Richard Lugar to speak at IU Bloomington about Ukraine crisis
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Former U.S. Sen. Richard G. Lugar, a professor of practice in the Indiana University School of Global and International Studies, will speak Wednesday, April 23, at IU Bloomington about the U.S. and European response to the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.
"Ukraine Matters -- A Vital Opportunity for Constructive United States-European Action" is the title of Lugar's address, which will be the closing lecture of the spring Global Perspectives Speaker Series presented by the School of Global and International Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences.
His lecture will begin at 4 p.m. in the Whittenberger Auditorium of the Indiana Memorial Union, 900 E. Seventh St. The event is free and open to the public.
Lugar is a fifth-generation Hoosier who served 36 years in the U.S. Senate. He retired in 2013 as the longest-serving member of Congress in Indiana history and the 17th longest-serving senator in U.S. history.
In the Senate, he exercised leadership on critical issues including nuclear nonproliferation, global food security, energy independence, foreign assistance reform, NATO expansion, preservation of the federal school lunch program and immigration reform.
He played an instrumental role in enacting U.S. sanctions on the apartheid government of South Africa, and he was a key figure in establishing U.S. opposition to the Marcos regime’s attempt to steal the 1986 election in the Philippines. He led numerous efforts to ratify arms control treaties, including the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the START Treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention and the New START Treaty.
In 1991, Lugar forged a bipartisan partnership with Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., to create the Nunn-Lugar Program, which was devoted to securing and destroying weapons of mass destruction in the former Soviet Union. Under Lugar's and Nunn’s active encouragement and oversight, this effort grew into a cornerstone of U.S. nonproliferation efforts worldwide and earned Lugar and Nunn multiple Nobel Peace Prize nominations.
In January 2013, Lugar joined the faculty of IU's School of Global and International Studies and announced that he was donating his senatorial papers to IU's Modern Political Papers collection, located at the Herman B Wells Library on the Bloomington campus. He also co-chairs the IU International Advisory Committee with former U.S. Rep. Lee Hamilton, whose congressional papers are also housed in the Modern Political Papers collection.
A graduate of Denison University in Granville, Ohio, Lugar attended Pembroke College at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. After serving in the U.S. Navy, he served two terms as mayor of Indianapolis and envisioned the unification of the city and surrounding Marion County into one government. Unigov, as his plan was called, set the city on a path of long-term economic growth. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1977.
For decades, IU has been a leader in global and international studies, teaching more foreign languages than any other American institution of higher education and housing 11 federally funded Title VI area studies centers, more than any other university. About 70 languages are regularly taught at IU Bloomington, which is home to federally funded Language Flagship programs in Chinese, Turkish and Swahili, and National Language Resource Centers in African and Central Asian languages.
The interdisciplinary School of Global and International Studies, with more than 350 faculty, brings together these strengths and draws upon internationally focused resources in other schools and departments at IU to expand international education opportunities for all students.
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Joanna Davis
- School of Global and International Studies
- Office 812-855-7270
- joedavis@indiana.edu