October 15, 2003
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.- Amherst's new president, Anthony W. Marx, will moderate a discussion of "The Liberal Arts: Privilege and Responsibility" on Sunday, Oct. 26, at 3 p.m. in Johnson Chapel. Sheldon Hackney, Catharine Stimpson, Harris Wofford, Diana Chapman Walsh and William Julius Wilson will join Marx. This discussion is open to the public at no charge.

Sheldon Hackney is a professor of U.S. history at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in the South since the Civil War, American utopias, the Civil Rights movement and the 1960s, and the American identity. Hackney had served as president of Penn for 12 years when he stepped down in 1993 to chair the National Endowment for the Humanities, which funds projects in history, literature, philosophy and other humanities disciplines. He left the NEH in 1997.

Catharine Stimpson is a University Professor at New York University, where she also is dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science. Stimpson was a founding editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and the first director of the Women's Center of Barnard College and the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University.

Senator Harris Wofford was a Democratic senator from Pennsylvania from 1991 until 1994, and the president of the Corporation for National and Community Service from 1995 until 2001. Wofford, who helped found the Peace Corps in 1961, has been a law professor and president of the State University of New York at Old Westbury and Bryn Mawr College.

Diana Chapman Walsh, the president of Wellesley College since 1993, previously chaired the Department of Health and Social Behavior at the Harvard School of Public Health, where she was also the Florence Sprague Norman and Laura Smart Norman Professor. Walsh has specialized in workplace democracy and principles of leadership, including the study of the practice of medicine within corporations. Walsh wrote Corporate Physicians: Between Medicine and Management and co-edited Science and Health, an analysis of social and cultural determinants of illness.

William Julius Wilson, the Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University, has written widely on urban poverty, urban race and class relations, and social inequality in cross-cultural perspective. He is the author of Power, Racism, and Privilege; The Declining Significance of Race; The Truly Disadvantaged; When Work Disappears; and The Bridge Over the Racial Divide.

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