Congressman Major R. Owens to Speak on Public Service
At Long Island University’s Brooklyn Campus, Thursday, May 5

Brooklyn, N.Y. – Brooklyn Congressman Major R. Owens, with a history of more than a quarter century as an elected official, is this year’s speaker for the Maxwell Lehman Memorial Lecture at Long Island University’s Brooklyn Campus. Taking place during National Public Service Week, his lecture is entitled, “The Power of Public Service: A Congressman’s Perspective.”

Rep. Owens will present the Lehman Lecture on Thursday, May 5, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., in the Campus’s Library Learning Center, room 515. The event is free and open to the public.

Elected to represent the 11th congressional district in the United States House of Representatives in 1982,  Rep. Owens is a member of the Education and the Workforce Committee, which guides all federal involvement in education, job training, labor law, employee safety and pensions, programs for the aging and people with disabilities, and equal employment opportunities. He also serves on the Government Reform Committee.

The ranking democrat on the Subcommittee for Workforce Protections, Owens has led the fight for minimum wage increases; as chairman of the Subcommittee on Select Education and Civil Rights for six years, his record for passing legislation as part of the New York delegation is second only to Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Prior to joining Congress, Rep. Owens was a professor at Columbia University and a member of the New York State Senate.           

The Lehman Lecture is named for a professor who taught public administration at the Brooklyn Campus during the 1960s, and who served for 13 years as editor of The Civil Service Leader, a newspaper for government employees.

The Campus’s School of Business, Public Administration and Information Sciences, along with the American Society for Public Administration Metro Chapter, the Public Administration Society and the M.P.A. Alumni Association are sponsoring the event. For more information, call Maria Yangas at (718) 488-1071.

Long Island University opened its Brooklyn Campus in 1926, welcoming a diverse population at a time when other major universities enforced quota systems against racial and ethnic minorities. Some 30,000 students currently are enrolled at the university’s three residential and three regional campuses, including more than 11,000 at the Brooklyn Campus. Located at the corner of Flatbush Avenue Extension and DeKalb Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn, the Campus is accessible to all major bus and subway routes and the Long Island Rail Road.