Former Senator John Edwards will speak in Salomon 101 next Tuesday after cancelling a separate lecture here last fall.
Edwards was scheduled to give the Gov. Frank Licht '38 Lecture last fall at Brown. But after he admitted in August to having an extramarital affair with a campaign staffer, Edwards cancelled all speaking engagements until the November elections, saying in a statement that he did not want to distract from the presidential campaign.
Professor of Political Science Marion Orr, who oversees the Licht Lecture series as director of the Taubman Center for Public Policy, said there was "mutual agreement" with the Edwards camp that the lecture should not go forward in light of the controversy.
The Licht Lecture was rescheduled for April and will feature Democratic strategist Donna Brazile.
Edwards spoke at Indiana University immediately after the election and at a private conference in California. But since then, the former senator has kept a low public profile.
The upcoming lecture, sponsored by the Brown Lecture Board, is not related to the cancelled Licht lecture, Orr said.
Andrew Chapin '10, a president of the lecture board, said Edwards has not informed the board of "an official speech topic."
A vice president for the Harry Walker Agency, Edwards' booking agency, declined to comment in an e-mail to The Herald.
But a profile on the Harry Walker Agency's Web site advertises Edwards' standard speaking topic as "America: The Land of Opportunity," about the moral imperative to offer all members of society access to the American dream. Edwards grew up in poverty and became a prominent trial lawyer before entering politics.
"He's always had a mission, and his mission ... is to promote economic quality," Associate Professor of Political Science Wendy Schiller said of Edwards. "My guess is that he's hoping to deliver that message."
"He won't be critical of the administration at all," Schiller predicted.
Edwards is known for his populist rhetoric, while the federal government has bailed out large financial institutions with hundreds of billions of dollars in recent months.
Schiller said she believes Edwards is motivated by issue advocacy rather than any attempt to return to higher office. "I don't see an electoral role for him at all in the near term," she said.
Free tickets to the event will be distributed from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. today and 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. Thursday in the J. Walter Wilson mail room.
