Monday, April 25, 1:30 p.m.
Presenter: Dr. Peter Bechtold

Since December 18, an “unprecedented revolutionary wave of demonstra­tions and protests” have occurred in the Middle East and northern Africa. With revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, culminating in the ouster of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak, major uprisings have followed in Bahrain, Yemen, Algeria, Jordan, Syria, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Mauritania.

For over three months, citizens have protested, demanding civil rights, better standards of living, and the ejection of ingrained autocratic regimes. These protests have garnered both attention and concern from around the world.

About the Presenter: Dr. Peter Bechtold

Dr. Peter Bechtold, chairman emeritus, Near East North Africa Area Studies, Foreign Service Institute, will speak to OLLI-UO in Portland members on these revolutions and uprisings. Dr. Bechtold is an award-winning professor of more than 11,000 U.S. government employees (State Department, DOD, Commerce, CIA, FBI, USAID, USIA) in intensive courses and long-term seminars, and has conducted private briefings for numerous ambassadors and flag officers.

He has taught graduate level courses and seminars at the Foreign Service Institute (General Norman Schwarzkopf was a student of Bech­told’s class on the Near East before taking the reins of the U.S. Central Command in 1988), Georgetown, George Washington, John Hopkins, Maryland, and Oregon Universities; Army, Naval, Air War Colleges; Marine Corps and National Defense Universities. Media appearances include MacNeil Lehrer, PBS, CNN, NPR, and overseas radio. Dr. Bechtold received Ph.D.s from Princeton University in Near East studies and political science. (http://www.drbechtold.com/)

This is a lecture not to miss. Friends and family are invited to attend.

Thursday, April 21, 5:30 p.m.
Presenters: Roy K. Johnston and David Kolb

How does a contemporary person find a place in a world transforming before our eyes? Like Ulysses we seek home, and there are treacherous seas and unknown dangers, so we need as much vision as we can find today. We need to find our place(s) and relocate ourselves where living in a place fully means being at home but also being open to all its tensions and unexpected possibilities. How can we be more open to those difficulties and opportunities, while also respecting the contours and history of our living places? Poet Roy K. Johnston and philosopher David Kolb will offer descriptions and visions from their opposed yet interrelated perspectives. Plato said that there was an ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy. But in their different ways poetry and philosophy can discern our new challenges and offer new visions of old truths.

About the Presenters

As a child, Roy Kahn Johnston wrote poetry, later completed the poetry require­ments for the USC Master of Professional Writing Program, and studied poetry at the Charles University in the Czech Republic and the William Joiner Center for War and its Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

He is published in Senses Magazine, Sacramento, CA; The Tribune, San Luis Obispo, CA; Big CityLit, New York City; New Times, San Luis Obispo, CA; Solo Café Anthology, Carpenteria, CA; War, Literature, & the Arts, United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, CO; and Soul Fountain, Queens, NY. His books include The System is Broken, Seeds of Tolerance, Kenosis; San Luis Obispo and Dissonance and Consonance.

David Kolb grew up mostly in the NewYork City suburbs, studied with the Jesuits in New York and Maryland, received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University, taught at Fordham University, the University of Chicago, Nanzan University in Japan, and has been at Bates College in Maine, as the Charles A. Dana Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the college. Since 2002, he has devoted himself full time to writing and lecturing.

Most of what he has written connects in one way or another to questions about what it means to live with historical connections and traditions at a time when we can no longer be totally defined by that history. He has explored this through German philosophers, through architecture and urbanism, and through experiments in new styles of writing and scholarship. In these differing areas one keeps seeing new kinds of looser, linked, and less centered unities emerging in cities, in architec­ture, in lives, and in texts and ways of writing.