Annual Dinner with Special Guest, Robert Barnett
Presidio Officers' Club, San Francisco
Thursday, June 12
6:00pm reception
7:00pm dinner and discussion
Please join us for our annual dinner event at the beautiful Presidio Officers' Club. Last year, over 150 alumni joined in a wonderful night of networking and discussion. This year, we are honored to have Robert Barnett, Director of Columbia's Modern Tibetan Studies Program, join us to speak about the current situation in Tibet.
In recent weeks, as deadly protests broke out in Tibet against the Chinese government, Barnett, an expert on contemporary Tibetan politics, has been on CNN, National Public Radio and Bloomberg Television. He has been quoted in TIME, blogged in The New York Times online edition and written an op-ed piece for The Wall Street Journal. And, he recently briefed actor Richard Gere, a close friend of the Dalai Lama.
Barnett, director of the Modern Tibetan Studies Program at Columbia’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute, is in the midst of a media storm. With Tibet closed off to journalists and few resources available for analysis and information since the protests spread to some 40 Tibetan towns, Barnett has become the go-to academic on Tibet. As an expert in the tiny field of Tibetan politics and the author or editor of nine books on modern-day Tibet, he has extensive sources within the region, the result of 20 years of research as a journalist and academic.
A journalist before becoming an academic, Barnett has a meticulously detailed map of recent Tibet-related protests throughout China. Started by a colleague who wants to remain anonymous, Barnett and other North American scholars update it constantly through a network of Tibetan and Chinese sources, Chinese newspapers, on-the-ground reports from tourists and other information, and disseminate it to news outlets.
