On November 29, join your Techer community at the Yale Club, when the Caltech Alumni Association comes to New York City.



What does your local Techer community look like? Nearly 1,600 Caltech alumni can make it to Grand Central Station in 90 minutes or less. It includes 11 Distinguished Alumni Award recipients, academics, industry leaders, and entrepreneurs. The top employers for Techers are Princeton, Columbia, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, NYU, and Goldman Sachs. But NYC-area Techers also work in finance, technology, pharmaceuticals, and research, as well as higher education.



Just imagine the possibilities when Techers like that come together. Make sure you're in the room. Rekindle your Caltech connections, make new friendships, and enjoy insightful conversations and networking opportunities. 

Registration is closed. Invitation is not transferrable. No walk-ins will be accepted.  

See all the New York Area Techers who have registered to come.

Wednesday, November 29

5:30 – 7:30 pm (ET)
 


The Yale Club 

50 Vanderbilt Ave

New York, NY 10017

$25 registration, per guest, includes hors d’oeuvres and drinks
.

Featured Speaker

Tracy Dennison, PhD

Edie and Lew Wasserman Professor of Social Science History; Ronald and Maxine Linde Leadership Chair, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences

Tracy Dennison studies institutions and their effects on long-term growth and development. She is especially interested in the roots of economic divergence between east and west Europe, and uses serfdom as a lens through which to examine institutional change over time. Dennison is interested in how specific societies worked in the past – how societal rules and norms affected human behavior and how and why this varied over space and time.

See the Caltech faculty page for Professor Tracy Dennison, PhD.

Presentation

‍Was Putin Inevitable? The Long History of the Weak State in Russia

Russia has a long history of authoritarian rule, from Ivan the Terrible in the 16^th century to Josef Stalin in the 20^th. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s was supposed to herald a new era of democracy and openness in Russia. But the rise of the Putin regime has left many wondering whether Russia can change. We often hear Russia described as having an “authoritarian culture” – one that is incompatible with western-style liberalism. This talk uses evidence from historical archives to examine Russia's failure to establish a democratic state and a rule of law. It will be argued that the problem is not the culture or mentality of the Russian people, but the structure of Russian society and the absence of institutions like secure property rights, upon which the rule of law was built, over many centuries, in western Europe.

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