Receive our RSS FeedThomas Friedman, Julian Bond to Speak at Williams College's 216th Commencement
Thomas Friedman
Mr. Friedman is a three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize - in 2002 for Distinguished Commentary, "for his clarity of vision, based on extensive reporting, in commenting on the worldwide impact of the terrorist threat" and in 1983 and 1988 for International Reporting for his coverage of Israel and Lebanon.
He began his career in London as a general assignment reporter for United Press International. A year later, he was sent to Beirut, where he remained until he joined The New York Times in 1981. He returned to the United States for a year before becoming the Times' Beirut bureau chief. For the next 26 months, Mr. Freidman covered the events happening around him, including the Sabra and Chatilla massacres, the American embassy and Marine bombings, the P.L.O. split and the Israeli withdrawal from Beirut. In 1984, Mr. Friedman went to Jerusalem as Israel bureau chief.
He took a year off in 1988 to write "From Beirut to Jerusalem," his book about the decade he spent reporting from the strife-ridden Middle East. The book, published in 1989, was on The New York Times bestseller list for 12 months, and won the 1989 National Book Award for non-fiction and the 1989 Overseas Press Club Award for the Best Book on Foreign Policy.
In 1989, Mr. Friedman was appointed the NYT's chief diplomatic correspondent in Washington, D.C. Over the next four years, his travels around the world followed then-Secretary of State James Baker and the end of the Cold War. In 1998, he was appointed chief White House correspondent and covered the transition to and the first year of the Clinton Administration.
Shifting his focus from politics to economics, Mr. Friedman became the newspaper's international economics correspondent in 1994. A year later, he became the Times' foreign affairs columnist, the fifth person to hold the post in the paper's history and a post he holds today.
Mr. Friedman is the author of "The Lexus and the Olive Tree," which focuses on globalization as the key factor shaping world affairs today. He argues that globalization is not just a phenomenon, but rather the international system that evolved in the wake of the Cold War. He views globalization as the integration of capital, technology, and information across national borders, creating a single global market and a "global village."
His 2002 book "Longitudes and Attitudes" is a compilation of his post-Sept. 11, 2001 biweekly columns, with commentary and a diary of his experiences and reactions during the period of crisis. He has said that the book is "not meant to be a comprehensive study of Sept. 11 and all the factors that went into it. Rather, my hope is that it will constitute a 'word album' that captures and preserves the raw, unpolished, emotional and analytical responses that illustrate how I, and others, felt as we tried to grapple with Sept. 11 and its aftermath, as they were unfolding."
His most recent book, "The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century" (2005), surveys the period between January 1, 2000 and March of 2004 in a search for the most meaningful events and representative trends, including the Sept. 11 attacks and war in Iraq, the increased technological connectivity and drift towards a more global community, with India and China and their "explosion of wealth in the middle classes" being case studies for the potential of globalization. Mr. Friedman asks whether this "'flattening' of the globe, which requires us to run faster in order to stay in place," has created a world that is becoming "too small and too fast for human beings and their political systems to adjust in a stable manner?"
Mr. Friedman received his bachelor's degree in 1975 in Mediterranean studies from Brandeis University. As an undergraduate, he spent semesters in Jerusalem and Cairo. After receiving his B.A., Friedman received a Marshall Scholarship to study at St. Antony's College, Oxford University. He received his master's degree in Modern Middle East Studies from Oxford. He has honorary degrees from Brandeis, Macalester, Haverford, and Hebrew Union College.
Julian Bond
Mr. Bond is chairman of the Board of the NAACP, a position he has held since 1998.
From his college days as a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to his present chairmanship of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Julian Bond has been an active participant in the movements for civil rights, economic justice, and peace, and an aggressive spokesman for the disinherited.
A native of Nashville, Tenn., Bond attended secondary school at the co-educational, progressive George School in Bucks County, Pa., graduating in 1957. He went on to Morehouse College, a traditionally African American college in Atlanta. There, he became active in the Civil Rights Movement. He was a founder of the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights, which directed non-violent protests that led to integration of Atlanta's movie theaters, lunch counters, and parks. He helped to form SNCC and worked as its communications director editing its newspaper. He left Morehouse in 1961 before graduation. He returned to graduate in 1971, receiving a B.A. in English after having served as editor of The Atlanta Inquirer, a protest newspaper.
Mr. Bond began running for a seat in the Georgia House of Representatives in 1965. That year, he was elected to a one-year term, but members of the House voted not to seat him because of his outspoken opposition to the war in Vietnam. He ran again in 1966, won and again was barred by the Georgia House. But after winning his third election, the United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Georgia House had violated Mr. Bond's rights in refusing him his seat.
Mr. Bond ultimately served four terms in the House and six terms in the Senate. At the 1968 Democratic Convention he helped unseat Georgia's regular delegates and was the first African-American to be nominated for vice-president even though he was too young to run. In the Senate, he was the first black chair of the Fulton County Delegation, the largest and most diverse in the upper house, and was involved with more than 60 bills that became law. His experiences in government led to the publication of a collection of his essays titled "A Time to Speak, A Time to Act," and a book, "Black Candidate – Southern Campaign Experience."
Mr. Bond has taught at Williams, Drexel University, Harvard University, and the University of Pennsylvania. He is a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the American University in Washington, D.C., and teaches history at the University of Virginia.
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DIRECTIONS: For building locations on the Williams campus, please consult the map outside the driveway entrance to the Security Office located in Hopkins Hall on Main Street (Rte. 2), next to the Thompson Memorial Chapel, or call the Office of Public Affairs (413) 597-4279. The map can also be found on the web at www.williams.edu/home/campusmap/
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