Anne-Marie Slaughter, author of the popular article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” will speak at the commencement ceremony this May.
Slaughter is a professor emerita of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, a former top official of the U.S. State Department and author of several books. She is also the CEO and president of New America, a think tank that considers national public policy issues.
Laura Marks, spokesperson for the U Board of Trustees, said U President David Pershing assembled an advisory committee made of faculty, students, staff and administrators to go through the process of selecting the speaker. The group “explored the availability, cost and how it fit with the university audience” before making a recommendation, Marks said.
Slaughter will discuss work-life balance in her address, a subject that she has done extensive work on. In her controversial piece, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All,” published in The Atlantic in 2012, she wrote of her own struggle between high-level government service and raising two teenage boys. She argued for changes, such as “flexible working hours, investment intervals and family-comes-first-management.”
Slaughter’s agent said the author feels the topic is more than just a women’s issue or about balancing work and family. Instead, she believes it to be about “the fundamental balance between competition and care,” Marks said.
It is also an issue Marks said the committee “thinks will resonate with students” as many already have families or will choose that path after graduation.
Susanna Phinney, a senior in nursing who will graduate Spring Semester, has reservations about the topic. While she said she feels it is relevant, Phinney thinks that work-life balance is something students should have already been learning in college, not at graduation, and she hopes the address will be motivational.
“Personally, I don’t want to hear about it the day I’m graduating, unless there’s a spin on it that is encouraging, motivating and exciting for new grads,” Phinney said. “I don’t want instruction at my commencement — I want encouragement, vision and celebration for what me and my class have accomplished.”
Marks said the two students who served on the advisory committee that chose Slaughter “were supportive of the choice.”
Other books Slaughter has written include Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family in 2015, The Idea That Is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World in 2007 and A New World Order in 2004. Slaughter received a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, as well as a J.D. from Harvard University and a doctorate in international relations from Oxford University.
Her address will start at 6:30 p.m. on May 5 in the Huntsman Center.
@NikiVenugopal