The role and form of government in solving the nation’s major issues will be discussed in an all-day conference this Friday.
Coordinated by the UT Roosevelt Institute, the “Government By and For Conference” will feature a number of speakers and panels focusing on solutions for some of the U.S.’s most pressing issues. The conference will be on Friday from 9 a.m. to 7:45 p.m. It will take place in the Toyota Auditorium of the Howard Baker Center for Public Policy. The Issues Committee and the Baker Center co-sponsored the event.
The Roosevelt Institute is a university think-tank that studies issues and policy ideas that would better the community, both on a local level and at large.
Julia Ross, the UT chapter president, described the Institute’s purpose further.
“Our goal is to take the resources available at the university,” said the sophomore in microbiology, “… to do research and implement policy through a variety of grants and publications opportunities that the campus network offers us to make things better in our local Knoxville community, but also to look at policy on a grander scale on the national and even international level.”
The conference is based off a report of collaborations from all 80 Roosevelt chapters. The Institute surveyed a few thousand millennials to see what they thought the ideal government would look like for the U.S. and what they expected of government.
“What came out of it was this expectation that government should serve in four roles,” Ross explained. “Government should be a lawmaker, government should be a body that engages its citizens, government should be an innovator and government should be a server of the public good.”
Based off those results, the theme and focus of the conference came about.
Eric Dixon, Institute member and senior global studies major, said that the conference will start a conversation on the national outlook.
“The whole conference is about dialogue about very important, pressing issues that are facing our country,” Dixon said. “So hopefully they’ll come away with both new and specific and general ways to think about those problems outside of that political sphere that we kind of operate in the U.S. now.”
There will be several panels, lectures and discussions throughout the day, featuring distinguished speakers, UT faculty and members from the main New York branch of the Roosevelt Institute.
The keynote speaker is Dr. Gar Alperovitz. Aside from currently serving as the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland, he’s also been involved with Cambridge University, Harvard’s Institute of Politics, the Institute for Policy Studies and a Guest Scholar at Brookings Institution. Alperovitz has authored several books and delivered the keynote address at the Green Party’s 2012 National Convention.
Dixon said that the main reason for bringing Alperovitz as the keynote speaker is because he is known for presenting alternative policy ideas that “aren’t very mainstream, but good for our communities.”
Having such a large conference is perhaps a considerable achievement for UT’s branch of the Roosevelt Institute, considering that the student group only started in last fall.
Dixon said that the success of getting the conference planned and running is a testament to the UT Roosevelt Institute’s success.
“I think it’s absolutely huge that we’ve been able to pull this together. … I think it’s indicative of our desire to collaborate and build coalitions on our campus and our community,” Dixon said.
The conference is free and open to the public. A student ID is required for students.
Lunch will be provided for those who registered for the conference, but Ross and Dixon said that there will be food available for those who didn’t register.
Any and all are welcome to the conference.
“If you are at all interested in politics or government or social issues generally, there will be something very interesting to you,” Dixon said. ” … We put a lot of time into this and we think it has a lot of substance, a lot of important substance that we should be discussing.”
