On Sunday, May 3 at 3 pm Eastern Time, Elizabeth E. (“Lizzy”) Shackelford will be our guest for a Casual Conversation on Zoom, her appearance due to the determined efforts of classmate Steve Horwitz.. Ms. Shackelford is the Distinguished Lecturer at the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth. Her Dartmouth page with an abbreviated bio may be found here: https://dickey.dartmouth.edu/team/shackelford-elizabeth/ .
First, a word about the Dickey Center. JSD was President of the College during our tenure as the Class of 1969, but before he became President, Dickey had a substantial career in the U.S. State Department:
[Dickey was] special assistant to the assistant secretary of state and later to the secretary of state, a member of the Office of Inter-American Affairs and the division of World Trade Intelligence, and director of the State Department’s Office of Public Affairs.
The Legacy of John Sloan Dickey - Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth .
A more detailed description of Dickey’s five years from leaving the practice of law in 1940 to becoming President of Dartmouth in 1945 may be found here,ArchiveGrid : Oral history interview with John Sloan Dickey, 1975-1978 , and includes identifying Dickey’s position as “special assistant to Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs Nelson A. Rockefeller,” who ran in the 1968 New Hampshire presidential primary with the tacit support of the Dickey administration. Governor Rockefeller was also our Commencement speaker, his topic being federalism.
Dickey had a special interest in Canada, as expressed through his establishment of Canada Year, that generated events that did not, I think it fair to say, capture the interest of our Class. (And found me as one of the three male actors in the terrible play Marise by Canadian playwright Jack Cunningham. I am confident that the few students who came to see it have long since purged it from their remembrances of their years at the College.)
Returning to Ms. Shackelford, a more extensive biography may be found at her website https://www.elizabethshackelford.com/about :
Shackelford has a BA from Duke University and a JD from the University of Pittsburgh. . . . She served as a career diplomat in the U.S. State Department, with postings in Warsaw, Poland, South Sudan, Somalia, and Washington, D.C. Her outstanding work in South Sudan during the civil war earned her the prestigious Barbara Watson Award for Consular Excellence.
She gained international recognition for her principled resignation in protest of the State Department policies of the Trump administration, which sparked important discussions about diplomacy and governance. That led to her book, The Dissent Channel: American Diplomacy in a Dishonest Age [Public Affairs 2020], which chronicles the challenges facing US foreign policy in the modern world.
In addition to her work at Dartmouth, Ms. Shackelford is committed to communicating her views on a broad range of issues to the public through a variety of channels, id.:
Shackelford is a regular foreign affairs columnist with the Chicago Tribune, and her commentary has also been published in Politico, Los Angeles Times, and Slate. She frequently appears on media outlets such as CNN, BBC, MSNBC, and Voice of America to provide foreign policy analysis.
Her columns collected on her website are all linked to the Chicago Tribune and are behind a paywall. But you can get an idea what her positions are from the short precis that she publishes to describe each linked piece. Several of her columns deal with the catastrophes that have and continue to bedevil the Sudan and South Sudan [see from NBC News online: Sudan enters a fourth year of war as officials lament an 'abandoned crisis'; Conflict in the Middle East has overshadowed the fighting in Sudan, which has killed at least 59,000 people and pushed parts of the North African country into famine. Sudan enters a fourth year of war as officials lament an 'abandoned crisis' 4/17/2026].
Ms. Shackelford’s passion in arguing for the lives and wellbeing of the people who live in the Sudan and South Sudan is evident. And should be because Ms. Shackelford sought and ultimately obtained as her second State Department posting the U.S. embassy in Juba, the largest city and capital of South Sudan, a city and country that remains a source of violence and murderous repression. Not for Shackelford a posting in London, Paris, Rome, or Madrid. Her story of determination and the failures of American diplomacy and foreign aid is told in her book The Dissent Channel. I urge you to read it, and you can also discover what the dissent channel is.
And urge you to come to her Casual Conversation on Sunday, May 3 at 3 pm on ZOOM.
Usual rules apply: email me at arthur.fergenson@ansalaw.com with your RSVP by the close of business Friday, May 1 (leaving yourself ample time to dance around a maypole, wave red flags as you march in a parade, and/or read the Constitution).
Arthur Fergenson