Actress and climate activist Jane Fonda this week sat down for a conversation with Willow Bay, dean of the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. She brought her famed intensity and personal power, now at age 86, with her.
She recalled on Thursday, April 11, the contrast she saw decades ago in California when she could hear songbirds and “all kinds of animals” — but that later “there were freeways, there was smog.” She told the crowd, “I couldn’t understand how people who lived in California weren’t bothered by what they seem to take for granted.”
Still an activist at heart, Fonda took a few jabs at corporate funding of university programs and got some pushback from the audience, which she seemed glad to hear. USC Annenberg — named for publishing magnate Walter H. Annenberg — along with two other universities, got the largest cash donation ever in U.S. education in the early 1990s. Annenberg explained to the media of that era, “Education is the key.”
