Rivlin to Speak About Prospects for Health Reform

Posted on Sept. 24, 2012

Alice Rivlin, founding director of the Congressional Budget Office, will discuss “Health Reform: Will We Ever Get It Right?” Sept. 27 at the University.

Rivlin’s free public talk, at 5:30 p.m. in Gerrard Hall, is the Thomas Willis Lambeth Lecture in Public Policy. Named for the 1957 graduate and former executive director of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, the series was endowed in 2006 to bring to campus distinguished speakers who are practitioners or scholars of public policy, particularly those whose work addresses education, ethics, democratic institutions and civic engagement.

Rivlin has served as director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, vice chair of the Federal Reserve board and assistant secretary for Health, Education and Welfare. In 2010, President Barack Obama appointed her to the Bowles-Simpson Commission on reducing the federal deficit. She is now a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution and a visiting professor of public policy at Georgetown University.

Rivlin is the author of numerous articles and books, among them Systematic Thinking for Social Action and Restoring the American Dream. In 2008, she received the inaugural Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize from the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She also has received a MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship, and she has taught at Harvard, George Mason and New School universities.

Lambeth served as administrative assistant to N.C. Gov. Terry Sanford ’39 and to U.S. Rep. Richardson Preyer and later for more than two decades as executive director of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation. During Lambeth’s tenure, the foundation awarded grants totaling more than $260 million to address many of North Carolina’s most pressing policy issues, particularly social justice and equity, governance and civic engagement, community-building and economic development, education, and protection of the state’s natural environment.

Lambeth has had a strong personal impact on many key public policy issues in North Carolina and nationally, including leadership of the Public School Forum of North Carolina, Leadership North Carolina, the N.C. Rural Center and a task force of the national Institute of Medicine on the problems of people who lack medical insurance. He also has been a national leader in improving the management and effectiveness of family philanthropic foundations themselves.

Lambeth is a recipient of the GAA’s Distinguished Service Medal, the University’s Distinguished Alumnus Award and the Davie Award for service to UNC. He chairs the GAA-sponsored Tar Heel Network, which supports the University’s goals and priorities through advocacy with legislators.

The lectureship was endowed in 2006 to bring to the campus distinguished speakers who are practitioners or scholars of public policy, particularly those whose work touches on the fields of education, ethics, democratic institutions and civic engagement.

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More online…

• Fleishman to Give Inaugural Lambeth Lecture on Public Policy
  News report from September 2007
• Carter to Give Lambeth Lecture on Public Policy
  News report from August 2008

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