Former Defense Secretary to Speak at Trinity

Ash Carter, former Secretary of Defense from 2015-2017, will present the 2018 Flora Cameron Lecture on Politics and Public Affairs at Trinity University at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 21.

His presentation, “Global Challenges Facing Our Nation in the 21st Century,” is free and open to the public. No tickets are required for admission. The lecture will be live-streamed on the Tiger Network at live.trinity.edu.

Currently, Carter is the director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School. He is also an Innovation Fellow at MIT.

For more than 35 years, Carter has leveraged his experience in national security, technology, and innovation to defend the United States and make a better world. He has done so under presidents of both political parties as well as in the private sector.

As Secretary of Defense from 2015 to 2017, Carter pushed the Pentagon to “think outside its five-sided box.” He changed the trajectory to deliver ISIS a lasting defeat, executed the pivot to the Asia-Pacific, established a playbook for the U.S. and NATO to confront Russia, and launched a cyber strategy. Carter also spearheaded technological capabilities, leading initiatives to transform the way the department recruits, trains, and retains quality people, opening all military positions to women, and building bridges to America’s technology community.

Earlier in his government career, Carter served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy from 1993 to 1996. He was responsible for the Nunn-Lugar program that removed and eliminated nuclear weapons in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, the military planning during the 1994 crisis over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, and the U.S. nuclear arsenal. In the Defense Department and on Capitol Hill during the Cold War, Carter was known for his work on missile defense and the then-Strategic Defense Initiative, as well as basing options for the MX Missile. Over the past three decades, Carter has also served on the Defense Policy Board, the Defense Science Board, and the Secretary of State’s International Security Advisory Board.

For his government service, Carter has been awarded the Department of Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the department’s highest civilian honor, on five separate occasions, and he twice received the Joint Distinguished Service Medal from the Chairman and Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In addition to his government service, Carter has taught at many of the world’s outstanding academic institutions, including Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Oxford University, and Rockefeller University in addition to Harvard and MIT. Carter is also author or co-author of 11 books and more than 100 articles on physics, technology, national security, and management.

Carter earned his bachelor’s degrees in physics and in medieval history at Yale University, where he was also awarded Phi Beta Kappa; and he received his doctorate in theoretical physics from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

The Flora Cameron Lecture on Politics and Public Affairs is made possible by an endowment gift by Mrs. Flora C. Crichton of San Antonio.

For more information, visit events.trinity.edu.