U. S. passivity to 20th Century genocide will be discussed by Samantha Power, winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, when she delivers the Convocation Address during the Grand Opening Week of Eleanor Roosevelt College on the campus of the University of California, San Diego.

The Harvard University scholar will speak on topics emerging from her highly praised book, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, at 7 p.m., Oct. 8, in RIMAC Arena on the UCSD campus.

As a journalist and founding executive director of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Power’s approach has been to raise questions by studying the major cases of genocide during the past 100 years, beginning with the Turkish killings of Armenians before World War I. She questions why the U.S. government failed to intercede and why other interests always seemed to keep the United States as a bystander rather than an active opponent of what later became known as crimes against humanity.

Power draws on her own reporting from the Balkans, her Harvard Law School education, and her in-depth research into Nazi atrocities and the dark periods of civil war and genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda and elsewhere. She has heroes, including American policy makers such as Sen. William Proxmire and Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey who urged the Wilson Administration to help the Armenians. Power argues that the few who did take a stand against genocide show what actions the United States might have taken in the face of facts of crimes against peoples.

Power shows how society-wide silence in face of genocide is taken by officials as an indicator of public indifference, allowing them to avoid involvement at no political cost at home. Power is a realist but her outrage at American inaction will engage the UCSD audience, and her work is clearly in the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt College’s namesake-- a woman who became a symbol of American commitment to human rights around the world.

“Samantha Power is an ideal speaker to inaugurate our new college facilities,� said Provost Ann Craig. “With her courage and scholarship, she is a role model for the kind of active, committed internationalism that we encourage,� added the Eleanor Roosevelt College academic leader.