Free and open to the public, the panel discussion begins at 5:30 p.m. in the Toyota Auditorium at Baker Center.

The panel discussion will be led by Glenn Reynolds, law professor and creator of Instapundit.com. He will provide an overview of the Fourth Amendment and then launch into the discussion about privacy and transparency.

Other panelists are:

• Suzi Allard, associate professor of information sciences, who will discuss the impact on her field of information science.
• Michael W. Berry, professor of electrical engineering and computer science and director of the Center for Intelligent Systems and Machine Learning, who will discuss data mining.
• Brandon Prins, professor of political science, who will discuss these issues from a global and national security perspective.

From 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., the Baker Center Ambassadors will take a copy of the Constitution to the Pedestrian Walkway and invite students to sign it. They also will have a copy in the center’s rotunda that students can sign from 9:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. They will be handing out pocket-size copies of the Constitution.

C O N T A C T :

Nissa Dahlin-Brown (865-974-8681, nissa@utk.edu)

Former Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana will deliver the Ashe Lecture on August 27, and journalist and author Tom Brokaw will give the Baker Distinguished Lecture on November 13.

The center will highlight its first decade of work with an exhibit and reception in the Baker Center Rotunda on September 4.

“This is an exciting time for the Baker Center,” Director Matt Murray said. “Senator Baker, who celebrates his eighty-eighth birthday on November 15, wanted to create a place where the campus and community could learn more about major issues facing our country.

“He also envisioned a place where students and faculty could nurture a ‘think tank’ atmosphere and become a source of expertise in the national discussion. We’ve made great strides toward that goal, and we’re excited as we plan the center’s future, focusing especially on energy and environmental issues, governance, and global security.”

Here’s the fall lineup. Events are free and open to the public unless other noted:

August 27—1:30 p.m., Baker Center Toyota Auditorium—Lugar will present Ashe Lecture.

August 29—3:30 to 5:00 p.m., Toyota Auditorium—Joshua Fu, UT associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, will talk about modeling in climate change as part of the Baker Forum on Energy and the Environment.

September 4—4:30 to 6:00 p.m. Tenth anniversary reception will be held in the Baker Center Rotunda.

September 17—5:30 p.m., Toyota Auditorium—Constitution Day panel discussion will feature several UT faculty members: Suzie Allard, associate professor of information sciences; Michael Berry, professor of electrical engineering and computer science and director of the Center for Intelligent Systems and Machine Learning; Brandon Prins, associate professor of political science; and Glenn Reynolds, law professor.

September 26—3:30 to 5:00 p.m., 416 Dougherty Engineering Building—Jim Shortie, a professor at Penn State University, will talk about agricultural and environmental economics as part of the Baker Forum on Energy and the Environment.

October 12—10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Toyota Auditorium—Working in collaboration with UT and city officials, students will develop suggestions for a parking policy for the future renovated Cumberland Strip. Check bakercenter.utk.edu for more information about how to participate.

October 24—6:00 to 7:30 p.m, Toyota Auditorium—Panelists from several universities will discuss emerging challenges to global security.

October 24—3:30 to 5:00 p.m., Toyota Auditorium—J.B. Ruhl, David Daniels Allen Distinguished Chair in Law at Vanderbilt University, will talk about environmental law as part of the Baker Forum on Energy and the Environment.

November 6—12:40 to 2:10 p.m., Toyota Auditorium—2013 Women’s Leadership Summit. The topic will be “Sustainable Quality of Life.” Co-sponsored by UT Center for Sustainable Business and Development.

November 13—1:30 p.m., University Center Auditorium—Tom Brokaw will give the Baker Distinguished Lecture. A Patrons Lunch will be held prior to the lecture. Cost is $250 per person and reservations are required. The free public lecture will be held at 1:30 p.m. in University Center Auditorium, 1502 Cumberland Avenue.

November 14—3:30 to 5:00 p.m., Toyota Auditorium—Bruce McCarl, a professor of agricultural economics at Texas A & M University, will talk about biofuels and climate change as part of the Baker Forum on Energy and the Environment.

Established in 2003, the Baker Center seeks to further the public’s knowledge of the US government and public policy and to encourage civil leadership and public service. The center sponsors programs to encourage informed discussion, with a special focus on engaging young people in policy issues and public service.

For more information about the Baker Center, visit bakercenter.utk.edu.

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CONTACT:

Nissa Dahlin-Brown (865-974-8681, nissa@utk.edu)

Mead will present a lecture titled “American Strategy in the Atomic Age” at 5:00 p.m. on April 2. At noon on April 3 there will be a panel discussion on “Public Intellectuals and Blogging” featuring Mead and Glenn Reynolds, professor in the UT College of Law and author of the blog Instapundit.

Both events are free and open to the public. They will be held in the Toyota Auditorium of the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy.

Mead’s visit is sponsored by a number of groups that cooperated to bring him to campus: the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy, Y-12 National Security Complex, the College of Arts and Sciences, the UT Humanities Initiative, the Department of History, and the Center for the Study of War and Society. The events are part of a project on the history of the Atomic Age, currently under construction as part of the partnership between UT and Y-12.

