Jittery prof aims for mediocrity in commencement address

I’m all ready for Saturday’s Park University commencement address. My topic will be “Inciting Peace”. If you can’t make it to the ceremony, the speech will be recorded and posted online. It should be linked either at www.park.edu or www.park.edu/grads .

Most commencement speeches are dull, platitudinous, cliché-ridden monstrosities. I’m hopeful that mine can transcend the typical speech and achieve, at minimum, mediocrity. If I reach that goal, given the sorry state of most commencement speeches, perhaps my address will be remembered semi-fondly.

Peace media and counterterrorism project begins next week

I’m off to Uganda on Sunday to teach the first two seminars in a new peace media and counterterrorism project that I’m directing. The goals of the project are to discourage at risk people from being drawn into violent extremism and to create durable linkages between government, police, army, corrections, media, community and the at-risk population.

The first two seminars in December will be for members of the media. Seminars in 2012, which I will team teach with Park University criminal justice professors John Hamilton, Ken Christopher, and Carol Getty, will target police, military, and security officials.

For more details on the project, click here.

Stay tuned to this blog for dispatches from Uganda beginning on or around Dec. 13.