Newsline: James Skelly named interim director of Baker Institute at Juniata College

[CoBNews <CoBNews@brethren.org>]

Newsline: Church of the Brethren News Service, News Director Cheryl 
Brumbaugh-Cayford, 800-323-8039 ext. 260, cobnews@brethren.org

James Skelly named interim director of Baker Institute at Juniata College

(Oct. 4, 2012) Elgin, IL - James Skelly, a longtime senior fellow at Juniata 
College's Baker Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, has been named 
interim director of the institute for a two-year period, effective immediately. 
Juniata College is a Church of the Brethren-related school in Huntingdon, Pa.

Skelly takes over from Richard Mahoney, who directed the Baker Institute from 
2008 to 2012. Mahoney left Juniata to become director of the School of Public 
and International Affairs at North Carolina State University in Winston-Salem.

Skelly has been associated with Juniata's peace studies program for more than a 
decade. Over the years, he has at different times spent a year or a semester in 
residency at the college to teach courses or returned to speak on various 
peace-related issues.

"Peace institutes like the Baker Institute, and peace studies more broadly, are 
not sentimentalized, utopian projects, although they are sometimes said to be 
so, especially by those who consider themselves 'realists,'" Skelly says. 
"Instead, it's our task at the Baker Institute and Juniata College to insure 
that we develop a realism that not only takes account of the world we're living 
in now, but more importantly, the world we want to live in and can create with 
commitment and intelligence."

Described as "the Peace Studies architect" by genocide scholar Robert Jay 
Lifton in Lifton's memoir "Witness to an Extreme Century," Skelly also is a 
member of the faculty at the Institute for Social and European Studies in 
Koszeg, Hungary, and a TAMOP Research Fellow at Pazmany Peter Katholik 
University in Hungary.

His activism for peace and commitment to peace studies reaches back to the 
1970s, when, as a US military officer, he filed a lawsuit against 
then-Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird because he refused to serve in Vietnam. 
The case helped redefine the criteria for conscientious objectors.

Since completing his doctorate at the University of California, San Diego, he 
has taught and lectured at institutions in Europe, the US, China, Japan, and 
Russia. He has published articles on war and peace issues, as well as study 
abroad and global citizenship in such professional journals as "International 
Educator," "Disarmament Forum," "Peace Review," and "The Handbook of Practice 
and Research in Study Abroad: Higher Education and the Quest for Global 
Citizenship."

In 1984 he joined the faculty at U.C. San Diego as associate director of the 
university's Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, where he worked with 
Ambassador Herbert York, a nationally known nuclear arms control advocate, and 
helped create a graduate fellowship program and a peace study abroad program 
with Mejii Gakuin University in Japan. He was a founder of the Peace Studies 
Association in 1987 and chair of the American Sociological Association's 
Section on Peace and War 1987-88. From 1989-90, he worked as associate director 
of New York University's Center for War, Peace, and the News Media, and 
subsequently became associate director of the Irish Peace Institute at the 
University of Limerick. In 1995, he co-founded the European Peace 
University-Spain, now part of Universitat Jaume I in Castellon de la Plana.

The Church of the Brethren is a Christian denomination committed to continuing 
the work of Jesus peacefully and simply, and to living out its faith in 
community. The denomination is based in the Anabaptist and Pietist faith 
traditions and is one of the three Historic Peace Churches. It celebrated its 
300th anniversary in 2008. It counts some 123,000 members across the United 
States and Puerto Rico, and has missions and sister churches in Nigeria, 
Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and India.

(John Wall, director of media relations for Juniata College, contributed this 
report.)

># # #

>For more information contact:

>Cheryl Brumbaugh-Cayford
>Director of News Services
>Church of the Brethren
>1451 Dundee Ave., Elgin, IL 60120
>800-323-8039 ext. 260
>cobnews@brethren.org