Linda Chavez, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity in Washington, D.C., delivered the annual Hanify-Howland Memorial Lecture on Nov. 5 in the Hogan Campus Center Ballroom. The lecture was titled, “Thinking About Race: The Shifting Civil Rights Agenda.”

Described by The Washington Post as one of “a new generation of intellectuals [seeking] to question the orthodoxies of the civil rights establishment,” Chavez, a Hispanic conservative, is well-known for her opposition to affirmative action, bilingual education and other issues affecting minorities.

The author of Out of the Barrio: Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation, and the autobiography, An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal, Chavez also writes a weekly column that is nationally syndicated. She currently serves as a political analyst for FOX News and regularly appears on television journals such as CNN & Co., The McLaughlin Group, Equal Time and The Newshour with Jim Lehrer. In 2000, Chavez was named a “Living Legend” by the Library of Congress for her contributions to America’s cultural and historical legacy. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, she was co-chair of the Council’s Committee on Diversity from 1998–2000. In 1992, Chavez was elected by the United Nations’ Human Rights Committee to serve a four-year term as a U.S. expert to the U.N. Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities.

The annual Hanify-Howland lecture honors the late Edward F. Hanify, a 1904 graduate of the College and a Massachusetts Superior Court justice for 15 years, who died in 1954. The series was initiated by Hanify’s friend, the late Weston Howland of Milton, Mass., a board chairman of Warwick Mills, Inc., who died in 1976.

Linda Chavez