The Hartwick College Institute for Public Service is scheduled to host a book talk from three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Mike McIntire.
“I have other other schools that I’m going to be speaking at, but I wanted to make Hartwick the first one,” said McIntire, who graduated from Hartwick in 1985.
The investigative reporter for The New York Times will speak about his new book, “Ricochet: Guns, Greed, and the American Way of Violence.”
Free and open to the public, the event will take place at 5:30 p.m. Sept. 4 at the Anderson Center for the Arts on the college’s campus.
Professor Laurel Elder, a co-director of HIPS, said Thursday, Aug. 27 that the event is the institute’s kickoff for the year, “when the students are excited and not overwhelmed with work yet.”
Elder co-founded the institute with professors Matthew Chick and Zachary McKenney in 2023.
“We want to connect our students to the community in all kinds of different ways,” Chick said, “but we also want to serve the community.” That is why the event is open to the public, he said.
According to a synopsis of the book, it “provides a bold new road map for understanding our fraught relationship with guns and violence in America.”
“One of my goals here,” McIntire said, was to speak “not just to people who are concerned about gun violence, but also people who are more concerned about gun rights. And I’m a gun owner myself. I’m certainly not anti-gun in any kind of way.”
“The point of the book is to try to bring some of my own experiences to bear, both personally and as a journalist,” he said. He added he wanted to do so “objectively as a reporter, kind of looking at the history of how we got here” and to look into what could be done to “get ourselves out of the crisis that we’re in when it does come to gun violence.”
McIntire said one thing he hears about often from young people is that they have grown up with lockdown drills and other experiences downstream from the commonality of school shootings in the United States, what he called a “daily ritualized trauma.”
As part of the institute’s objectives to promote civic engagement among students, Elder said, the discussion will be moderated by students Addison Havens and Oiram Dueñas-Valles. Elder said it sets an example for students in the audience.
They may think, “‘oh, here are my peers talking to a New York Times Pulitzer Prize (winning) reporter, at the same level,'” and it gives a sense of “the possibilities of what they can do with their own lives, what they could do at Hartwick,” Elder said.
“We love all of our alums at Hartwick,” Chick said. “Mike is special. He’s fantastic. He’s an incredible speaker. He’s very engaging. He’s very kind.”
The board of HIPS is composed of about a dozen people, including McIntire, who have had careers in public service, and almost all of whom are Hartwick alumni.
McKenney said that while journalism is not one of its official three pillars, it has been a large part of HIPS’s mission.
“Journalists are absolutely essential” to “maintaining a democratic society and holding elected officials accountable,” he said.
Elder said that the first 50 students to attend will receive a free copy of McIntire’s book. There will be a reception following the event where McIntire will be available for book signings.
HIPS has another journalist scheduled to speak later in September. JJ Green, a security correspondent for WTOP News, will give the Constitution Day Lecture at 5:30 p.m. Sept. 18 in the Anderson Center, titled “Why Smart People Believe Lies: The Fight for Truth and the Future of the Constitution.”
To learn more about the event and HIPS’s work, visit https://tinyurl.com/2w4y7ayj.