University Lectures presents Van Jones.

Van Jones is president and co-founder of Rebuild the Dream, and co-host to CNN’s Crossfire reboot.

Recently named a co-host to CNN’s Crossfire reboot, Van Jones is president and co-founder of Rebuild the Dream, a platform for bottom-up, people-powered innovations to help fix the U.S. economy. A Yale-educated attorney, Jones has written two New York Times Best Sellers: “The Green Collar Economy,” the definitive book on green jobs, and “Rebuild the Dream,” a roadmap for progressives in 2012 and beyond. In 2009, Jones worked as the green jobs advisor to the Obama White House. There, he helped run the inter-agency process that oversaw $80 billion in green energy recovery spending.

Jones is the founder of Green For All, a national organization working to get green jobs to disadvantaged communities. He was the main advocate for the Green Jobs Act, signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2007, the first piece of federal legislation to codify the term “green jobs.” Under the Obama administration, the Green Jobs Act has resulted in $500 million for green job training nationally. Jones had also worked in social justice for nearly two decades and is the co-founder of two social justice organizations—the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and Color of Change.

The Office of Multicultural Affairs presents Black to the Future: The Attack on Civil Rights and the Return of Jim Crow Justice

Keynote Speaker – Dr. Umar Johnson

Presented in partnership with The Black Voice

The Douglas Bilken Landscape Urban Education Lecture Series presents
as part of the
2014-2015 Surveillance & Segregation in 21st Century Schools:
Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Against the Social Ecology Of School Discipline: Teaching for Love, Justice, and Joy with Crystal T. Laura, Ph.D.

Crystal T. Laura, Ph.D. – teacher, activist, author – will discuss her new book, Being Bad: My Baby Brother and the School-to-Prison Pipeline, a riveting account of her younger brother’s odyssey through school and to prison. She makes an eloquent and urgent argument that schools can only succeed with all of our children when they are built on a foundation of “love, justice, and joy,” a pursuit she describes as “dangerous and worthwhile.”

Crystal T. Laura, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of educational leadership and co-director of theCenter for Urban Research and Education at Chicago State University, and a volunteer teacher at St. Leonard’s Adult High School for formerly incarcerated men and women. Among her publications are Being Bad: My Baby Brother and the School-to-Prison Pipeline (2014) and Diving In: Bill Ayers and the Art of Teaching Into the Contradiction (co-edited with Isabel Nunez and Rick Ayers, 2014). By day, she explores teacher education and leadership preparation for learning in the context of social justice with the goal of training school professionals to recognize, understand, and address the school-to-prison pipeline. During the second shift, she co-parents two marvelous boys who give her work in the field of education particular urgency.