Elmhurst College Takes a Yearlong Look at Democracy and Civic Engagement

Elmhurst College will welcome Jon Meacham, Michael Eric Dyson, Jeffrey Toobin and Naomi Wolf to campus this fall to participate in The Democracy Forum, the college’s yearlong series of lectures and cultural events designed to illuminate the problems and promise of democracy.

The Democracy Forum kicks off Thursday, Sept. 15, with Dyson, radio host, author of April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Death and How It Changed America and sociology professor at Georgetown University. Dyson will present Dr. King for the 21st Century as part of the Rudolf G. Schade Lecture Series. A book-signing will follow.

On Thursday, Sept. 22, the College will welcome Toobin, a senior analyst for CNN and staff writer for The New Yorker. Toobin, who has covered some of the nation’s most prominent legal cases over the past 20 years, including the Kenneth Starr investigation of the Clinton White House, will present The Supreme Court: Inside a Secret World, as part of the Rudolf G. Schade Lecture Series.

Meacham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, former editor of Newsweek and current executive editor at Random House, will be the featured speaker during Elmhurst College’s second annual Niebuhr Forum on Religion in Public Life. Meacham will present The Content of Our Character: Race, Politics, Religion and Culture, and How Traditions Unite and Divide Us on Friday, Sept. 30.

Wolf, political consultant, author of the 1991 international bestseller The Beauty Myth and co-founder of the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, will present Citizen Empowerment 101 on Thursday, Oct. 20. 

Lectures begin at 7 p.m. at Hammerschmidt Chapel, 190 Prospect Ave. Admission is free and open to the public.

Note: The documentary film based on Wolf’s book, "The End of America," will be screened at 11:15 a.m. and 7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 18, at Illinois Hall, Schaible Science Center,190 Prospect Ave.