Although many of the high-profile speakers to visit Tufts are invited as part of the Issam M. Fares Lecture Series, that lecture will not happen in the 2005-2006 academic year, Professor and Fares Center Director Leila Fawaz confirmed for the Daily in an e-mail.
The Fares lecture, which brings a high-profile speaker to Tufts to discuss issues facing the Middle East, is arranged by Tufts' Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies.
While the series is described as an "annual" lecture in official University communications, this year marks the second time in the last three academic years that there has been no such Fares lecture.
"The timing of the lectures varies depending upon speaker schedules and availability," Kim Thurler, Tufts' Associate Director of Public Relations, wrote in an e-mail to the Daily. "It's not unusual to skip a year."
Thurler also noted that in 1996, Tufts hosted two Fares lecturers.
These were the Honorable James A. Baker, III, 61st Secretary of State and 67th Secretary of the Treasury, and Former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing.
The 2005-2006 school year will be the third time in the Fares lecture series' 12-year history that it has not taken place.
Tufts last hosted a Fares lecture in Fall 2004, when Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton addressed students in the Gantcher center on "Policy Changes in the Eastern Mediterranean after the Presidential Election."
The last time the Fares lecture was not held was the 2003-2004 academic year.
The previous academic year, President George Herbert Walker Bush delivered a speech, his second Fares lecture, entitled "Perspective on the Middle East" in spring of 2003.
While no such former heads of state will address Tufts this year, the Fares center did sponsor addresses by Georgetown University Islam expert John L. Esposito and Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Thomas R. Pickering, both in November.
Explaining why the Fares lecture planned for spring of 2005 had been postponed, Chief of Staff in the Office of the President Judy Olson told the Daily at the time that unnamed complications had "prevented our top choice speaker from joining us."
She added that, "given the extremely high profile of Fares lecturers, the complexity of organizing such an event is, hopefully, understandable to our community."
The other Fares lectures were delivered by President William Jefferson Clinton (spring 2002), then-Secretary of State Colin Powell (fall 2000), former Senator George Mitchell (fall 1998), former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (fall 1997), former Secretary of State James A. Baker, III, (fall 1996), former President of France Valery Giscard d'Estaing (spring 1996) and President George H.W. Bush (fall 1994).
For the first five years after the beginning of the series a lecture was held every year. No lecture was held during the 1999-2000 academic year. A lecture followed every year for the next three years.
The Issam M. Fares Lecture Series is named after former trustee and Deputy Prime Minister of Lebanon Issam M. Fares. His son, Fares I. Fares, a 1993 Tufts graduate who is also a trustee and member of Tufts' International Board of Overseers, originally proposed the idea for a lecture series.
