This past Tuesday, the Brandeis International Business School's 2013 Perlmutter Award was presented to Stanley Bergman, the chairman and chief executive officer of the health care company Henry Schein, Inc. Bergman first gave a lecture in IBS' Lee Hall about corporate responsibility.
This past Wednesday, Executive Director of the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders Lee Swislow spoke to a small group of Brandeis students and faculty in the Mandel Reading Room about GLAD and her journey through feminism and activism as a part of Feminist Coming Out Week. Swislow first gave a brief background of her early life.
Last Tuesday, Damien Echols, a former death row inmate now working towards his exoneration, spoke with students from the Justice Brandeis Innocence Project at an event called "Life After Death Row," part of the second annual 'Deis Impact. Anne Driscoll, senior reporter for the Justice Brandeis Innocence Project at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, introduced a panel of speakers, which consisted of Echols, his wife Lorri Davis, his defense team advisor Lonnie Soury, and CBS correspondent Erin Moriarty, who interviewed Echols as a death row inmate following his release from prison. Echols was convicted in 1994 as the ringleader of the "West Memphis Three," along with Jessie Misskelley, Jr. and Jason Baldwin, who were convicted of the 1993 murders of three boys in West Memphis, Ark.
Investigative journalist Scott Carney spoke about the organ and skeleton market, drug testing and the unknown practices behind these businesses followed by a question-and-answer session and book signing last Wednesday.
Brandeis has launched a cluster of seminars for entering students, called JustBooks, "in an effort to honor the University's dual commitments to social justice and rigorous intellectural inquiry," according to Prof.
On Wednesday, Dr. Sarah Fortune of the Harvard School of Public Health presented a lecture on the evolution of drug resistant mycobacterium tuberculosis. Prof.
Students for Environmental Action hosted the second-annual SEA free food banquet to promote local and organic food projects this past Tuesday in the Levin Ballroom. The event featured two speakers who discussed the importance of animal rights and healthy food coalitions. The first speaker, Alexis Fox, the Humane Society of the United States' state director for Massachusetts, spoke of the progress that Brandeis has made on campus, as well as what she and the HSUS are striving to achieve in the near future. Fox is the leading innovator of the idea for Meatless Mondays, an initiative that she hopes will be taking place next year on campus.
Noam Chomsky, professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and political activist, addressed students, faculty and alumni on the topic of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict last Thursday, focusing on conflict resolution and further insight into the Middle East struggle for peace. Chomsky last appeared at Brandeis almost exactly a year ago on Nov.
This past Friday, Prof. Mark Auslander (ANTH), a sociocultural anthropologist and published author, presented a lecture on his latest book, The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of Race and Finding an American Family. The lecture, centered predominantly on the book, presented an in-depth look into the complex relationships between religion, slavery and emancipation, and the blurred lines of post-slavery family lineages. The concept of the matriarchal African-American woman was analyzed in depth, specifically the story of Catherine Boyd, a slave woman known as Miss Kitty who was owned by Methodist Bishop James Osgood Andrew. Auslander used a combination of classic anthropological research and data acquisition, art history and in-depth analysis of groups of people in the South and their personal thoughts to write a book documenting his journey across the American South. A portion of the lecture focused on Auslander's commitment to incorporating artwork from Southern communities into the book. A prominent piece of art within the book was a quilt created by Lynn Marshall-Linnemeier, a photographer and artist from Atlanta. The quilt adorns the front cover of The Accidental Slaveowner and is a topic of much discussion within the book. According to an online presentation by the artist, the quilt was created "for the purpose of memory.
This past Friday in the Shapiro Campus Center, Rob Jenkins, a published author and tenured associate professor of English at Georgia Perimeter College, spoke of the benefits of and options in choosing a career teaching at a two-year university. Though Jenkins displayed a PowerPoint presentation, he spoke predominantly on a question-and-answer basis, shaping his speech around the questions and opinions of the participants. Jenkins began his presentation by saying that most applicants were either unaware or unprepared to teach in a two-year institution. Jenkins stressed the advantages of choosing a career path in the two-year college system for a number of reasons, including generally easy-to-acquire tenure, no "publish or perish" rule whereby one must publish works in order to achieve tenure and the relative ease in branching out within the two-year college system. He also emphasized the unimportance of having a terminal degree in one's field of study, the possibilities for enhanced community involvement over those a full research-university professor would have, as well as relatively competitive salary and benefits. Among other topics mentioned in the discussion were the negative aspects of working in a two-year institution over a four-year institution. Most two-year schools do not take into consideration an applicant's research history or plans for academic research.
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