BENJAMIN R. BARBER

BENJAMIN BARBER has combined a career as a distinguished scholar and political theorist with a life of practical commitment to democratic civic practices and the arts. He is an experienced educational and political consultant, public speaker, fund raiser, administrator, and television and theater writer/producer. As a scholar with a Ph.D. in government from Harvard University, he has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Haverford College, Princeton University, the City University of New York, Essex University (UK) and the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en sciences sociales in Paris; he has won Guggenheim, Fulbright and American Council of Learned Society fellowships and was awarded an honorary doctor of laws from Grinnell College.

AMONG BARBER'S FOURTEEN BOOKS are the classic Strong Democracy (translated into six languages) and the two Princeton University Press editions of his essays The Conquest of Politics (philosophical essays) and the forthcoming A Passion for Democracy (American essays), as well as his recent critical hit Jihad Versus McWorld (with over a half dozen translations). His new study of civil society A Place for Us: How to Make Society Civil and Democracy Strong (Farrar, Strauss/Hill&Wang) will be published in 1998. His novel Marriage Voices was published by Simon and Schuster in 1981 and appeared on several "best novel of the year" lists.

IN ACADEMIC ADMINISTRATION, Barber has for the last ten years been director of the Walt Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy at Rutgers University, where he also holds the Walt Whitman Chair of Political Science. In his capacity as director, Barber oversees an administrative staff of eight and another fifteen research and project personnel including a half dozen graduate students. He is responsible for raising and administering an annual budget of $600,000, primarily in foundation and government grants. The Center currently oversees eight programs that unite the theory and practice of democracy, including projects on service learning, technology and democracy, arts education, public space and the civic retrofitting of malls, the measurement of citizenship, global markets and global civil society.

AS A POLITICAL ADVISOR AND CIVIC CONSULTANT, Barber has acted as a counselor to dozens of organizations and agencies concerned with citizenship, civil society, community service, education and democracy. He is a frequent informal advisor to President Bill Clinton, and has contributed to major speeches. He has also consulted with German President Roman Herzog, the Mendes-France Center in Paris (parti socialist), the Political Academy (Volkspartei) in Vienna, and is on the German Land of Baden-Wurttemburg's Citizenship Council. He has drafted papers and lectured for the U.S. Information Agency and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and counselled the Corporation for National and Community Service. He speaks frequently in North America and Europe (he speaks German and French fluently) where many of his books and articles have appeared in translation. He also serves on the editorial boards of many journals including Government and Opposition in London, and he was the editor-in-chief for ten years of the prominent international journal Political Theory.

FOR TELEVISION AND THE THEATRE, Barber has written and directed in areas related to his commitment to democratic practice. With Patrick Watson he wrote and edited for television the prize-winning ten-part PBS/CBC series The Struggle for Democracy. He contributed to the British series Greek Fire and the Farmers' Insurance Corporation's prize-winning civic education PBS series The American Promise. He wrote and produced with Pacific Street films the educational video "Schools for Sale." His plays have been produced off-Broadway in New York as well as at the Berkshire Theatre Festival, Colorado College and the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth. His song lyrics for British tenor Martin Best have been recorded on EMI Records, and his libretto for George Quincy's opera Home and the River has been produced by Encompass Music Theatre in New York and by the Suffolk County (NY) Arts Festival.

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