Much ado about...much
2/10/2006
Our first Lund-Gill Chair, Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman, has been teaching juniors every Monday night this semester about Science, Technology and Education in the 21st Century. He'll give a talk to the rest of us on this coming Monday afternoon titled 'Should Science be at the Core of a College Education?' And then a few weeks later he'll give another public lecture, 'Does Science Answer All Questions?' Come to campus and hear him! Leon Lederman is an internationally renowned physicist and Director Emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, where he was Director from 1979 to 1989. During a remarkable career spanning more than four decades, Dr. Lederman's research has ranged the gamut of subatomic-particle physics from meson studies through pioneering experiments with neutrino beams to the discovery of the third generation of quarks. His many honors include the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics, the National Medal of Science, the Elliot Cresson Medal of the Franklin Institute, the Wolf Prize in Physics, and the Enrico Fermi Prize given by President Clinton in 1993. He served as a founding member of the High-Energy Physics Advisory Panel of the United States Department of Energy and the International Committee for Future Accelerators. He's having a great time so far in the classroom this semester and so are his students!
We're also delighted to announce next year's Lund-Gill Chair. David Bevington is the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1967. His publications include The Bantam Shakespeare, in 29 paperback volumes, and The Complete Works of Shakespeare, HarperCollins, fifth edition. He is senior editor of the recently published Norton Anthology of Renaissance Drama. This year he'll publish How to Read a Shakespeare Play, and This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance, Then and Now.
He'll teach for us a senior honors seminar in the revise Honors Program, on the theme of 'Wisdom and Power,' featuring such texts as Sophocles' Oedipus, The Book of Job, and Shakespeare's King Lear.
Things are jumping on campus as usual. This week we had a talk and panel discussion on 'Katrina: Race, Class and Politics,' information sessions for many of our Study Abroad programs, including London, Florence and South Africa, the opening of a fascinating new exhibit in our art gallery, a faculty/staff/student discussion of the movie Crash, and more pre-Valentine's Day candy sales than even I could keep up with—this coming from someone who's office suite features an array of secret and strategically placed confectionary stashes.
I'm enjoying my own class this semester, Christianity Among the World's Religions, where we're debating so many issues, not the least of which is the present cartoons controversy and the issues it raises about freedom, tolerance, the clash of cultures and the quest for understanding. Students are posting vivid insightful comments on our course's Blackboard (electronic discussion) site as well—I just read about a dozen of them. The site allows us to extend our classroom so that the two modes of conversation—synchronous in class and asynchronous on Blackboard—will complement and enrich one another.
So from particle physics to Shakespeare and so much more, all's well that—keeps getting better!
Our first Lund-Gill Chair, Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman, has been teaching juniors every Monday night this semester about Science, Technology and Education in the 21st Century. He'll give a talk to the rest of us on this coming Monday afternoon titled 'Should Science be at the Core of a College Education?' And then a few weeks later he'll give another public lecture, 'Does Science Answer All Questions?' Come to campus and hear him! Leon Lederman is an internationally renowned physicist and Director Emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, where he was Director from 1979 to 1989. During a remarkable career spanning more than four decades, Dr. Lederman's research has ranged the gamut of subatomic-particle physics from meson studies through pioneering experiments with neutrino beams to the discovery of the third generation of quarks. His many honors include the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics, the National Medal of Science, the Elliot Cresson Medal of the Franklin Institute, the Wolf Prize in Physics, and the Enrico Fermi Prize given by President Clinton in 1993. He served as a founding member of the High-Energy Physics Advisory Panel of the United States Department of Energy and the International Committee for Future Accelerators. He's having a great time so far in the classroom this semester and so are his students!
We're also delighted to announce next year's Lund-Gill Chair. David Bevington is the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1967. His publications include The Bantam Shakespeare, in 29 paperback volumes, and The Complete Works of Shakespeare, HarperCollins, fifth edition. He is senior editor of the recently published Norton Anthology of Renaissance Drama. This year he'll publish How to Read a Shakespeare Play, and This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance, Then and Now.
He'll teach for us a senior honors seminar in the revise Honors Program, on the theme of 'Wisdom and Power,' featuring such texts as Sophocles' Oedipus, The Book of Job, and Shakespeare's King Lear.
Things are jumping on campus as usual. This week we had a talk and panel discussion on 'Katrina: Race, Class and Politics,' information sessions for many of our Study Abroad programs, including London, Florence and South Africa, the opening of a fascinating new exhibit in our art gallery, a faculty/staff/student discussion of the movie Crash, and more pre-Valentine's Day candy sales than even I could keep up with—this coming from someone who's office suite features an array of secret and strategically placed confectionary stashes.
I'm enjoying my own class this semester, Christianity Among the World's Religions, where we're debating so many issues, not the least of which is the present cartoons controversy and the issues it raises about freedom, tolerance, the clash of cultures and the quest for understanding. Students are posting vivid insightful comments on our course's Blackboard (electronic discussion) site as well—I just read about a dozen of them. The site allows us to extend our classroom so that the two modes of conversation—synchronous in class and asynchronous on Blackboard—will complement and enrich one another.
So from particle physics to Shakespeare and so much more, all's well that—keeps getting better!
