It’s hard to imagine what kind of event could bring these individuals (and dozens more) with such diverse resumes under the same roof, but once again, organizers, including founder and former event president Douglas McElhaney are pulling it off.
For the sixth year in a row, USF St. Petersburg will host current and former diplomats, academics from faraway places, journalists, public health professionals and others at the St. Petersburg Conference on World Affairs. It takes place Tuesday through Friday, Feb. 20-23 at the campus’s University Student Center.
The idea is to foster big-picture perspectives on an incredibly broad array of issues, both for students and the general public, which is invited to attend.
“The goal is to bring about provocative but thoughtful analysis of the international issues of the day. This has been our only agenda every year,” said Dr. Thomas Smith, a co-founder of the conference and professor of political science and director of the USFSP University Honors Program, in a written statement. “Over these years, the conference has exposed students to people and ideas they wouldn’t otherwise encounter as well as brought the campus and the community closer together.”
The conference opens Tuesday night with a keynote from Ambassador Thomas Pickering, who, over the course of a 50-year career in the Foreign Service, became a Career Ambassador, the highest achievable rank one can earn. He’s now Chairman of the Board of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.
The title of the keynote address? “American Foreign Policy: Challenges and Opportunities.”
In a phone interview with CL, Pickering said his address will be a wide-ranging exploration of “the changing atmosphere in the world in which foreign policy and security policy has to take place,” the specific challenges occurring in specific regions (such as dealing with nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea) and potential paths ahead.
Attendees looking to hear how President Donald Trump and Trumpism may end up killing or saving us all someday may be disappointed, though.
Pickering said the issues he plans to discuss on Tuesday — as well as during the three panel discussions in which he’ll participate during the conference — are decades in the making. Examining them, he explains, goes much deeper than talking about who’s president.
He does, though, acknowledge that there’s a relationship between the two — especially as the Trump administration seeks steep cuts to diplomacy and international aid.
“I didn’t come to talk about American domestic politics, but inevitably, they are part of the foreign policy picture,” he said.
The panels that follow on Wednesday and Thursday run the gamut.
Among them are “Rethinking Puerto Rico in the wake of Maria,” “How’d we get hooked? The opioid epidemic and what to do about it,” “Are China and Russia today’s expansionist powers?” and “What on earth are U.S. Troops doing in Africa?”
Other panels will examine #MeToo, health care policy, the “faltering” European Union and cyber warfare.
And while many discussions will likely eschew Trump talk in favor of the bigger picture, one discussion will ask panelists to grade the president on his foreign policy.
Though campus politics likely won’t come up in these public discussions, the event is happening at an unusual time for faculty, staff and students at USF St. Pete. Currently, some state lawmakers are pushing a proposal in Tallahassee that would strip USF’s St. Pete and Sarasota campuses of their independence. USF St. Pete has been a separately accredited campus since 2006. In that time, the institution has grown from a sleepy satellite campus for commuters into a bustling semi-residential campus with a variety of academic programs along the city’s busy downtown waterfront.
It’s unclear whether a centralized university administration would return the USF system to the Tampa-centric attitude it had before. But local lawmakers who oppose the effort to re-consolidate the campuses say they hope to defeat it.
This article appears in Feb 15-22, 2018.