Central Intelligence Agency Director Leon Panetta and two former U.S. national security advisers will be keynote speakers at a foreign policy conference Monday, March 8, on the OU campus.

Panetta, along with security advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, will headline the conference, titled “A New Kind of Leadership: America and the Rise of the Rest.”

“This conference will give all Oklahomans and the OU community a rare opportunity to hear directly from leading architects of U.S. national security policy at a time of major challenges to our country,” stated OU President David Boren in a press release.

Panetta will speak during a luncheon event, “Major Challenges to National Security,” and Brzezinski and Scowcroft will speak on “The Major Challenges Facing the U.S. Around the World and How We Should Respond to Them,” at the President’s Associates dinner.

Two events in the lecture series are open to the public:

-- “The Architecture of American History,” featuring David Sanger, the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times, who is known as one of the nation’s most lucid analysts of foreign policy, national security and the politics of globalization, at10 a.m. in Beaird Lounge of Oklahoma Memorial Union, and

-- “An Assessment of U.S. Policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” featuring Matthew Hoh, a former combat Marine in the Middle East, a Foreign Service officer in Afghanistan from 2007 to 2009, and a frequent guest commentator on national media programs, at 2 p.m. in Meacham Auditorium. Hoh resigned from the U.S. Foreign Service in protest of American policy in Afghanistan.

This is the eighth foreign policy conference held at OU, according to the release. The other conferences included U.S. Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger, Madeleine K. Albright and James A Baker III; former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher; former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev; Nobel Peace Prize-winner and Archbishop Emeritus, Desmond Tutu; His Royal Highness Crown Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan; and the first democratically elected president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

Limited seating is available for the lunch and dinner for OU students, faculty and staff. For more information, visit the OU Public Affairs Web site or call 325-1701.