Last week, Grand Valley State University’s Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies hosted guest speaker Heather Gerken, Dean of the Yale Law School. Gerken spoke in the Loosemore Auditorium on GVSU’s Pew Campus on Sept. 18 as a part of the center’s Common Ground Initiative. Program Director Scott St. Louis said that the Hauenstein Center was pleased to host her. 

“She’s one of the foremost eminent legal minds working in the country today,” St. Louis said. “We had everybody in that audience from high school students to former attorneys to political theorists, so it’s a real challenge to be able to speak to all those different parts of an audience, but she did that and tailored her talk to speak to an audience that was politically mixed.” 

Gerken’s talk focused primarily on federalism in the 21st century and how those principles are being applied today, discussing how federalism affects relationships between states. Much of her academic work has focused on this topic. 

“Her argument is that the tightly integrated systems of commerce and technology that bind states together mean that federalism works in ways the founding fathers could not have intended,” St. Louis said, summarizing the main points of Gerken’s discussion Tuesday night. “But this is actually a good thing, because it forces Americans in red and blue parts of the country to work across the divide. It actually sort of brings people into dialogue rather than encouraging them to separate.” 

Gerken’s work has been published in numerous academic journals and media outlets, including The New York Times, Democracy Journal, NPR, and The Atlantic, among others. She has a long career in academia, but only became Dean of Yale Law School in 2017. 

The Common Ground Initiative prepares new generations of leaders to work constructively with people from with diverse backgrounds and different worldviews. These goals seem to fit with the overall values and ideology of the center, first established by its namesake Ralph W. Hauenstein at its inception in 2003. Hauenstien was a successful businessman and well-known philanthropist during his lifetime, a Grand Rapids native whose inspiration for the center drew heavily on his experience in the United States Military during World War II. 

“What Ralph used to say is that he saw with his own eyes the very worst that leaders were capable of in the 20th century,” St Louis said. “So for the 21st century, he wanted to create a space that would cultivate ethical, effective leadership for his children’s children.”