Bruce Cole, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., will discuss “Boondoggle! The Struggle to Build the Eisenhower Memorial” in a 6 p.m. lecture Monday, Feb. 27, in James B. Woulfe Alumni Hall in Anderson Student Center on the St. Paul campus of the University of St. Thomas.
The talk is free and open to the public.
Bruce Cole
Cole is a presidentially appointed member of the Eisenhower Memorial Commission but is speaking at St. Thomas as a private citizen, not on behalf of the commission.
The Eisenhower Memorial was authorized by Congress 17 years ago but remains on the drawing board. Its design by Frank Gehry for the National Mall remains unfunded and is the target of a storm of criticism.
Cole, a former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, has had a ringside seat to the controversy. In his talk, he will tell the story of the memorial from its inception to today, and discuss the history of presidential memorialization (including Cleveland Garfield’s memorial) and the long process of building monuments in our nation’s capital.
The lecture is sponsored by the university’s Art History Department with support from the Communication and Journalism Department; College of Education, Leadership and Counseling; History Department; Philosophy Department; Terrence J. Murphy Institute of Catholic Thought, Law and Public Policy; a Faculty Development Distinguished Visitor Grant; and the Department of Art and Art History at St. Olaf College.
More information can be found here.
