FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER DAVID SHIPLER TO DISCUSS HIS RESEARCH AND BOOK ON THE WORKING POOR AT MANHATTAN COLLEGE’S FOUNDER’S WEEK

RIVERDALE, N.Y. – Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former New York Times correspondent David K. Shipler will speak at Manhattan College April 19, 2005 at 4:00 p.m. as part of Founder’s Week, the College’s annual celebration in honor of its founder, St. John Baptist de La Salle. This event, which is free and open to the public, will be held on campus in Smith Auditorium.

In line with the College’s mission to teach children of the poor and the working poor with special attention to educating first-generation students, Shipler plans to discuss the research and ideas that support his latest book, The Working Poor: Invisible in America. “Nobody who works hard should be poor in America,” writes Shipler. In The Working Poor, he examines the lives of American families struggling against insurmountable odds to escape poverty and illustrates their everyday existence and living conditions.

Shipler worked for The New York Times from 1966 to 1988 and reported from New York, Saigon, Moscow and Jerusalem before serving as chief diplomatic correspondent in Washington, D.C. A former officer in the U.S. Navy, Shipler also has written for The New Yorker, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. He was awarded the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land, which explores the mutual perceptions and relationships between Arabs and Jews in Israel and the West Bank. Shipler also executive produced, wrote and narrated a two-hour PBS documentary based on Arab and Jew, which won a 1990 duPont-Columbia Award for broadcast journalism.

Shipler, who has been a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution and a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is also the author of Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams and A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America. He was one of three authors invited by President Clinton to participate in his first town meeting on race. Shipler, a graduate of Dartmouth College, has taught at Dartmouth, Princeton University and American University, and has received honorary degrees from Middlebury College and Glassboro State College.

Shipler’s lecture, sponsored by the College’s office of mission, the peace studies department, the school of business and student government, is part of Founder’s Week, April 18 through April 22. During this week, the College will host several events celebrating the founding of the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools by John Baptist de La Salle in France (1694). De La Salle founded the community of Brothers to teach the young boys of the poor and the working poor; thereby organizing the first schools for marginalized urban children of France. Manhattan College continues that mission through special attention to first-generation college students and provides a contemporary, person-centered educational experience with reflection on values and principles.

For more information about this lecture, please call Dr. John Wilcox, vice president for mission, at (718) 862-7442. If you are a member of the press and wish to cover this event, please call Melanie A. Farmer at (718) 862-7232.

Manhattan College is located at West 242nd Street near Broadway in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, one mile from the Westchester County line and accessible by MTA subway lines 1 and 9.

Manhattan College was founded in 1853 in the Lasallian heritage of excellence in teaching, inspired by St. John Baptist de La Salle. Manhattan College is an independent, Catholic, coeducational institution of higher learning offering more than 40 major programs of undergraduate study in the areas of arts, business, education, engineering and science, and graduate programs in education and engineering.

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