On November 20, the Marron Institute hosted personal and professional friends and colleagues of the late Mark Kleiman, former Director of the Marron Institute’s Crime & Justice Program, for an afternoon of celebration and remembrance. The program featured three panels central to Kleiman’s lasting legacy: Turning Ideas into Policy, Challenging the Narrative, and the Value of Mentorship. Welcoming Remarks (00:00 - 28:50) Clayton Gillette; Director, NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management and Max E. Greenberg Professor of Contract Law, NYU School of Law Angela Hawken; Program Director, NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management and Professor of Public Policy David Kennedy; Co-Founder and Executive Director, National Network for Safe Communities Panel I: Turning Ideas into Policy (28:50 - 01:19:51) Introduction: Jeremy Travis, Executive Vice President of Criminal Justice, Arnold Ventures Moderator: Susan Herman, Director, Office of ThriveNYC Bret Bucklen, Director of Research, Pennsylvania Department of Corrections Chauncey Parker, Executive Assistant District Attorney, District Attorney of New York Lenny Ward, Former Director of Parole & Community Programs, New Jersey State Parole Mark spent the last three decades of his life in academia, but before his time at Harvard, UCLA, and eventually NYU, he was a practitioner. He worked in the private sector - for Polaroid - and in the public, first as a Congressional aide, then as an analyst for the City of Boston, and finally as head of management and policy analysis for the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Mark was an “ideas man” in almost all of these roles, but he never lost perspective on how his ideas could be used to shape policy. His relationship with practitioners was symbiotic: they provided the raw knowledge that inspired him, and they oversaw the sandboxes where that inspiration met reality. For this panel we have invited several practitioners who used Mark’s ideas to guide their agencies. Panel II: Challenging the Narrative (01:19:51 - 01:53:20) Introduction: Vikrant Reddy, Senior Research Fellow, Charles Koch Institute Moderator: German Lopez, Senior Correspondent, Vox Glenn Loury, Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences, Brown University David Kennedy, Co-Founder & Executive Director, National Network for Safe Communities Jen Doleac, Associate Professor of Economics, Texas A&M; University The search for objective truth was central to Mark’s professional life. The very name of his blog, the Reality-Based Community, was a reaction to what he perceived to be intellectual torpor among the policy community. Often this intellectual rigor caused him to be labeled a contrarian or iconoclast. Students in his politics classes might agree. But he never made a point or took a position without firm conviction. His desire in life was that, whatever our opinions or interpretations, we should all be able to recognize facts. For this panel, we welcome scholars who take unpopular positions - often at great professional risk - because they share Mark’s commitment to objective analysis. Panel III: The Value of Mentorship (01:53:20 - 02:31:21) Introduction: Beau Kilmer, Director, RAND Drug Policy Research Center Moderator: Richard Hahn, Executive Director, NYU Marron Crime & Justice Program Jon Caulkins, H. Guyford Stever University Professor, Carnegie Mellon University Rosanna Smart, Economist, RAND Corporation Steve Davenport, Founder, Aperture Research Mark’s eminence as a scholar was overshadowed only by his eminence as a teacher. Alumni of Mark’s classes are influential in a variety of fields. They remember him as a demanding yet genial presence in the classroom, an instructor who assigned voluminous reading lists but always made the process of learning personal. Some of those students were fortunate enough to have Mark as a mentor - the role he truly relished and in which he excelled. Mark’s mentorship was steeped in his own reverence for the people he called “my teachers.” But like those great scholars, Mark didn’t simply teach facts or methods; he shaped ways of approaching life and comprehending it. Perhaps this is the way Mark will live on most visibly: as an inextricable part of the patterns of thinking experienced by those he taught.

• published: 19 Dec 2019
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