Condoleezza Rice, who served as the 66th secretary of state of the United States from 2005-09, will be the keynote speaker at Westmont College’s sixth annual President’s Breakfast from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. March 4 in the Grand Ballroom of Fess Parker’s DoubleTree Resort.
Tickets, which are $100 per person, will go on sale at 9 a.m. Feb. 1 and can be purchased only at the Westmont Web site (click here). Seating will be limited, and tickets will be sold on a first-come, first-served basis.
Rice also will answer questions from a Westmont student panel in convocation at 10:30 a.m. March 4 in Westmont’s Murchison Gym.
Rice is a professor of political economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, a Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution, and a professor of political science at Stanford University.
Before becoming America’s chief diplomat, she served as assistant to the president for national security affairs (national security adviser) from January 2001 to 2005. Rice joined the Stanford University faculty as a professor of political science in 1981 and served as Stanford University’s provost from 1993 to 1999.
In 1999, she was the Westmont commencement speaker. In her talk, “The Responsibility of the Educated Christian,” Rice praised Westmont for educating the whole person and focusing on personal and spiritual growth as well as intellectual development.
The youngest person and first black to become a provost at Stanford University, she previously held a high-level post in President George W. Bush’s administration as senior adviser to the National Security Council and special assistant to the president.
She was a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution from 1991 to 1993 and returned to the Hoover Institution after serving as provost until 2001. As a professor, Rice won two of the highest teaching honors: the 1984 Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 1993 School of Humanities and Sciences Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching.
Her new book, Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family, shares how her upbringing in segregated Birmingham, Ala., and her strong, caring family and parents helped shape the course of her life. She also has authored and co-authored several other books, including Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft with Philip Zelikow, The Gorbachev Era with Alexander Dallin and Uncertain Allegiance: The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army.
Rice served as a member of the boards of directors for the Chevron, Charles Schwab and Transamerica corporations. She was a founding board member of the Center for a New Generation, an educational support fund for schools in East Palo Alto and East Menlo Park and was vice president of the Boys & Girls Club of the Peninsula. She currently serves on the board of the Boys & Girls Club of America.
The Westmont Foundation and area businesses sponsor the President’s Breakfast to promote discussion and consideration of current issues among local community leaders. This year’s lead sponsor is Santa Barbara Bank & Trust.
— Scott Craig is the media relations manager for Westmont College.