TWU Fellows’ Photo Response to “Why Do You Do What You Do?”

Texas Women’s University, in partnership with the Boone Family Foundation, Cecelia & Garrett Boone Donor Advised Fund of the Dallas Women’s Foundation and the Embrey Family Foundation became the ninth fellowship to join our Public Voices Thought Leadership Project from June 2012 through June 2013. The only fellowship to combine faculty fellows with nonprofit leaders (grantees of the Boone and Embrey foundations), its success has been remarkable. During the fellowship period, 19 fellows produced 105 concrete pieces of thought leadership including published op-eds in major outlets ranging from CNN to The Guardian to The Dallas Morning News, as well as many radio and TV appearances. Collectively, TWU Public Voices fellows far exceeded the stated targets of the fellowship, with a success rate of over 500%.

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The program garnered successes early and continued until its completion. The first op-ed, written by Ellen Magnis, ran in the international outlet The Guardian just four days after the fellowship launched in June 2012. Because of her op-ed, Ellen was invited and took part in a live Q&A discussion with feminist author Naomi Wolf on The Guardian’s website. Five days later, Katie Pedigo’s op-ed about the Trafficking Victims Protection Act was published in the Dallas Morning News. Just two days after Katie’s op-ed ran, Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison signed on as cosponsor of the bill.

Anna Clark published soon after the launch of the fellowship program and went on to write a total of 9 op-eds in major outlets including The Christian Science Monitor, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, and Al Jazeera. Anna was asked to speak at a Senate hearing on a bill that would end the sale of shark fins in Texas. Joy Strickland’s open letter to President Obama on U.S. drug policy led the opinion page of CNN last November and started a conversation with almost 500 comments on the op-ed itself and was “liked” on Facebook over 1100 times.

TWU fellows have written about everything from immigration and gun control to education and the environment. They have shaped public opinion, public policy, and each other. Over the course of the program, fellows investigated how and why their knowledge and experience matters, grappled with their right and responsibly to shape history, and used their voices to change the world.

The Week In Review

Notable O.E.P. Stories for the Week Ending in August 24th, 2012

Alex Prager, “Deborah”

Two of our reported successes this week deal with Missouri Representative/Senate candidate Todd Akin’s indefensible (though even this is contested), “folkloric” comments regarding the biological processes informing rape, pregnancy, and female physiology. The remaining two address similarly hot-button topics – men with eating disorders and the United States’ aging prison population, and just what to do with them – in a studied and cool manner that we’ve happily come to expect from our prolific alumni. All timely and utterly necessary appraisals of the various truths of our “now.”

	While a definite stigma persists as to the so-called truths and lived reality of eating disorders, a good portion of the conversation centers upon young girls and women – keeping with many medi- cal, psychoanalytic, and societal “tradi- tions,” it seems. Men have only recently been more fully conceptualized as hav- ing eating disorders; Abby Ellin‘s NYT article testifies on their behalf.
	In her own words: “Little Margaret found her voice this week.” Indeed, and it’s one of subtle irony and insight: PVF Fellow Margaret Martonosi writes candidly about MO Rep. Todd Akin, all the while maintaining a rhetorical/ideo- logical distance indicative of a thinker who’s spent time sitting with her mind, crafting her voice, and enacting close readings. She asks questions – how, why? – and is unafraid to highlight the hypocrisies of Akin’s social proclivities.
	“When Representative Todd Akin said that cases of ‘legitimate rape’ do not result in pregnancy,” muses Susan Celia Greenfield, “he was simply artic- ulating a widely-held medical belief. In second-century Rome that is.” This is an opinion worthy of PBS’s “Need to Know” designation and one, we might all agree, so deserving of attention.
	Can such a thing as “compassionate release” for aging prisoners exist? Perhaps the most notable aspect of Tina Maschi‘s HuffPo article persists as its understated ability to incite inquiry in readers (including myself), doing so by proffering points-of-view that some might consider inconsequential or even inflammatory. But what progress can be made without the willingness to talk, to question, to offer insight? We comm- end Tina for having the tenacity to approach, and critique, this subject.

Because I can’t seem to help myself, and in celebration of his one-hundred-and-ninth birthday this year, I’ll include an excerpt of a clipping from George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Why I Write” (found on Brain Pickings, one of those places online in which I easily and freely become lost, as if in a vortex of ideas). This is also another of those “But I promise you, it relates!”-type moments:

“And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a POLITICAL purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.” (emphasis mine)

- J. J. Morr

Freedom, Foliage, and the Final Frontier: End of September Updates

Hello everybody, this is Taryn (dedicated intern), here to catch you up on some of the latest OpEd Project successes.

There’s been so much action this week – with teams in NYC, Dallas, Chicago, and at Yale.  In Dallas, we presented to Women Moving Millions.  In NYC, we ran public programs and held media meetings.  Our Chicago team – Debbie Seigel, Michele Weldon, Katherine Lanpher and Zeba Khan — will be running a public program on October 1st, hosted by Northwestern University, with forty women in the room (a record).

Successes this week included:

*Qanta Ahmed published an op-ed on Saudi women in today’s NY Daily News, which was the most emailed article of the day. Qanta is now on her 20th published column since coming through OpEd project, many of which have been featured in the Washington Post and USA today. Read You Don’t Know Saudi Arabian Women. 

*Marielle Anzelone, an urban ecologist, had a gorgeous column in the NYT  this week on the beginning of Autumn –
 it’s the first of a 13-week online column on urban ecology that was offered her after she published her first op-ed ever in May, in the NYT print edition, after coming through The OpEd Project. Read: Autumn Unfolds in a Patch of Urban Forest. 

*Yale Scholar Laura Wexler (part of our OpEd Project at Yale fellowship program)  had a beautiful CNN column on the Troy Davis execution, and the unreliability of eyewitness identification and memory. As a result of this, Laura will be on Minnesota Public Radio today.  Listen to the interview.

*Also,Yale astrophysicist Meg Urry wrote a great CNN piece on the expanding galaxy – her fourth for CNN in the past few months that we’ve been working with her (she also did one for The Huffington Post). Yesterday, CNN offered Meg a monthly column, and potential TV spots.  Find Meg’s columns here.

*Finally, Fordham/Princeton scholar Carina Ray (we are launching OpEd Project fellowships at Princeton and Fordham both in the next two months) published an enlightening article in the Huffington Post this week titled The Gaddafi Mercenary Myth; and Sarah Fitts, who came through our NYC public program just this last weekend, published her persuasive piece Freedom is an Electric Car, also in the Huffington Post.

Wow.  What a week!