Contact: Harriet Laird
STARKVILLE, Miss.--Mississippi State University will welcome former Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney to campus Jan. 28 to take part in the university's Global Lecture Series.
Romney will be the featured speaker during the 6 p.m. free public lecture in Lee Hall's Bettersworth Auditorium. A moderated question-and-answer session will follow Romney's address.
For program entry, attendees must have tickets, available at the Center for Student Activities in MSU's Colvard Student Union, Suite 314, beginning Jan. 12 for students and Jan. 15 for the general public.
Romney was the 2012 Republican nominee for president of the United States. He also was a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.
Elected Governor of Massachusetts in 2002, Romney presided over a period of sustained economic expansion. Without raising taxes or increasing debt, he balanced the budget every year of his administration, closing a $3 billion budget gap inherited when he took office. He also enacted educational reforms and in 2006 signed into law a private, market-based reform that ensures every Massachusetts citizen will have health insurance.
Already a highly successful businessman, Romney first gained international recognition for his role in turning around the 2002 Winter Olympics. With the 2002 games mired in controversy and facing a financial crisis, Romney took over as president and CEO of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee and delivered a highly successful games.
Previously, from 1978 to 1984, Romney was a vice president at Bain & Company, Inc. In 1984, he founded Bain Capital, one of the nation's most successful venture capital and investment companies. Bain Capital helped launch hundreds of companies on a successful course, including Staples, Bright Horizons Family Solutions, Domino's Pizza, Sealy, Brookstone, and Sports Authority.
MSU's Global Lecture Series is sponsored by the Student Association that previously has hosted former U.S. secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and Gen. Colin Powell, news anchor Dan Rather, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient F.W.de Klerk, the seventh and last president of apartheid-era South Africa.
For more information about the event, call 662-325-2930. For more on Gov. Romney, please visit www.chartwellspeakers.com/speaker/mitt-romney-exclusive-speaker.
Mississippi's flagship research university is online at www.msstate.edu, facebook.com/msstate, instagram.com/msstate and twitter.com/msstate.