Birmingham--The University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion will sponsor An Evening with Maria Echaveste and From Protest to Academic Freedom: Free Speech and Hate Speech on College Campuses lecture and a panel discussion led by Lata Nott of Newseum.
An Evening with Maria Echaveste is scheduled for Tuesday, September 12, 2017, in the UAB Hill Student Center Alumni Theater at 6:00 pm. Maria Echaveste serves as a senior fellow at the UC Berkeley Center for Latin American Studies where she has built a distinguished career working as a public policy consultant, lecturer, a senior White House official, long-time community leader, and corporate attorney. Her current work focuses on immigration, civic engagement, labor rights, and education. Additionally, she is a Senior Fellow at the Opportunity Institute, a recently formed non-profit working to accelerate improvements to our nation’s public education system. Before co-founding the strategic and policy consulting group NVG, LLC, in 2002, she served as Assistant to the President and Deputy Chief of Staff for President Clinton from 1998 to 2001. In that position, she focused on issues relating to immigration, civil rights, education, finance, Mexico and Latin America. She also previously served as Administrator of the Wage and Hour Division at the US Department of Labor from 1993 to 1997. Currently, Echaveste serves on the board of directors of the California Healthcare Foundation, the Level Playing Field Institute, and Mi Familia Vota.
From Protest to Academic Freedom: Free Speech and Hate Speech on College Campuses lecture and concluding panel discussion led by Lata Nott will begin at 6:00 pm on Tuesday, September 20, 2017, at UAB’s Heritage Hall in lecture room 102. Lata Nott is the executive director of the Newseum Institute’s First Amendment Center, which has offices at the Newseum, in Washington, D.C.; and at the John Seigenthaler Center, on the Vanderbilt University campus, in Nashville, Tennessee. Before that, she was a litigator in New York City at the law firms of Proskauer Rose and Chadbourne & Parke. In addition to her commercial litigation practice, she maintains an active pro-bono practice focused on asylum cases, and developed a proficiency in legal issues surrounding the Internet, data privacy, and cybersecurity, frequently contributing to Chadbourne & Parke’s technology law blog.
Critical Conversations is a campus-wide civic forum series that provides a platform for civil discourse. The goal is to foster a diverse, equitable, and inclusive community by using education and civil discourse as tools to encourage and empower UAB and its surrounding communities to engage, collaborate, and create solutions to social issues affecting our communities.
Both events are free and open to the public. To learn more, or if you have any questions, please visit the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion website or call us directly at (205) 934-8762. Students, if you will require accessibility accommodations for this event, please contact Disability Support Services at (205) 934-4205. Faculty and staff will need to contact the AWARE program (205) 975-9973 for similar accommodations.