StuCo confirms 2005 MSE chairs

The Student Council announced the appointment of the 2005 Milton S. Eisenhower Symposium chairs this Tuesday, and confirmed the symposium's upcoming theme.

Juniors Emilie Adams, William Ares and Garvey Rene will co-chair next year's Symposium, which is entitled "American Mass Media: Redefining the Democratic Landscape."

According to the appointed chairs, the theme of the symposium aims to explore the role of media today in the political process, particularly because the political media itself has become newsworthy and increasingly viewed as partisan and divided.

The symposium will also deal with broad issues of race, gender and politics.

Co-chair William Ares explained that the development of the symposium's theme reflected his own observations of the country's political atmosphere.

"My personal experience with the Symposium led me to want to become involved," Ares said. "I want to bring a more balanced array of speakers to campus, speakers that are balanced in their political views and ideology, as well as in their race and gender."

According to Ares, the upcoming symposium's focus on media came from the fact that he was "engrossed in politics for the last two or three months. I was watching every news show that I could get my hands on."

When Ares was exploring possible ideas for the symposium, he suggested the "interplay of media and politics."

Ares added that he and his co-chairs planned to choose "well-known speakers, or speakers that are a little more well-known, and appealing to a broader base by addressing pertinent issues."

"Some of the speakers in this years symposium didn't fit," Ares commented, "and a lot of speakers don't stay on the topic of the symposium."

The decided topic of media and politics, Ares said, was "sufficiently broad, yet focused enough to cover different subtopics."

The new co-chairs also announced plans to improve publicity for MSE Symposium events.

Ares commented that he wanted "the majority of people to turn out."

"We are going to engage in a strong publicity effort focusing on other schools in the area, including colleges and high schools," Ares added, "and hopefully will use the Baltimore Sun and the CityPaper to get the word out."

Getting the Hopkins community to come to symposium events is also extremely important to Ares and the other staff members of the MSE team.

According to Ares, the MSE Symposium "is a huge cost to the University and to not have everyone benefit would be a crime."

Ares said he "looks forward to getting to know and to listening to people that I have looked up to."

Two people that Ares particularly wants to bring to Hopkins are Bill O'Reilly, host of the controversial Fox show The O'Reilly Factor, and Dick Morris, a political consultant and author who Ares considers to be "an absolute genius."

"Running the symposium is a lot of work," Ares said. "All of us on the team are insanely involved on campus, and time management is going to be important."

However, Ares added that he is proud of the upcoming team of co-chairs for being "diverse and balanced, and bringing different life experiences and ideologies" to the symposium.

Lectures slated for next fall will address the relationship between the economy and the media, healthcare and current gender issues.

The MSE symposium was founded in 1967, and is one of the few in the nation that is entirely run by undergraduates.

Every year an intensive process takes place to pick a theme and a team to plan and strategize the upcoming symposium.

The symposium broadly aims to address pertinent issues to the Johns Hopkins Community and its surrounding communities with lectures, debates and discussions.

In the past the symposium has brought such illustrious speakers as Nobel Prize winner Nelson Mandela and Academy Award winner Michael Moore.