The Leopold Lecture: A 35-Year Tradition
The Leopold Lecture: A 35-Year Tradition
By Michael J. Allen
Photography credit: Genie Lemieux, Evanston Photographic Studios
The Leopold Lecture marked its 35th anniversary in October 2024 with a talk on the urgency of climate change delivered by former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. Kerry helped broker the Paris Climate Agreement as Secretary of State in the Obama Administration and served as U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate during Biden’s presidency. His lecture in Cahn Auditorium stressed the need for action and urged young people to get involved.
Each fall the Leopold Lecture is a highlight on the university’s calendar, bringing a distinguished practitioner or commentator on US public policy or foreign affairs to Northwestern to address faculty, alumni, students, and staff on pressing issues of the day. The series was established in 1990 with an endowment created by the former students of Richard W. Leopold, the William Smith Mason Professor of History Emeritus, who taught diplomatic history at Northwestern from 1948 until his retirement in 1980.
The Leopold Lecture has welcomed to the Evanston campus statesmen like Secretary Kerry and former President of Mexico Vicente Fox; politicians Senator George McGovern and Congressman Adam Schiff; policymakers Anne-Marie Slaughter and Samantha Powers; journalists Seymour Hersh and Jane Mayer; historians Jill Lepore and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.; foreign policy thinkers Richard Haass and Anne Applebaum; and public-minded authors including Elizabeth Kolbert and Andrew Bacevich. Their appearances have often filled Cahn Auditorium with a diverse and interdisciplinary audience drawn from across campus and Chicago's alumni community.
For many years, Professor Michael Sherry worked with faculty colleagues and former Leopold students and benefactors to select each year’s lecturer. Since 2018, a faculty committee led by Michael Allen has nominated potential lecturers to Weinberg Dean Adrian Randolph, who consults with alumni before extending an invitation.
The Leopold Lecture is the first of several institutions created by former students to honor Professor Leopold.
Alumni also established the Richard W. Leopold Chair--currently held by Deborah Cohen and before that by Michael Sherry--as well as the Leopold Fellows program, which in 2024 made possible 33 student-faculty research collaborations.
In recent years the Leopold Lecture has been followed by a Q&A session led by a faculty member who researches matters proximate to the speaker's expertise. After the public event, the speaker typically has dinner or hors d'oeuvres with invited guests to allow for a more frank, informal exchange. When schedules permit, speakers also meet separately with a relevant undergraduate class or student group.
The entire affair aims to provide a taste of the kind of expert discourse on contemporary politics and policy that Richard Leopold provided in his three-quarter seminar, The History of American Foreign Policy, taught MWF at 8:00 AM in Harris Hall 108, which has since been named the Richard W. Leopold room.
Leopold Lecture '24
Left to Right: Northwestern alum Ivan Schlager, Weinberg College Class of 1984, Parent Class of 2022. John Kerry. Northwestern Provost Kathleen Hagerty. Karen Alter, Norman Dwight Harris Professor of International Relations, department of political science at WCAS. And Adrian Randolph, dean of the Judd A. and Marjorie Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Art History.