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Health & Fitness

Benedictine hosts author, activist and former politician Kennedy Townsend

Benedictine University will host Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the first female lieutenant governor of Maryland, who will give a public lecture and lead a series of workshops with students and faculty members as part of the Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellows program.

Kennedy Townsend will present “Get in the Bullring: How You Can Make a Difference” at 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday, October 29 in Scholl Hall, Room 101. The lecture, which is sponsored by Benedictine’s Office of the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, is free and open to the public.

Kennedy Townsend has a long history of accomplishment in the public arena and has made her mark in the private sector during the past six years. After two years at the financial services firm Lehman Brothers, she is now a senior advisor at a hedge fund run by the former treasurer of the World Bank.

In the public sector, Kennedy Townsend served in a variety of roles and worked on important public safety, higher education and public service issues. As Maryland’s lieutenant governor, Townsend had direct command over a variety of major cabinet departments including Economic Development and Transportation, State Police, Public Safety and Correction and Juvenile Justice. As deputy assistant attorney general at the U.S. Department of Justice, she worked diligently on the Police Corps, a program granting higher education scholarships to those who pledged to work as police officers.

Prior to serving at the Department of Justice, Kennedy Townsend spent seven years as the founder and director of the Maryland Student Service Alliance. There she led the fight to make Maryland the first – and still only – state to make public service a graduation requirement. In 1982, she managed the successful re-election campaign of her uncle – the late U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.).

Kennedy Townsend taught foreign policy at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and has been a visiting fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. She has served as a special advisor to the U.S. Department of State, as a Paul Nitze senior fellow at St. Mary’s College and as a Woodrow Wilson fellow.

An honors graduate of Harvard University, she earned a law degree from the University of New Mexico, where she was a member of the law review.

Kennedy Townsend is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Inter-American Dialogue, and serves on the boards of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

She is the author of “Failing America’s Faithful: How Today’s Churches Mixed God with Politics and Lost Their Way,” and has appeared on “Meet the Press,” “The Colbert Report,” “Larry King,” and “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren.”

Kennedy Townsend is the eldest child of Robert and Ethel Kennedy.

The Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellows program, which is administered by the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) in Washington, D.C., brings prominent artists, diplomats, journalists, business leaders and other professionals to campuses across the United States for a weeklong residential program of classes, seminars, workshops, lectures and informal discussions.

For more information about the lecture or the Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellows program, contact (630) 829-6247 or bshore@ben.edu.
                        
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Benedictine University is an independent Roman Catholic institution located in Lisle, Illinois just 25 miles west of Chicago, and has branch campuses in Springfield, Illinois and Mesa, Arizona. Founded in 1887, Benedictine provides 55 undergraduate majors and 17 graduate and four doctoral programs. Benedictine University is ranked No. 1 among the country’s fastest-growing campuses between 2000-2010 in The Chronicle of Higher Education’s list of private nonprofit research institutions, and Forbes magazine named Benedictine among “America’s Top Colleges” for the third consecutive year in 2013. Benedictine University’s Master of Business Administration (M.B.A.) program is listed by Crain’s Chicago Business as the fifth largest in the Chicago area in 2013.


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