Announcing Gridlock...

Gridlock...Can Our System Address America's Big Problems? The Duke Sanford School of public policy is going to have a programmatic focus on this general topic up until the 2012 Presidential election. Of course we have a blog. David Schanzer and I have been talking this up in the hallway for the past year or so (his office is by the bathroom) and Dean Kuniholm has agreed to support this effort with speaker monies and the like. David does security policy and I do health policy, but we hope to engage a variety of interests, and to keep the structure loose enough to develop organically. Karen Kemp and Mary Lindsley are providing insight and elbow grease.

We mostly want to engage the students, to be involved and have a say, and to model grown up behavior in practicing talking about difficult problems.

At this point we are planning a post-election discussion on Nov. 3 (featuring Mac McCorkle and Frank Hill), and hope to formally announce soon that David Brooks, columnist for the NY Times will be coming to Duke on Nov. 9, 2010 to address this topic of 'Can our system address America's big problems?'

You can probably figure that we start from the point of answering this rhetorical question with 'no'.....but we don't have a choice. We must address the big problems. Lets get started.