May 07, 2007

Contact:   Bill Giduz • 704-894-2244 • bigiduz@davidson.edu

Jim Zogby, president of the Arab-American Institute, will moderate a third round of discussions between students in Davidson and Baghdad,  four years after U.S. troops entered Iraq.

Davidson College students will come face-to-face via video satellite with their peers at Baghdad University early Thursday morning, May 10, to discuss the relationship between their two countries.

About eighty students from Baghdad University’s College of Communications will  gather in a relatively safe site at Baghdad’s Intercontinental Hotel. About 80 Davidson students are also expected to join the conversation.

James J. Zogby, president and founder of the Arab-American Institute and a former visiting professor at Davidson, has arranged the ninety-minute video conference between members of the two student bodies. It will begin at 8:30 a.m. (EST) in the C. Shaw Smith 900 Room of the Alvarez College Union.

Zogby will use the exchange as an edition of the weekly hour-long “Viewpoint” talk show he hosts for Abu Dhabi Television. It is available in the U.S. over the LinkTV network on Friday, May 18, at 5 p.m.

The 8,000-mile cross-cultural meeting follows two previous Davidson/Baghdad video conferences in the spring of 2003. The first occurred in March, just a week before U.S. bombs first fell on Baghdad. The second was in May, just days after President Bush's “mission accomplished” speech. Zogby was spending the semester in Davidson as the James K. Batten Visiting Professor of Public Policy.

Students at Davidson and from Baghdad University 8,000 miles away will discuss current issues in Iraq via satellite video.

Zogby will moderate the discussion, posing some initial questions and then opening the floor to allow students on both sides to ask questions and voice their opinions. “I want to ask about their personal experiences and bring it home on both sides,” said Zogby. “I think it will be a traumatic encounter, but I have no idea what the participants will say or do. There should be many Davidson students in the audience who were part of the 2003 video conference, and it will be interesting to learn their opinions four years later.”

That 2003 video production won an award for foreign policy productions at the Cairo Radio & TV Arts Festival as the most significant production of the year.

Davidson is a highly selective independent liberal arts college for 1,700 students. Since its establishment in 1837 by Presbyterians, the college has graduated 23 Rhodes Scholars and is consistently ranked in the top ten liberal arts colleges in the country by U.S. News and World Report magazine.

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