Happy New Year!
As we return for the Spring, here in the Garfield Center for Public Leadership we are gearing up for a busy semester including many of our exciting programming elements. One of these main elements being our yearly international trip, this year taking place in Switzerland.
Preparation for the GCPL Trip to Switzerland
We are now in the intensive phase of prepping for our GCPL study-away trip and thus we spent much of December focused on this topic. This year the GCPL will be taking the Garfield Scholars to Switzerland. The trip will run from March 7-14, which is during Hiram’s spring break. We have decided upon a 3-city strategy for the trip and thus will be spending around two days in each of Geneva, Bern, and Zurich, along with an afternoon of exploration in the beautiful (and cheese famous) city of Gruyere.
The purpose of this trip is to examine issues relating to several pressing contemporary themes: immigration (the subject of the GCPL’s fall seminar), national financial policy (the subject of the GCPL’s spring seminar), healthcare (an on-going area of interest and focus for GCPL scholars and for the GCPL in general), and globalization (another perennial GCPL theme) especially focused on Swiss relations with NATO and the EU, during this time of tension/war between Russia and Europe. As preparation for this trip, we are benefitting tremendously from friends of the GCPL that have extensive contacts in and knowledge of Switzerland.
We are currently in the process of setting up meetings in each of the three cities that we will be visiting. Regarding Geneva, we have been corresponding with the World Trade Organization HQ and with the UN’s Geneva HQ, to arrange meetings with top officials from those organizations. In Bern, we are looking to arrange meetings with representatives of the Swiss government, and with US Embassy personnel. We are also very pleased that Professor Jim Kercher will be joining us for this trip. Professor Kercher often does research at the Paul Scherer Institute, which involves cutting edge science and medical research, just outside of Zurich. As such, we are nailing down the details of arranging our visit to that institute.
Meanwhile, the GCPL students are particularly excited about this trip, and are engaged in the preparation activities pertaining to our topics of exploration in Switzerland
James Thompson, Ph.D.
Department of Political Science
ThompsonJA@Hiram.edu
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