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Cambridge Forum National Radio Broadcasts

Some forty years ago Harvard College students initiated broadcasts of Cambridge Forum events at our Church in Harvard Square, founded in 1636. Now our radio broadcasts are a part of the action of Boston’s WGBH Forum, America’s preeminent public broadcaster. Our programs are regularly scheduled by radio stations in some other states: Alaska, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Maine, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington.

Some forty years ago Harvard College students initiated broadcasts of Cambridge Forum events at our Church in Harvard Square, founded in 1636. Now our radio broadcasts are a part of the action of Boston’s WGBH Forum, America’s preeminent public broadcaster. Our programs are regularly scheduled by radio stations in some other states: Alaska, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Maine, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Washington. Some Unitarian Universalists congregations have underwritten local public radio broadcasts.

Deep thanks re due to the two long serving part-time staff of our free public forum, which has always self-financed its public services: Dr. Patricia Suhrcke, our Director; and David Leveille, our Radio Producer. They have added to the Board a Program Committee; built a local core of contributors to Cambridge Forum; added volunteers; related more functionality to WGBH; arranged special community celebrations; established working relations with the noted Harvard Book Store; added more nonlocal nationally notable speakers; and strengthened Forum ties with the arts.

The primary cosponsor of Cambridge Forum is the historic Lowell Institute of Boston. Other cosponsors are the interfaith university chaplains of both Harvard and MIT.

What are some examples of Cambridge Forum broadcasts in the past year or so?

	Garrison Keillor,Host of A Prairie Home Companion;
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Colored People;

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	Dava Sobel, The Planets, a tour of our solar system;
Bob Dylan’s folk music;

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	Howard Zinn on Democracy;
Niall Ferguson on The West and China;

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	Stephen Walt on The Israel Lobby;
Katherine Newman, Portraits of the Near Poor in America;

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	Jonathan Kozol’s The Shame of the Nation;
Andrea Mitchell, Talking Back;

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	Deborah Meier and Ted Sizer, Many Children Left Behind;
Bob Schieffer, What He Couldn’t Tell you on TV;

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	The Life and Times of I. F. Stone;
Loretta Napoleoni, The Dark Side of the Global Economy;

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	Elizabeth Gould, Afghanistan’s Untold Story;
Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal;

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	Jacqueline Olds, M.D. and Richard Schwartz, M.D., The Lonely American;
Rashid Khalidi on The Cold War in the Middle East;

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	Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot on The 25 years After 50;
Amy Goodman, Standing Up to Madness;

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	T. J. Stiles, a biography of The First Tycoon;
Lynn Margulis, Tales of Science and Love;

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	Vincent Harding, Is America Possible?
Jared Bernstein, Feeling Squeezed in Today’s Economy;

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	Fred Pearce, Confessions of an Eco-Sinner;
The Three Trillion Dollar War;

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and finally our celebration of America’s Cambridge-rooted Unitarian Public Poet: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at 200.

Cambridge Forum is one of American public radio’s longest running public affairs programs. It now sometimes also has video on demand: single camera productions which are distributed nationally and internationally. Go to Cambridge Forum online, and sample some of the programs. It’s a feast!

Rev. Herb Vetter, D.D.. Director Emeritus