Evening Talk: Condoleezza Rice

In honor of our free exhibition We the People: The Radical Notion of Democracy, we invite you to join us for a conversation in our restaurant Eleven with 66th Secretary of State Dr. Condoleezza Rice. Drawing from her career and experiences as an educator, diplomat, and secretary of state, Dr. Rice will share her perspectives on how we create and sustain democracy through hard work, persistence, strong institutions, and dedicated citizens.

Tickets are $15 ($12 for members, $5 for students), reserve your spot online or by calling Guest Services at (479) 657-2335 today.

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This event is sold out and tickets are required for entry.
If you created an account when you reserved your tickets, you can access your tickets here.

Event Schedule:
Doors Open: 3:30 p.m.
Doors Close: 4:50 p.m. – No Late Entry
Talk Begins: 5 p.m.

Event Location: For this event, we’re transforming our restaurant Eleven into a lecture hall. Guest Services staff will be available to provide directions if needed.

Getting here: Parking will be available in our lower and upper parking decks adjacent to the museum. Accessible parking is located in the lower parking deck.

Overflow parking will be located in the gravel lot directly off of J St., across the street from the Amazeum. There are accessible spaces in the gravel lot, and shuttle service to the museum entrance.

Entry: Our main entrance and South Lawn entrances will be open. The galleries will be closed.

Amenities: A cash bar will be available. Restrooms will be open on our lower level.

Prohibited items:

• No bags larger than 6 inches by 6 inches by 6 inches
• No weapons, noisemakers, or signs.

Condoleezza Rice

Condoleezza Rice is the Tad and Dianne Taube Director of the Hoover Institution and the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy. In addition, she is a founding partner of Rice, Hadley, Gates & Manuel LLC, an international strategic consulting firm.

From January 2005 to January 2009, Rice served as the 66th secretary of state of the United States, the second woman and first Black woman to hold the post. Rice also served as President George W. Bush’s Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (National Security Advisor) from January 2001 to January 2005, the first woman to hold the position.

Rice served as Stanford University’s provost from 1993 to 1999, during which time she was the institution’s chief budget and academic officer. As provost, she was responsible for a $1.5 billion annual budget and an academic program involving 1,400 faculty members and 14,000 students. In 1997, she also served on the Federal Advisory Committee on Gender-Integrated Training in the Military.

From February 1989 through March 1991, Rice served on President George H.W. Bush’s National Security Council staff. She served as director, then senior director, of Soviet and East European Affairs, as well as special assistant to the president for National Security Affairs. In 1986, while an International Affairs Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, Rice also served as special assistant to the director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

As professor of Political Science, Rice has been on the Stanford faculty since 1981 and has won two of the university’s highest teaching honors—the 1984 Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 1993 School of Humanities and Sciences Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching.

She has authored and co-authored numerous books, most recently To Build a Better World: Choices to End the Cold War and Create a Global Commonwealth (2019), co-authored with Philip Zelikow. Among her other volumes are three bestsellers, Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom (2017); No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (2011); and Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family (2010). She also wrote Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (1995) with Philip Zelikow; edited The Gorbachev Era (1986) with Alexander Dallin; and penned The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army, 1948-1983: Uncertain Allegiance (1984).

In 1991, Rice co-founded the Center for a New Generation (CNG), an innovative, after-school academic enrichment program for students in East Palo Alto and East Menlo Park, California. In 1996, CNG merged with the Boys & Girls Club of the Peninsula, an affiliate club of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America (BGCA). CNG has since expanded to local BGCA chapters in Birmingham, Atlanta, and Dallas. Rice remains an active proponent of an extended learning day through after-school programs.

Since 2009, Rice has served as a founding partner at Rice, Hadley, Gates, & Manuel LLC, an international strategic consulting firm based in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. The firm works with senior executives of major companies to implement strategic plans and expand in emerging markets. Other partners include former National Security Advisor Stephen J. Hadley, former Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and former diplomat, author, and advisor on emerging markets, Anja Manuel.

Rice currently serves on the boards of C3.ai, an AI software company; and Makena Capital Management, a private endowment firm. In addition, she is vice chair of the Board of Governors of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America and a trustee of the Aspen Institute. Previously, Rice served on various boards, including Dropbox; the George W. Bush Institute; the Commonwealth Club; KiOR, Inc.; the Chevron Corporation; the Charles Schwab Corporation; the Transamerica Corporation; the Hewlett-Packard Company; the University of Notre Dame; the Foundation for Excellence in Education; the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; and the San Francisco Symphony.

In 2013, Rice was appointed to the College Football Playoff Selection Committee, formerly the Bowl Championship Series. She served on the committee until 2017.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Rice earned her bachelor’s degree in political science, cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Denver; her master’s in the same subject from the University of Notre Dame; and her PhD, likewise in political science, from the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver.

Rice is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and has been awarded fifteen honorary doctorates.

