Contact:  Rick Peterson, Manager of News Services, 414/832-6590
For Immediate Release						October 17, 1996
 
Presidential Politics Examined in Lawrence University Main Hall Forum  
 
 
APPLETON, WIS. -- A critical overview and assessment of the means used for
nominating and electing the president of the United States will be discussed by
national presidential scholar Larry Longley Tuesday, October 22, in a Lawrence
University Main Hall Forum.  The address, "Electing the People's President," at
4:15 p.m. in Main Hall, Room 109, is is free and open to the public.

Longley, a professor of government at Lawrence, will examine the impact of the
primaries in nominating candidates, the purpose of national conventions and the
role played by the debates during the fall campaign.  

He has written more than 100 books and studies of politics and political
institutions, including "The Electoral College Primer," which was published
last month by Yale University Press.  A presidential elector in the 1988 and
1992 elections, Longley served a consultant to the U.S. Senate Judiciary
Committee for much of the 1970s and 1990s and has been invited to testify as an
expert witness to U.S. Senate hearings on electoral college reform on several
occasions.  

A member of the National Committee of the Democratic Party since 1989 and
elected to the DNC Executive Committee earlier this year, Longley joined the
Lawrence faculty in 1965.  He earned his bachelor's degree at Oberlin College
and his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University.  In 1994, Longley was awarded a
distinguished lectureship by the Fulbright Scholar Program and spent a year as
the John Marshall Chair in Political Science at Budapest University in Hungary.