Kenan Institute to Hold Lecture on Moral Learning
Friday, January 12, 2001
The highlight of the day's events will be the 2001 Kenan Distinguished Lecture by Thomas Ehrlich, a senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and author of Higher Education & Civic Responsibility. All events are free and open to the public.The 4 p.m. keynote address, titled "Moral and Civic Learning," is scheduled for the Bryan Center's Von Canon Hall. A 5:30 p.m. reception will follow.
A pair of panel discussions - "Should We Teach Virtues in College? And If So, Which Ones?," at 1 p.m. in the Old Trinity Room of the West Union Building; and "Promoting Moral Leadership," at 2:30 p.m. in the Alumni Memorial Commons of the Duke Divinity School - will kick off the afternoon's events.
The Kenan Distinguished Lecture Series brings speakers to campus to address moral issues of broad social and cultural significance. Previous Kenan lecturers include Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist William Raspberry, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and sociologist Robert Bellah.
Ehrlich, who is chairman-elect of the American Association of Higher Education, has served as president of Indiana University, provost of the University of Pennsylvania and dean of Stanford Law School. He has written or edited eight books, including The Courage to Inquire. He currently is a Distinguished University Scholar at California State University who regularly teaches community service-learning courses at San Francisco State University.
Ehrlich, co-director of a national project at the Carnegie Foundation examining current efforts by American colleges and universities to promote student moral and civic responsibility, has praised Duke's and the Kenan Institute's efforts to support the study and teaching of ethics. After a site visit last year, Ehrlich and his colleagues selected Duke as one of eight institutions whose efforts to promote moral and civic education will be featured at a national conference at Florida State University in February.
The day's events celebrate the establishment of the Kenan Institute for Ethics last year as the result of a $10 million endowment managed by the William R. Kenan Jr. Charitable Trust's Fund for Ethics. The institute grew out of the Kenan Ethics Program, which began in the fall of 1995 with a five-year, $2 million grant from the Kenan Fund for Ethics.