Ambassador Shirin R. Tahir-Kheli

Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Institute, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Board of Advisers, Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia.

Shirin Tahir-Kheli was named by Newsweek in 2011 as one of the “150 women Who Shake the World”.

Shirin Tahir-Kheli was the first Ambassador for Women’s Empowerment in the US Government appointed by Secretary Condoleezza Rice on April 5, 2006. She served in the office of the Secretary of State in this capacity.

Recipient, Ohio Wesleyan University Distinguished Achievement Citation, 2007, for “Remarkable professional achievement. Profound service to humanity.”

From April 2005 to 2006, Tahir-Kheli served as the Senior Advisor to the Secretary of State on United Nations Reform.

Awarded Great Immigrants Honorees Award “Pride of America” by Carnegie Corporation of New York on July 4, 2005 for her contributions to public service.

From March 2003 to April 2005, she served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Democracy, Human Rights and International Operations at the National Security Council. The White House

Dr. Tahir-Kheli was Research Professor of International Relations at the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Foreign Policy Institute, Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC.

From 1999 to June 2002, she served as Founding Director, South Asia Program, FPI/SAIS.

Tahir-Kheli was Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute in Philadelphia where she chaired a major Track II BALUSA effort on India-Pakistan.

Tahir-Kheli was a fellow of Princeton University’s Center of International Studies, 1993-1995.

She co-chaired the Council on Foreign Relations Study Group on India and Pakistan, 1993-95.

She has served as a member of:

• United States Commission on International Religious Freedom
• United States Commission on the Public Service
• Distinguished Advisory Panel for Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico
• Board of Trustees of the Carnegie Corporation of New York
• Advisory Board of Princeton University’s Institute for the Transregional Study of Contemporary Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia.
• Trustee Aga Khan University Board

During her service in the United States government, Tahir-Kheli served as:

• Head of the United States delegation to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights session in Geneva in 2001
• She became the first American Muslim ambassador in July 1990 when serving under President George H.W. Bush as Ambassador to the United Nations for Special Political Affairs, a post that carries the rank of Ambassador.
• Director of Near East and South Asian Affairs (1986-89), National Security Council.
• Director of Political Military Affairs (1984-1986) at the National Security Council at the White House.
• She joined the Reagan Administration in 1982 as Member, Policy Planning Staff in the Office of the Secretary of State.
• Faculty, U.S. Army War College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 1980-1981.
• Tenured Associate Professor of Political Science, Temple University (resigned tenure in 1985 to stay on at the National Security Council, The White House)

Ambassador Tahir-Kheli has dedicated more than ten years to finding areas of agreement between India and Pakistan that could change their relationship to one of productive peace. Toward that end, she has been chair of the 12-member BALUSA Group, comprising senior Indian, Pakistani, and US participants, that is geared to influencing policy toward cooperation. She has co-chaired an important study on water and security in south Asia and has been co-chair of an effort to promote India-Pakistan cooperation in the fields of energy and the environment.

She is the author and editor of several monographs, including: Before the Age of Prejudice: A Muslim Woman’s National Security Work with Three American Presidents, (Macmillan, 2018); India, Pakistan and the United States: Breaking with the Past published by the Council on Foreign Relations (1997), The United States and Pakistan: The Evolution of an Influence Relationship (Praeger, 1982); and numerous journal articles including: “Evolution of Politics” in Pakistan At Seventy, edited by Shahid Javed Burki (Routledge, 2019); Manipulating Religion for Political Gain in Pakistan: Consequences for the U.S. and the Region, (Johns Hopkins SAIS, 2015).

Shirin Tahir-Kheli has a PhD in International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA from Ohio Wesleyan University. She has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations since 1990 and a past member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Lectures & Talks sponsored by

We the People: The Radical Notion of Democracy is sponsored by Kenneth C. Griffin.

Learning and engagement programming for We the People: The Radical Notion of Democracy is sponsored by

Sarah and Ross Perot, Jr. Foundation | Mitchell, Williams, Selig, Gates, & Woodyard, P.L.L.C. | Johnny and Jeanie Morris, Bass Pro Shops | Alturas Foundation | Harriet and Warren Stephens, Stephens Inc. | Sotheby’s | Bob and Becky Alexander | Marybeth and Micky Mayfield | Lamar and Shari Steiger | Jeff and Sarah Teague / Citizens Bank | Arkansas Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities | Avis and Bill Bailey | Scarlett and Neff Basore | June Carter Family | Terri and Chuck Erwin | Jackye and Curtis Finch | The Harrison and Rhonda French Family | Jim and Susan von Gremp | Laurice Hachem | Shannon and Charles Holley | Valorie and Randy Lawson / Lawco Energy Group | Donna and Mack McLarty | Steve and Susan Nelson | Neal and Gina Pendergraft | Helen Porter | JT and Imelda Rose | Lee and Linda Scott | Stella Boyle Smith Trust, Catherine and Michael Mayton, Trustees | William Reese Company