A Shanahan Speaker On a Shanahan Topic

Andrea Batista Schlesinger

By Kay Mills

Andrea Batista Schlesinger, executive director of the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, will help frame the economic issues of the fall election campaign for JAWS members as the Shanahan Speaker at the Attitash Camp. This talk honors one of JAWS’ founding members, Eileen Shanahan, an ace economics reporter for the New York Times for many years and later founding executive editor of Governing Magazine.

Schlesinger heads an institute founded by an adviser to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement. The name derives from King’s statement “If you want to say I was a drum major, say I was a drum major for justice.” During Schlesinger’s tenure as executive director, the institute has focused on the immigration debate and the concerns of the squeezed middle-class and has launched a national program to connect college students from under-represented communities with policy careers. It has also created a Marketplace of Ideas series highlighting successful progressive policies from across the country.

As a teenager, Schlesinger was the student member of the New York Board of Education and later studied public policy at the University of Chicago. She directed a national campaign to engage college students in the discussion on the future of Social Security for the Pew Charitable Trusts. Her analyses have been published in The Nation, New York Newsday, the Chicago Sun-Times and other newspapers and magazines. She was named a “40 Under 40 Rising Star” by Crain’s New York Business in 2007. She has headed DMI since 2002 and lives in Brooklyn, where she grew up.

Shanahan joined with JAWS’ Betsy Wade, the late Joan Cook and others, in suing the Times for sex discrimination in the 1970s. That suit helped open newsroom doors and promotions to many women who followed. Shanahan was also a mentor to many JAWS members. When she died in 2001, her daughters, Mary Beth and Kate Waits, asked that memorial donations be given either to JAWS or to UNITY, the alliance representing journalists of color. That gift and subsequent fundraising efforts by JAWS members enable the organization to bring to the fall meeting women who can address topics that would have piqued Shanahan’s curiosity, which was as wide as it was deep.

Kay Mills is the author of “This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer” and “A Place in the News: From the Women’s Pages to the Front Page.” She is working now on a mystery.