LEXINGTON, KY – The Rotary Club of Lexington held its weekly meeting Thursday, February 2, at the Mane on Main, Chase Bank building on Main St. The program’s guest speaker was Dr. Robert Farley, Patterson School of Diplomacy, University of Kentucky.
This meeting was also be on Zoom. For the Zoom link please email, trafton@rotarylexky.org.
If you would like to have lunch, please contact Jenny@rotarylexky.org to reserve your meal.
Few programs throughout the Rotary year are more eagerly anticipated than our annual look at the state of the world through the eyes of the experts at the University of Kentucky’s Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce (Patterson School). This tradition of beginning the year with prognostications of world events goes back at least forty years.
This year we are privileged to hear from Dr. Robert Farley, Senior Lecturer at the Patterson School. Dr. Harley has taught security and diplomacy courses at the Patterson School since 2005. He also held an academic position with the Department of National Security Strategy, United States Army War College from August 2018 to July 2019.
He received his BS from the University of Oregon in 1997, and his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2004. Dr. Farley is the author of Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force (University Press of Kentucky, 2014), the Battleship Book (Wildside, 2016), and Patents for Power: Intellectual Property Law and the Diffusion of Military Technology (University of Chicago, 2020). He has contributed extensively to a number of journals and magazines, including the National Interest, the Diplomat: APAC, World Politics Review, and the American Prospect. Dr. Farley is also a founder and senior editor of Lawyers, Guns and Money.
The Patterson School itself has an interesting history and deep ties to the Rotary Club of Lexington. It was launched in 1959 in fulfillment of the vision of UK’s first president, Dr. James Kennedy Patterson. Upon his death in 1922, almost his entire estate was placed in a trust to be used for the creation of a college of diplomacy to be named for his deceased son, William Andrew Patterson. Thirty-seven years later the trust had grown sufficiently large that, coupled with funding from the Commonwealth of Kentucky, the Patterson School could become a reality.
As for those Rotary ties, our Club’s own Vince Davis served as Director of the Patterson School for twenty-one years, starting in 1972. In that role he took the podium for this yearly presentation, much to the delight of his fellow Club members. Vince had military experience as an intelligence officer and naval aviator – serving in Korea – and previously received academic appointments at Princeton, Dartmouth and Denver.
Dr. Farley can be reached via e-mail at Farls0@gmail.com.