2008 Fall Roundtables
Why the Professorial Political Leaning Tends to be Liberal
HELD: Tuesday, October 21st
Texana Room, DeGolyer Library
3:30 - 5:00 pm
Are they/we so dangerous? Daniel B. Klein and Charlotta Stern, "By the Numbers: The Ideological Profile of Professors," www.aei.org/events/eventID.1595/event_detail.asp (click the article in the right (!) frame. David Horowitz thinks so too, in "The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (2006)." Or see, "Is the Academy a Liberal Hegemony?" in Public Opinion Quarterly, 2006 70(3):304-26, http://poq.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/70/3/304 Do we need affirmative action for conservative thinkers? Is that why they call it "liberal" arts? See Mark Bauerlein, "Liberal Groupthink is Anti-intellectual," www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/news/2261/liberal-groupthink-is-anti-intellectual. Or is this just conservative posturing to marginalize the contribution of academics to public policy debate? And is it working? If any of this is true, does it influence our teaching, scholarship, and public advocacy? Join our panelist Bill Bridge/Law, Dennis Simon/Political Science, Mike Lusztig/Political Science and Robert Frank/Music for this discussion.
Presenting Research to the Public (and Students)
HELD: Monday, September 22nd
Texana Room, DeGolyer Library
3:00 - 4:30 pm
To stimulate the interest of benefactors as well as to better educate our students, presenting our research to the world outside ought to be engaging and exciting. Too often it is droll and ponderous. How can we do a better job? Translating esoteric, arcane, or technical data into an understandable story requires skill: it’s a fine line between the overly specific and the oversimplified. Join us for a broad consideration of this important activity. Our panelists will be Caroline Brettell/Anthropology, Patti LaSalle-Hopkins/Office of Public Affairs and Brent Sumerlin/Chemistry.