University Lectures

Thursday, October 2

4:30pm – Adamson Wing Auditorium, 136A Baker Hall

Robert Sternberg, Dean, School of Arts and Science and Professor of Psychology, Tufts University

Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized: A New Approach to University Admissions

Robert J. Sternberg is an American psychologist and psychometrician and the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University. He was formerly IBM Professor of Psychology and Education at Yale University and the President of the American Psychological Association. He is a member of the editorial boards of numerous journals, including American Psychologist. Sternberg has a BA from Yale University and a PhD from Stanford University. He holds ten honorary doctorates from one North American, one South American, and eight European universities, and additionally holds an honorary professorate at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. In this talk, he will describe a model of human abilities that is broader than the narrow model of general ability upon which contemporary admissions assessments are based, and will discuss two assessments—Rainbow and Kaleidoscope—which operationalize this model. He will present data showing that the new assessments increase prediction of academic performance, decrease ethnic-group differences, and result in improved perceptions on the part of students, their parents, and guidance counselors regarding universities’ willingness to consider the whole person in admissions decisions and how these ideas are being implemented at Tufts University.

Thursday, October 2

4:30pm – Breed Hall Auditorium, Margaret Morrison Carnegie Hall 103

JAMES LaPAGLIA LECTURE

Larry Temkin, Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers University

Why Care About Equality?

Many people are suspicious of equality as a value. They believe that egalitarians are motivated by base emotions like envy, and that they are committed to the Levelling Down Objection, which holds that valuing equality leads to levelling down. Specifically, many anti-egalitarians believe that egalitarians are committed to policies such as putting out the eyes of the sighted in order to promote equality between the sighted and the blind. Accordingly, egalitarianism is claimed to be an absurd view that only a hardened misanthrope could endorse. In this talk, I distinguish between different kinds of equality, and illuminate one particular version of egalitarianism that I call Equality as Comparative Fairness. I defend this version against several rival positions, as well as against numerous objections, including the Levelling Down Objection. In addition, I present several examples illustrating that although equality is not /all/ that matters, we cannot simply dispense with the ideal of equality if we want to do full justice to all our moral beliefs.

Larry S. Temkin is Professor II of Philosophy at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. He graduated number one with a B.A.-Honors Degree from the University of Wisconsin/Madison (1975), and earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Princeton (1983). He also studied at Oxford University. Specializing in ethics and political philosophy, Temkin is the author of Inequality, (Oxford University Press, 1993), as well as many articles. He has received fellowships from the Danforth Foundation and the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and been a Visiting Fellow or Scholar at the National Humanities Center, Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, All Souls College Oxford University, the National Institutes of Health, and the Australian National University. He is also the recipient of eight major teaching awards. Temkin is currently working on a book, tentatively titled, Rethinking the Good, Moral Ideals, and the Nature of Practical Reasoning.

Monday, October 6th

4:30pm – Adamson Wing Auditorium, 136A Baker Hall

David Blight, Professor of American History and Director, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition, Yale University

A Slave No More: Two Men who Escaped to Freedom (including their Narratives of Emancipation)

David W. Blight is a renowned historian of the collective memory and cultural legacies of racism and slavery. At Yale University, he holds the Class of 1954 Chair in American history and directs the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. His 2001 book, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory received the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, the Frederick Douglass Prize, and five other book awards. At Carnegie Mellon, he will discuss his latest book, A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation (2007). Based on manuscripts discovered in 2004 – an event given front-page coverage by The New York Times – Professor Blight reconstructed the authors’ lives in slavery and freedom to reveal a complex process of emancipation that long outlasted the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Sponsored by the Center for AfricanAmerican Urban Studies and the Economy (CAUSE) and the Department of History

Friday, October 10th

12:30pm – Rangos Ballroom, UC
INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL
Gary Knell, President & CEO, Sesame Workshop
Muppet Diplomacy: How Sesame Street Is Changing Our World

Free tickets (REQUIRED) for lecture & lunch available at UC Info Desk