Jan. 10, 2018

This piece is presented by Augustana University.

Tickets were gone quickly for the 2018 Boe Forum on Public Affairs featuring Condoleezza Rice, who served as the 66th U.S. secretary of state. The annual event is sponsored by Augustana University and the Center for Western Studies.

Rice will speak at 7:30 p.m. March 20 in Augustana’s Elmen Center, 2505 S. Grange Ave.

The event is free and open to the public, but tickets are required. They were gone in a matter of hours. Rice, who also served as national security adviser under President George W. Bush during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, will discuss “America’s National Security and the World.”

“Since its inception in 1995, the Boe Forum on Public Affairs has sought to provide access to individuals who can address events, issues or problems of worldwide or national concern and of broad public interest,” said Harry Thompson, executive director of the Center for Western Studies. “The Boe Forum Committee’s selection of Dr. Condoleezza Rice to address the topic of national security fulfills in an especially timely way the mission of the Center for Western Studies to improve the quality of social and cultural life in the Northern Plains region.”

Augustana University President Stephanie Herseth Sandlin agreed.

“Augustana is honored to host Secretary Rice, a renowned scholar, author, professor and stateswoman, as the 2018 Boe Forum speaker,” Herseth Sandlin said. “During her service to our country over the past 30 years, Condoleezza Rice helped lead American foreign policy during some of history’s most significant events — from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that followed. Her insight and perspective on the topic of national security in the world today will no doubt be both highly engaging and thought-provoking.”

About Condoleezza Rice

Rice is the Denning Professor in Global Business and the Economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution and a professor of political science at Stanford University. She is also a founding partner of RiceHadleyGates LLC.

From 2005-09, Rice served as the 66th secretary of state of the United States, the second woman and first African-American woman to hold the post. Rice also served as President George W. Bush’s national security adviser from 2001-05, the first woman to hold the position.

Rice served as Stanford’s provost from 1993-99, during which she was the institution’s chief budget and academic officer. As provost, she was responsible for a $1.5 billion annual budget and the academic program involving 1,400 faculty members and 14,000 students. In 1997, she also served on the Federal Advisory Committee on Gender-Integrated Training in the Military.

From 1989 through March 1991, Rice served on President George H.W. Bush’s National Security Council staff. She served as director, senior director of Soviet and East European Affairs and special assistant to the president for national security affairs. In 1986, while an international affairs fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, Rice also served as special assistant to the director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

As a professor of political science, Rice has been on the Stanford faculty since 1981 and has won two of the highest teaching honors — the 1984 Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 1993 School of Humanities and Sciences Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching.

She has authored numerous books, including two best sellers, “No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington” (2011) and “Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family” (2010); and co-authored “Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft” (1995) with Philip Zelikow; “The Gorbachev Era” (1986) with Alexander Dallin; and “Uncertain Allegiance: The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army” (1984). Rice is also the author of “Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom” (2017).

In 1991, Rice co-founded the Center for a New Generation, an innovative, after-school academic enrichment program for students in East Palo Alto and East Menlo Park, Calif. In 1996, CNG merged with the Boys and Girls Club of the Peninsula, an affiliate club of the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. CNG has since expanded to local BGCA chapters in Birmingham, Atlanta and Dallas. She remains an active proponent of an extended learning day through after-school programs.

Since 2009, Rice has served as a founding partner at RiceHadleyGates LLC, an international strategic consulting firm based in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. The firm works with senior executives of major companies to implement strategic plans and expand in emerging markets. Other partners include former National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley and former Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates.

Born in Birmingham, Ala., Rice earned her bachelor’s degree in political science, cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Denver; her master’s degree from the University of Notre Dame; and her doctor of philosophy degree from the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver.

Rice is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been awarded 11 honorary doctorates. She resides in Stanford, Calif.

About the Boe Forum

Through the Boe Forum on Public Affairs, the Center for Western Studies has hosted many of the world’s most influential leaders. Past Boe Forum speakers are:

• Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson (2017)
• Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (2016, in memoriam)
• Microsoft executive Robbie Bach (2014)
• Governor of Utah and U.S. Ambassador to China and Singapore Jon Huntsman (2013)
• Director of Google Ideas Jared Cohen (2012)
• U.N. Human Rights High Commissioner Mary Robinson (2011)
• U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (2010)
• President of Pakistan Pervez Musharraf (2009)
• Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Sandra Day O’Connor (2008)
• President and First Lady of Mexico Vicente Fox and Marta Fox (2007)
• Vice President Al Gore (2007)
• Presidential Envoy to Iraq L. Paul Bremer (2006)
• <p “>Mayor of New York City Rudy Giuliani (2004)
• Journalist Susan Dentzer with Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich (2003)
• Jordan’s Queen Noor (2001)
• Archbishop Desmond Tutu (1999)
• First Lady of the United States Barbara Bush (1998)
• Prime Minister of Great Britain John Major (1998)
• President of the former Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev (1996)
• President George H.W. Bush (1995)
• Gen. Colin Powell (1995)