September 24, 2024
Last Thursday night, SMPA hosted our first public event of the year. Writer and editor Michael Tomasky led a conversation with SMPA associate director and associate professor Jesse Holland, SMPA adjunct instructor Jeanne Cummings, and SMPA senior Lydie Lake. Professor Holland spent 20 years as a journalist at AP, Professor Cummings was the Washington, DC deputy bureau chief at the Wall Street Journal, and Lydie spent the spring studying and reporting in Eastern Europe. The event topic was the role of the press in preserving democracy. It was a fascinating conversation that could have gone on for another hour. As Sarah Morrisette said, it sounded like listening to an intense dinner conversation.
All of which is to say, it was a Thursday night in SMPA.
Conversations like the one last week (and the one tonight and all the others we host) are part of what we do here. Interesting conversations are part of regular Washington, but ours are different. Whenever possible, we put a student on the stage with the speakers. You can listen to smart people tackle big ideas at think tanks, galleries and galleries all over town. What makes the talks here special is SMPA students. The thing we have that the Smithsonian, the Wilson Center, Busboys and Poets, and the rest don’t have, is you.
Your perspective matters. A lot of campaigns are done at you and experts opine about you, mostly without your involvement. Pundits talk about a political world in which they’ve made a career. Your career is in front of you. Your perspective is often discussed without you - that is both unfair and intellectually suspect. And selfishly I like to see students on stage because it’s a chance to show off how terrific SMPA is. You and your classmates have shared the spotlight with the senior government officials, leading Democratic and Republican political consultants, award-winning journalists, and more. You have more than held your own every time.
When I tell panelists that a student will be part of the discussion I sometimes get an “Oh that’s nice” sort of reply (sometimes skeptically). By the end of the event the panelists who haven’t been around SMPA have learned what we already know - SMPA is full of smart, interesting and committed people who study, shape and tell the stories that matter.