Former U.S. Senator John Edwards (D-N.C.) urged college students to confront the major problems facing the planet at this weekend's first annual Millennium Campus Conference, a three-day event held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to raise awareness of global poverty.
The Millennium Campus Network (MCN), a group of Boston-area college students that includes Tufts undergraduates, organized the conference, which featured lectures on five different topics: technology, health, education, public policy and economics.
Edwards, a two-time presidential candidate and the Democratic candidate for the vice presidency in 2004, spoke candidly about the presidential race he exited this winter.
"The next president of the United States absolutely must be a visionary, whoever it may be," said Edwards, who ended his campaign on Jan. 30. "If you look at what's happening in the world today, we desperately need visionary leadership."
Edwards spoke on Friday morning as one of two keynote speakers at the conference's opening ceremonies, along with Henrietta Holsman Fore, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The former senator asserted that poverty was part of a greater world crisis, and that many of the world's socioeconomic and environmental issues must be tackled together.
"We are faced with enormous challenges, both in America and around the world, which literally go to the survival of our planet," Edwards said, citing climate change, population growth and severe poverty as three interwoven crises that the world community must address. "We no longer live in a world that America can simply dominate with its power ... We can't solve these problems alone. It's absolutely impossible ... No matter how strong we are - militarily, economically, politically - we can't solve these problems alone."
Students from Tufts, MIT, Harvard, Brandeis, Boston and Northeastern Universities and Berklee College of Music organized the conference. Tufts sophomore Will Herberich said the different schools collaborated well to plan this weekend's events.
"Our job is not to tell other groups what to do," said Herberich, director of strategic partnerships for the MCN. "We founded our group on the principle that if we all work together, we can do better than if we're competing."
Other keynote speakers over the weekend included Paul Farmer, a Harvard medical anthropology professor; Amy Smith, one of the founders of the Service Learning program at MIT; Paul Romer, a Stanford University economics professor; Ira Magaziner, policy director and chairman of the Clinton Foundation Policy Board; and John Wood, the founder of Room to Read.
In the conference's closing ceremonies on Sunday, Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and John Legend, a five-time Grammy-winning R&B singer, delivered the keynote addresses.
"The Jeffrey Sachs-John Legend event on Sunday was really, really great," Herberich said. "Sachs is a really inspiring speaker. He laid out his plan for what he'd like to do, he expressed confidence and he really got the crowd motivated."
MIT senior Anne Liu was the director of the conference. She and Brandeis senior Sam Vaghar, the MCN's co-director, both gave opening remarks before Holsman Fore and Edwards spoke Friday morning.
"We need to find a way to change the ways that people tackle global poverty," she said. "How can we work together to mobilize people on this?"
The overall tone of the weekend focused on a call to activism from the college students in the audience. Edwards, 54, has seen collegiate activism make history in past generations. Most notably, he cited the civil rights movement, anti-Vietnam War protests and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. He said he expects that trend to continue.
"You can feel the same thing happening right now, with respect to Iraq," Edwards said. "You can make a tremendous difference."
