Affirmative Action the Topic of 1998-99 Seminar Series

Orlando Patterson, Amy Gutmann, Glenn Loury, and Richard Wasserstrom will be the featured speakers at this year's Affirmative Action Seminar, sponsored by the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.

This second annual Markkula Seminar brings nationally acclaimed scholars to campus to give public presentations and to meet with a selected group of academics from SCU and other institutions who spend the year studying a topic of public interest.

This year's public programs begin on Nov. 5, at 7 p.m., with Richard Wasserstrom, emeritus professor of philosophy at U.C.-Santa Cruz. Typical of his work is "Preferential Treatment, Color-Blindness, and the Evils of Racism and Racial Discrimi-nation," an address to the American Philosophical Association. Wasserstrom has taught law and philosophy at UCLA and served as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Tuskegee Institute. He has also edited such books as Today's Moral Problems (Macmillan, 1984) and Morality and the Law (Wadsworth, 1971). His talk will take place in the Recital Hall, Music and Dance Building, at SCU.

Orlando Patterson, the John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, will speak at the Williman Room of the Benson Memorial Center, Dec. 3, at 7 p.m. He is currently working on the second volume of his book Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, a historical sociology of freedom. The first volume of Freedom (Basic Books, 1992) won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 1991. A distinguished scholar on the institution of slavery-his Slavery and Social Death (Harvard University Press, 1985) won the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award of the American Sociological Associa-tion-Patterson is shifting the focus of his research to contemporary America, with special emphasis on the inter-secting problems of race, immigration, and multiculturalism. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The director of the Institute on Race and Social Division at Boston University, Glenn Loury will join the seminar for a public presentation on Feb. 4, at 7 p.m., in the Recital Hall, Music and Dance Building, SCU. He won the 1996 American Book Award for One by One, From the Inside Out: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America (The Free Press, 1996). He has written frequently on affirmative action. A professor of economics at BU, Loury is a fellow of the Econometric Society and was vice president of the American Economics Association. In 1986-87, Esquire Register named him one of the men and women under 40 who are changing the nation, and in 1997-98, he was on the Templeton Honor Roll for Education in a Free Society.

The final presenter, April 29, at 7 p.m., is Amy Gutmann, co-author of Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton University Press, 1996), which won the Ralph J. Bunch Award of the American Political Science Association, the North American Society for Social Philosophy Book Award, and the Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America. Gutmann is the director of the University Center for Human Values and the Program in Ethics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, where she holds the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professorship. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her presentation will be in the Benson Memorial Center Parlors.

All public presentations are free. For further information, contact the Ethics Center at 408-554-5319.