(Posted November 17, 2003)

HUNTINGDON, Pa.-- Jim Skelly, senior fellow at the Baker Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, will speak on ?Conscientiously Objecting to War? at 7 p.m., Tuesday, Nov. 18 in Neff Lecture Hall at the von Liebig Center for Science on the Juniata College campus.

Skelly plans to lecture on the resistance to war on behalf of military personnel. He will address the moral dilemmas that soldiers are now facing in Iraq. Speaking from experience, Skelly will discuss his time as a U.S. military officer, who refused to serve in the Vietnam War and sued the U.S. Secretary of Defense.

Skelly will also draw from his experiences of working against the war through several groups, such as the Concerned Officers? Movement, and the television show ?Free the Army? that encouraged soldiers and sailors to express their opposition to the war in Southeast Asia.

Skelly earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Minnesota in 1967 and went on to earn a master's degree in 1981 and a doctorate in 1984, both from the University of California, San Diego.

He has been immersed in a research project gauging European response to the new administration of President George W. Bush.

In 1984, Skelly was named associate director of the University of California's Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. From 1989 to 1990, Skelly was associate director for international programs at New York University's Center for War, Peace and the News Media. He went on to become a visiting scholar at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley from 1991-1992 under the support of the MacArthur Foundation.

An Irish citizen, Skelly has worked as a faculty member and administrator with several European institutions, including the Irish Peace Institute at the University of Limerick, the European University Center for Peace Studies in Austria, the International People's College in Denmark, and the Universitat Jaume I in Spain. In addition he has lectured in the United States, Europe, Russia, China and Japan.
He is a founder of the Peace Studies Association.


Contact April Feagley at feaglea@juniata.edu or (814) 641-3131 for more information.