Contact: Todd Wilson, 719-389-6602, [email protected]
Symposium to Examine Cultures in the 21st Century
COLORADO SPRINGS -- Samuel Huntington leads off a group of scholars from around the world gathering next month at Colorado College to address globalization and intercultural dynamics in the next century in a three-day series of lectures, debates, and open discussions.
Scheduled for Thursday - Saturday, Feb. 4 - 6, "Cultures in the 21st Century: Conflicts and Convergences" will allow CC students, faculty, alumni, and others to discuss the new millennium with prominent academics, journalists, and activists. Discussion topics include social implications of a global economy, the Confucian world, the Islamic world, the communitarian impulse, the future of populist politics, and the global politics of environmental protection.
The symposium is the centerpiece of Colorado College's 125th anniversary commemoration. Several publications on the history and heritage of this nationally ranked liberal arts college also are planned as are commissioned musical compositions.
The symposium schedule includes:
Thursday, Feb. 4
Keynote Address, 11 a.m., Packard Hall
Samuel Huntington, professor of the science of government and director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University, will speak on his 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order.
The author and editor of more than a dozen books and 90 scholarly articles, Huntington has studied, taught, and written on military politics, strategy, and civil-military relations, American and comparative politics, and political development and the politics of less-developed countries. He served as the coordinator of security planning for the National Security Council at the White House in 1977 and 1978. In 1970, he founded the quarterly journal Foreign Policy.
Huntington's talk is sponsored by CC's Marianne Lannon Lopat Memorial Lecture Fund.
Global Politics of Environmental Protection, 3 p.m., Packard Hall
Time magazine senior writer Eugene Linden and National Public Radio's Daniel Zwerdling will kick off the weekend discussion series.
Linden writes about science, technology and the environment for Time and has contributed to the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Los Angeles Times. He has received several honors, including two Genesis Awards for outstanding writing about animal issues and the American Geophysical Union Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Science Journalism. Linden's 1986 book, Silent Partners, was cited as a notable book by the New York Times, and he has recently published The Future in Plain Sight: Nine Clues to the Coming Instability.
Linden's talk is sponsored by the Timothy Linnemann Memorial Lecture on the Environment and the Harold D. and Rhonda N. Roberts Memorial Lecture in the Natural Sciences.
Zwerdling began hosting National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" in 1994. Since 1980, he has served NPR as an investigative correspondent, covering environmental health, science and Third World development issues. He is the only journalist to have won the World Hunger Media Award twice - in 1985 for reports on the drought and famine in Chad, and in 1983 for reports on environmental and economic problems plaguing U.S. farmers.
Currently an associate of the Bard College Institute for Language and Thinking in New York, he also has taught media ethics at the American University in Washington, D.C. His 1980 book, Workplace Democracy, is still used in colleges across the country.
Zwerdling's talk is made possible through Colorado College's Harold D. and Rhonda N. Roberts Memorial Lecture in the Natural Sciences.
The Islamic World, 7:30 p.m., Packard Hall
Harvard University professor of Islamic history Roy Mottahedeh and Howard University professor of African studies Sulayman Nyang will discuss the Islamic world.
Former director of Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Mottahedeh is the author of numerous articles and two books, Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society and The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran.
His visit is made possible through the college's W. Lewis and Helen R. Abbott Lecture Fund.
>From 1975 to 1978, Nyang served as deputy ambassador and head of chancery of the Gambia Embassy in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He is currently the lead developer for the African Voices Project of the Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution. Nyang's best known works are Islam, Christianity and African Identity, A Line in the Sand: Saudi Arabia's Role in the Gulf War, Religious Plurality in Africa, and Islam in America, his latest book. Nyang's talk is sponsored by the McHugh Leadership Speakers Series.
Friday, Feb. 5
The Confucian World, 11 a.m., Packard Hall
Roger Ames, professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Hawaii, author and former CC visiting professor Li Zehou, and Harvard University professor of Chinese history and philosophy Tu Wei-Ming will delve into the Confucian world.
