Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and author Thomas L. Friedman will make his only West Coast speaking appearance of the year when he gives a lecture at the University of Puget Sound Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2002.
Friedman’s speech, “The Global Economy and American Foreign Policy,” will begin at 8 p.m. in the Memorial Fieldhouse on the Puget Sound campus.
The Friedman speech will be the first in the new Susan Resneck Pierce Lecture Series. The Puget Sound Board of Trustees named the series after Pierce in recognition of her years of outstanding service to the university. Pierce, president of Puget Sound since 1992, has announced she will retire during the summer of 2003.
Friedman is the foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times, for which he won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
He also was awarded Pulitzer Prizes for International Reporting in 1988 and 1993.
Friedman contends we are not fighting a war on terrorism, which he says is just a tool.
Rather, Friedman believes that we are fighting what he calls “religious totalitarianism,” which he described in a Nov. 27, 2001, column as “a view of the world that my faith must reign supreme and can be affirmed and held passionately only if all others are negated.”
General admission tickets to the Friedman lecture are $8, and will go on sale Sept. 10 at the Wheelock Information Center. Credit card orders may be phoned in to 253/879-3419.
Fieldhouse doors will open at 7 p.m. on Sept. 24.
Copies of his latest book, “Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11,” will be available before the lecture and afterward at a book signing in the Rasmussen Rotunda of Wheelock Student Center.