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Fall 2019
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Making Women’s Empowerment Mainstream

Condoleeza Rice believes that empowering women is an integral part to improving the world.

So it is only fitting that Johns Hopkins SAIS has created a lecture series to honor her: The Condoleeza Rice “Women Who Inspire” series. The goal of the series is to highlight women who reshape the world, confront global challenges, and who blaze the trails across all walks of life.

At the series’ dedication last May, Rice noted that during her time as Secretary of State [2005–2009], she found “the countries [that] were the most conflict-ridden all had something in common: They all devalued women.”

The May 2 dedication also marked the series’ first lecture, given by Ana Palacio, Spain’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs (2002–2004). An accomplished international lawyer specializing in international and European Union law, Palacio has dedicated her career to advocating for democracy. She began her lecture by quoting the opening line of Rice’s memoir: “Never be the helpless victim of your circumstances.”

Both Rice and Palacio believe that women’s issues should not be compartmentalized but instead be woven into daily affairs. Their ultimate goal? To see all women empowered to overcome injustice and inequity and emerge as victors.

Quotable
“The Russians, let me just make this clear, did not hack Facebook. They used the system as it was built. They are customers of Facebook. They are really good customers of Facebook. They know how to use it, and they did.”
Kara Swisher,

New York Times columnist,

Feb. 8, 2019
“Today’s young people could be the first generation of Americans that don’t do better than their parents, and that is a failure of leadership. In many ways, the failure to reform our own economic system has led to our current misguided approach to foreign policy. … The cost of doing nothing is not nothing.”
U.S. Rep. John K. Delaney, April 30, 2019
“If you could wave a magic wand and empower women, you would get purchase on so many other issues that bedevil the globe. If you want to do something about the population explosion, educate women, and they won’t have their first child at 12, and they won’t have 13 kids. If you want to do something about human trafficking, educate women, and they won’t be trafficked into the sex trade, one of the saddest elements that we see in modern slavery. If you empower women and you give them microloans or legal rights to property or to own a business, they will employ a whole village, and before you know it, that village will be better off.”
Condoleezza Rice,

former U.S. secretary of state,

May 2, 2019
“We see a creeping feeling of helplessness depriving many today of the boundless confidence that our generation enjoyed. We must re-instill that confidence in ourselves as citizens, in our democracies, in the liberal international order, in what is possible, and in the future.”
Ana Palacio,

former minister for foreign affairs for Spain,

May 2, 2019
“The United States Air Force is too small for what the nation is asking us to do. We have to restore the readiness of the force and increase the size of the force to create the Air Force we need to meet the needs of the National Defense Strategy.”
Heather Wilson,

secretary of the U.S. Air Force,

May 2, 2019
“We’re wrestling … with that dark isolationist gene in our national DNA. It’s clearly visible today on the extreme left of the Democratic Party and the extreme right of the Republican Party.”
Nicholas Burns,

U.S. ambassador to Greece (1997–2001) and to NATO (2001–2005),

April 9, 2019
“Because the proximate community is often the basic building block of democracy, it makes capitalism work for the many. … When capitalism works for the many, there is broad democratic support.”
Raghuram Rajan,

author of The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind,

April 12, 2019
“'Life, contrary to what many in this town believe, is not some personal public relations exercise. It is and must be more than that. It should be and ought to be something like a search-and-rescue operation: Search for that leader that hides within yourself, and then rescue others around you who need you.'”
Prince Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein,

former UN high commissioner for human rights,

his Commencement address to the Class of 2019, May 22, 2019
More Resources
To see all SAIS Campus events, visit events.sais-jhu.edu/#the-recap
Dispatch
Features

A Watershed Moment

As Johns Hopkins SAIS celebrates its 75th anniversary, the magazine sat down at 555 Pennsylvania Ave (the future home of the school), with Dean Eliot A. Cohen and Student Government Association President Shamaila Ashraf for a wide-ranging conversation about our changing world, the school’s future, and curricular changes that will be nothing short of transformational.

Confronting a Crisis

New faculty member Yascha Mounk is on a mission to strengthen liberal democracy.

On the Shoulders of Giants

During this 75th anniversary year, we celebrate the seminal contributions of early SAIS greats, whose intellectual DNA continues to run deep in their contemporary counterparts. Our second installment in a yearlong series.

Through the Years

Beginning from the School’s earliest days, we highlight SAIS’s rich history and important milestones.

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Sue DePasquale

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Skelton Sprouls

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