GCPL Newsletter - January 2026 

As we return from winter break, we hope you had a great holiday season. This edition of the newsletter reflects both a moment of gratitude and a look ahead: we take time to honor the retirement and remarkable contributions of Kathy Luschek, one of the founding pillars of the Garfield Center for Public Leadership, and we share an exciting preview of the GCPL’s spring programming, including seminars, international travel, and our annual crisis simulation. We are looking forward to an engaging spring semester.  

The Retirement of Kathy Luschek 
Kathy Luschek recently announced her intention to retire from Hiram College. She will be wrapping up her engagement with the college early this month.  

During her time at the College – roughly two decades – she has worked primarily on behalf of the college’s Centers of Distinction, with a particular focus on the GCPL, and thus we want to take this opportunity to express appreciation for her service to the program and to thank her for the many contributions she has made to the GCPL. 

Kathy was one of the original founding members of the GCPL. From its earliest days, she worked with other founders to set the program on a path of innovation, strength and success. 

During her tenure, she played a key role in organizing the GCPL’s many events, managing the program’s finances, coordinating with the program’s many partners – both individuals and organizations – and participating in the GCPL’s array of extracurricular educational endeavors. 

In that latter capacity, she travelled with the GCPL students and administrators to Washington, D.C on several occasions, and was involved in establishing the GCPL’s ongoing and very fruitful partnership with the Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College, with which the GCPL hosts events in the nation’s capital. 

She also travelled with the GCPL on several study-away experiences to other countries, including Cuba, Panama, Mexico, the UK, Paris, South Korea, Iceland, and Czech Republic. 

These activities often required her to engage rapidly and strategically to challenging situations, whether those were student health crises in other countries, or health crises occurring with visiting guests to the College, or sudden cancellations of flights for major trips with the students, or getting stranded for a few days in a foreign country, or being subjected to surveillance by another country’s authorities (as far as we could tell), or having to corral the student cohort while Professor Thompson was questioned by the Cuban military police… etc. 

She also put in a lot of time working with high school groups so that the GCPL could run at-Hiram programming for high school students; this included making several trips to high schools and organizing camps for those students at Hiram. 

For all of these and for many more of her efforts on the GCPL’s behalf, we want to thank her and to wish her the best in her next endeavors. Thank you, Kathy! 

Preview of the GCPL’s Spring Semester Programming 
The GCPL will be hosting its spring seminar, as a virtual event, in the latter part of February. The title of that event is “Where’s the Party? Analyzing the Democratic Party’s Response to the Populist Challenge by Comparing it to Populism Responses in France and Italy.” 

The guest speakers for this seminar will be Brigitte Granville – an expert on French Politics at Queen Mary University in London – and Franco Pavoncello, who is an expert on Italian politics and the President of John Cabot University in Rome. 

In the first half of March the GCPL will travel to Italy, for a week in Florence, during which time we will be meeting with a variety of people to discuss the topic of populism with people in that country. Meetings have thus far been confirmed with Italian politicians, civil servants, a leading academic research institute, artists/architects, and medical practitioners, and we are now finalizing details for a few other meetings in order to round out the schedule. 

In early April the GCPL will be travelling to Washington, D.C., to host a seminar on the recent major cases of and most notable trends pertaining to the US Supreme Court. This seminar will be co-hosted by The Eisenhower Institute and will be held at the EI’s HQ in D.C., one block from the White House. 

The Speaker for this event is Derek Webb, who is a highly regarded federal law lawyer in D.C., a distinguished constitutional scholar at Catholic University of America, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Supreme Court Historical Society, the Chair of the Abraham Lincoln Institute, and a Senior Research Scholar at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. 

In early May the GCPL will be hosting its annual crisis simulation. This event was originally planned for the fall semester, but was rendered infeasible due to the impact of the government shutdown on air travel, which prevented our crisis simulation mentors from being able to get to Hiram. 

The topic of the seminar pertains to an international crisis involving the Iranian regime, although we may need to adjust that topic based upon whether that regime is still in power as of May (and depending on how events unfold with regard to Venezuela…). 


James Thompson, Ph.D.
Department of Political Science
ThompsonJA@Hiram.edu 

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