Mead is the James Clarke Chase Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College and editor at large of The American Interest. Until 2003, he served as the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for US foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. Until 2011, he also was a Brady-Johnson Distinguished Fellow in Grand Strategy at Yale and taught in Yale’s International Security Studies Program.

Mead is the author of the Via Meadia blog at www.theamericaninterest.com, where he writes regular essays on international affairs, religion, politics, culture, education, economics, technology, literature, and the media. Mead’s writings are frequently linked to and discussed by major news outlets and websites such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, the Financial Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, Harper’s, The Washington Post, and RealClearPolitics, as well as by foreign periodicals.

He serves as a regular reviewer of books for Foreign Affairs and frequently appears on national and international radio and television programs. In 1997, he was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in the category of essays and criticism.

His most recent books include Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World, which won the Lionel Gelber Award, and God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World.

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C O N T A C T :

Cynthia Tinker (865-974-0128, ctinker@utk.edu)

Michael J. Higdon

Higdon in "Crimes of the Heart" at the Oak Ridge Playhouse.

While serving as a judicial law clerk, Michael Higdon remembers walking into the judge’s office and finding him in the middle of reading a legal brief—sound asleep.

Higdon, now an associate professor and director of the College of Law’s legal writing program, said that experience helped him understand the impact of good, and bad, legal writing.

“I got to see what types of writing helped and hurt cases,” he said.

Not all good writers are good legal writers, Higdon said. Legal writing is technical, logic-based, and thorough yet succinct. It’s written for busy, skeptical readers.

“I like the challenge of figuring out what your reader needs to know even before they know they need it,” he said. “Our legal writing program at UT teaches students how to do this.”

Higdon serves as member of the national Board of Directors for the Legal Writing Institute.

A South Carolina native, Higdon earned his bachelor’s degree in English from Erskine College and his master’s degree in communication studies from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.

“My mother always said I should be a lawyer because I was so good at arguing my way out of things,” he quipped.

Higdon graduated first in his University of Nevada law school class in 2001and served as editor-in-chief of the Nevada Law Journal. After graduating, he spent a year as a law clerk for a judge on the U.S. Court of the Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Before coming to UT in 2009, Higdon practiced commercial and employment litigation with a Las Vegas law firm and then taught for five years at the University of Nevada, Boyd School of Law.

Doug Blaze, dean of the College of Law, calls Higdon a “true innovator and national leader” in the field of legal writing. “In addition, his cutting-edge scholarship explores the often difficult interface between gender and the law, particularly with regard to LGBT issues.”

One of Higdon’s most recent publications, published this past summer in the Indiana Law Journal, is “To Lynch a Child: Bullying and Gender Nonconformity in Our Nation’s Schools.” The piece likens the bullying of LGBT youth to the physical and spiritual lynching of black children in years past.

In his spare time, Higdon enjoys acting and working behind the scenes in community theater. Last fall, he played both a lawyer in Crimes of the Heart at Oak Ridge Playhouse and an aspiring opera singer in Lend Me a Tenor with the Foothills Community Players. He also serves on the board of the Foothills Community Theater.

Glenn Reynolds

Reynolds holds a piece of lionfish sushi, from a piece he did for "Popular Mechanics."

Glenn Reynolds, the Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law, has been called upon to serve as an expert in … well, almost everything.

He’s a teacher, an author, a contributing columnist, and a web TV correspondent. He’s penned scholarly books, but also writes for mainstream publications including The New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal. He’s a regular columnist—dubbed the “resident contrarian”—for Popular Mechanics magazine. He’s testified before congressional committees on space law, international trade, and domestic terrorism.

But most people worldwide know Reynolds because of his blog: Instapundit.

Since 2001, this renaissance scholar has contributed his two cents on everything from politics to popular culture on the blog. And it gets fourteen million page visits a month.

In April 2011, the New York Times featured Reynolds in “Big Blogs on Campus,” a feature about university-based bloggers around the country.

The newspaper described Instapundit as “a ‘thought leader’ in social networking circles” and notes that it “reads more like a Twitter feed than academic discourse, with a relentlessly updated selection of links to sites and news bytes that Professor Reynolds agrees with, disagrees with, or despises.”

In 2007, Forbes.com listed him as number seven in its “Web Celeb 25″ feature, which it said was “a list of the biggest, brightest, and most influential people on the Internet.”

That story called Instapundit “the apotheosis of academic blogs, the inspiration for many that have followed” and quotes Reynolds describing his readers as “people on Capitol Hill,” “technogeeks,” and “a truck driver who e-mails me regularly from the road.”

Blaze said he sees the blog as a form of outreach, giving Reynolds a venue for communicating some of his scholarly pursuits to a general audience in a very digestible and entertaining way.

Reynolds’ multi-media pursuits go hand-in-hand with his academic research.

“One of the big themes in my research is the power of the individual in light of recent technology,” he said.

Reynolds, who earned his bachelor’s degree from UT and his law degree from Yale, teaches a class on constitutional law and administrative law, as well as seminars on Internet law, national security law, science and technology, and space law.

In his spare time, Reynolds enjoys scuba diving.

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C O N T A C T :

Amy Blakely (865-974-5034, ablakely@utk.edu)