In April of 2010, The Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy, The University of Tennessee Obesity Research Center, The University of Tennessee Center for Public Health, and The University of Tennessee Health Science Center convened the conference, Building Healthy Communities: A Workshop bringing together public administrators, administrators, policy makers, and concerned citizens. The report and recommendations from that conference are now available.
Prominent speakers from diverse backgrounds – industry, academia, and government – provided their opinions on what the important issues are in the STI and sustainable economic growth nexus. A variety of issues were discussed, but generally the overarching matters were the role of STI for global competitiveness and issues related to energy technology/sustainability.
I had the privilege of delivering a lecture earlier this week as part of a conference honoring the 85th birthday of former Senate Majority Leader Howard H. Baker Jr. The conference took place at the University of Tennessee at the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy. The conference was a stark reminder of a bygone era in American politics when our governmental institutions worked and where our elected officials could argue and debate but in the end come together to find solutions and come to agreement for the greater good.
The perfect storm of problems associated with health and health care will not be immediately remedied by the historic passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Although opportunities abound, we are faced with deep-rooted challenges related to our ability to afford the reforms, inadequate infrastructure and scarce resources, sometimes paralyzing partisanship, and competing [...]
In April of 2009 many young Iranians took to the streets to protest what they saw as a gross injustice: the victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over the reformist candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi. These protesters felt the election had been rigged and that Mousavi, and by default the Iranian people, had been cheated. These protests were based [...]
This is the central question that participants will grapple with in an up-coming workshop at the Baker Center for Public Policy on the future of governance. People around the world are disillusioned with government. In the United States, voting rates are down and the approval ratings of the major parties are near historic lows. At [...]