Reconciliation acts and the Gramm-Rudman balanced budget bill. The Gramm-Latta bills reduced federal spending, strengthened national defense, mandated the 1981 tax cut and implemented President Reagan' s economic program. From 1985 until Congress repealed it in 1990, Gramm-Rudman cut the deficit by 40 percent and reduced the size of government relative to the size of the economy by 10 percent.
Gramm was chosen twice by his colleagues to serve as chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. He is the author of several books, including "The Role of Government in a Free Society" and "The Economics of Mineral Extraction."
Scholar Gates. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is a 1973 graduate of Yale College, where he majored in history. He also holds degrees in English language and literature from Clare College, University of Cambridge. He taught English and African-American studies at Yale (1979-85) and at Cornell University (1985-90) before joining the faculty of Harvard University in 1991
Gates is the author of "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man," "Colored People: A Memoir," "Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars," "The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism" and "Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the Racial Self." He is general editor of "The Norton Anthology of African-American Literature" and is coeditor of Transition magazine, which was designated as the "Best New Journal in the Social Sciences and the Humanities" in 1993 by the Association of American Publishers. A staff writer for The New Yorker, Gates has published essays, reviews, interviews and profiles in both scholarly and popular publications.
An outspoken advocate of affirmative action, Gates serves on numerous academic and civil boards and committees, including the Schomburg Commission for the Preservation of Black Culture and the American Civil Liberties Union National Advisory Council. In addition to fellowships from the Ford and Mellon foundations, his numerous honors include a MacArthur Prize, the Zora Neale Hurston Society Award for Cultural Scholarship, the Norman Rabb Award of the American Jewish Committee and the Tikkun National Ethics Award.
The Chubb Fellowship is devoted to encouraging and aiding students interested in the operation of government and in public service careers. The program was established in 1936 by Hendon Chubb, a member of the Class of 1895S.