Ames is the editor of Philosophy East & West and China Review International. The author of many interpretative studies of Chinese philosophy and culture, including Thinking Through Confucius, Anticipating China: Thinking Through the Narratives of Chinese and Western Culture, and Thinking from the Han: Self, Truth, and Transcendence in Chinese and Western Culture, he also translates Chinese classics.
Zehou has held academic positions at Colorado College, the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin, Swarthmore College, and the University of Colorado in Boulder. He was placed under house arrest for three years after the Tiananmen massacre, and his works were banned in China due to his scholarly reputation and role in the intellectual revolution in China in the 1980s.
In 1985, Wei-Ming was a Fulbright research scholar in China and was asked to teach Confucian philosophy at Peking University. He taught the modern transformation of Confucian humanism at Taiwan University in 1988. He is the author of several books, including Neo Confucian Thought: Wang Yang-Ming's Youth, Centrality and Commonality and Politics: Essays on the Confucian Intellectual. The Confucian world forum is sponsored by the college's Gaylord Endowment for Pacific Areas Study.
The Communitarian Impulse, 3 p.m., Packard Hall
University of California professor Donna Haraway, Stanford University philosophy professor Richard Rorty, and University of Chicago cultural anthropology professor Richard Shweder will discuss the communitarian impulse.
A 1966 Colorado College graduate, Haraway has taught at the University of Hawaii and Johns Hopkins University; she has been at the University of California at Santa Cruz since 1980. She specializes in feminist theory, science studies, anthropology and environmental studies. Haraway is the author of Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science and Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Her visit is made possible through the Demarest Lloyd Humanities Lecture Fund at CC.
Hailed by the New York Times as "the most influential contemporary American philosopher today," Rorty has served as president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. His most recent book is Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, and he is completing The Hope of Pragmatism and Truth and Progress. His talk is sponsored by the college's McHugh Leadership Speakers Series.
Shweder served as president of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, and he is currently co-chair of the Social Science Research Council's Planning Committee on Culture, Health and Human Development. He is the author of Thinking Through Cultures: Expeditions in Cultural Psychology, and he is the editor of many anthropology volumes. His visit is made possible through the Harold D. and Rhonda N. Roberts Memorial Lecture in the Natural Sciences at Colorado College.
Saturday, Feb. 6
Social Implications of a Global Economy, 9:30 a.m., Packard Hall
London School of Economics political science professor emeritus Kenneth Minogue and Harvard University international political economy professor Dani Rodrik will address the global economy.
Minogue is a senior research fellow with the Social Affairs Unit in London, writing about politics and the media. He also works for the New Zealand Business Round Table on a study of Maori-Pakeha relations in New Zealand. He is the author of several books, including The Liberal Mind and The Concept of a University. His visit is sponsored by the CC Dean's Fund.
Rodrik is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and his most recent research is concerned with the consequences of international economic integration, the role of conflict-management institutions in determining economic performance, and the political economy of policy reform. His talk is sponsored by the college's H. Chase Stone Memorial Fund for Lectures.
The Future of Populist Politics, noon, Gates Common Room
Executive vice-president of the AFL-CIO Linda Chavez-Thompson, Atlantic Monthly contributing editor Robert Kaplan, and University of Colorado professor Patricia Nelson Limerick will end the symposium with a prediction of the future of populist politics.
Chavez-Thompson has 30 years of experience in the labor movement, and she was the first person of color elected to an executive office in the AFL-CIO. She was appointed by President Bill Clinton to serve on the President's Initiative on Race and, most recently, to serve as vice chair of the President's Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities. Her visit is made possible through the Schlessman Executive-in-Residence Program at Colorado College.
Two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and author of six books, Kaplan has served as a consultant to the U.S. Army's Special Forces Regiment and has been a fellow of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. His talk is sponsored by CC's Manning Endowed Fund for Political Science and Public Policy Studies.
Limerick teaches courses on the American West and American history. Her best-known work, The Legacy of Conquest, has had a major impact on the field of Western American history, and she is working on Something in the Soil and The Atomic West. In 1996, she was president of the 5,500-member American Studies Association. Limerick's visit is sponsored by the college's Women in the West Lecture Fund.
For more details on the symposium, see http://www.ColoradoCollege.edu/125/
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