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Lani Guinier: “The Tyranny of the Meritocracy” – November 4, 2015

In “The Tyranny of the Meritocracy,” Harvard Law School professor and pioneering civil rights advocate Lani Guinier critiques university merit systems that privilege the elite and offers a blueprint for nurturing student potential that promises to better serve the challenges of a twenty-first century world. Drawing on current case studies, as well as her many years observing the experiences of minority and female students at the universities where she has taught, Guinier charts how current views of merit often lead to narrower learning experiences, suppress leadership potential, and discourage the collaborative approaches that have repeatedly proven the best way to solve problems, from the classroom to the […]

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Harry Brod: “Asking For It: The Ethics & Erotics of Sexual Consent” – February 10, 2015

Harry Brod is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at the University of Northern Iowa. He is the author of White Men Challenging Racism: 35 Personal Stories, Theorizing Masculinities, Hegel’s Philosophy of Politics: Idealism, Identity and Modernity, A Mensch Among Men: Explorations in Jewish Masculinity, and The Making of Masculinities: The New Men’s Studies. The line between sexual consent and sexual coercion is not always as clear as it seems — and according to Harry Brod, this is exactly why we should approach our sexual interactions with great care. Brod, a professor of philosophy and leader in the pro-feminist men’s movement, […]

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James Haile: “Ta-Nehisi Coates: quantum matter and the phenomenology of the body” – October 20, 2015

The publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “letter to his son,” Between the World and Me (2015), has been met with mixed reviews. Responses have ranged from a critique for his ‘pessimism’ to grand celebratory remarks announcing him as the next great intellectual and social critic in the mold of James Baldwin. This talk will investigate the meaning of the body in Coates’ book and its relationship to ‘race’ and will argue that while Coates does not offer us a solution to the problem of embodiment or the galaxy distances between bodies, black and white, what he does offer, to his son and to his readers, […]

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Dennis Dalton: “Gandhi and Forgiveness” – September 29, 2015

Gandhi practiced the value of forgiveness as a method of conflict resolution. He derived this idea from the world’s great religious traditions. He applied it to his leadership of the Indian independence movement and later to attaining peace in the face of Hindu-Muslim civil war. This lecture will explain how he urged forgiveness of British atrocities following the Amritsar massacre of 1919 and then through his Calcutta fast for religious unity in 1947. reference will also be made to similar acts of forgiveness by Martin Luther Kind, Jr. in 1956 during the Montgomery bus boycott.

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Rhonda Sharpe: “I’m Every Woman”: Income Distribution by Race and Ethnicity – September 17, 2015

July 28, 2015 was Black Women’s Pay Equity day – the day that Black women’s earnings were equal to that of white men’s earnings in 2014. Much of the scholarly literature on pay inequality focuses on the inequities between white men and others. This study analyzes the wage gap between Black women and other women, controlling for age cohort, education, geographic location, and marital status/family type. In this talk, I will describe the study and explore its implications for economic policy and future research.

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