Robert and Mary Ferguson Lecture

College of Business and Technology





Richard Longworth

Richard Longworth

Longworth, author of “Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism,” is a senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at DePaul University. He joined the council in 2003 as executive director of its Global Chicago Center after a career in journalism, most recently as senior correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. For 20 years, Longworth was a foreign correspondent for the Tribune and United Press International and was the Tribune’s chief European correspondent. He has reported from 75 countries on five continents. In his speech at Western, which will be titled after his book, Longworth will talk about the way globalization is transforming the Midwest, the challenges it is presenting to everyone from old factory towns to universities, and the difficulty communities are experiencing in meeting these challenges.

Longworth: Caught in the Middle

This includes his encouragement for cooperation across state lines, including cooperation between colleges and universities, to leverage the Midwest’s many strengths and create an economically vibrant region, able to compete in this new global economy.

Longworth is the author of “Global Squeeze,” one of the first books on globalization, and of a MacArthur Foundation report, “Global Chicago,” which led to the founding of the Global Chicago Center. He is co-author of a book, “Global Chicago,” published by the University of Illinois Press.

He also has won every major national award for economic reporting, plus the Lowell Thomas Award for a story on a camel trek through the Sahara Desert. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, has been a speaker at the Davos conferences and for five years was a mentor to StreetWise, Chicago’s newspaper for the homeless.

Longworth, an Iowa native, graduated from Northwestern and won NU’s Alumni Merit Award in 2000. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, won the Overseas Press Club award twice, for series on globalization and the UN, and was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1980 and 2003. For more information, visit richardclongworth.com.

Read the Richard C. Longworth Lecture - March 25th 2009