Category Archives: Events

Speaker to Address Academic Freedom in a Post 9/11 World

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – The pressures of patriotism are taking their toll on freedom, says writer John K. Wilson.

Wilson, author of the book Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies (Paradigm Publishers, 2007), will speak at Illinois Wesleyan University about the issues facing academic freedom after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center. His talk is scheduled for 4 p.m. on Wednesday, March 5, in room C101 of the Center for Natural Sciences (201 Beecher St., Bloomington) and is sponsored by the Illinois Wesleyan University chapter of the American Association of University Professors. The event is free and open to the public.

Author of five books, Wilson compares “patriotic correctness” to political correctness. He charges that journalists and professors are coming under fire for questioning the government’s decisions or discussing military operations in an unfavorable light. “Today’s wave of repression in the name of patriotic correctness has only begun,” wrote Wilson.

Wilson is the founder of the Institute for College Freedom and coordinator of the Independent Press Association’s Campus Journalism Project. His works are often quoted in blogs and Web sites such as the Independent Media Center. He has also written Barack Obama: The Improbable Quest and Newt Gingrich: Capitol Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Now living in Chicago, Wilson is also the founder of the Indy, an independent newspaper for Bloomington-Normal.

Journalist Roland S. Martin to Speak at Soul Food Dinner

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Journalist and author Roland S. Martin will present the keynote speech at Illinois Wesleyan University’s annual Soul Food Dinner on Sunday Feb. 24 in the Hansen Student Center (300 E. Beecher St., Bloomington). The event, sponsored by Student Senate, is in celebration of Black History Month.

Dinner will be catered by Sodexho Campus Services and served at 5:30 p.m. Following dinner Martin will address the audience.

Tickets for the Soul Food Dinner will go on sale January 29 and sell through February 9. For the general public tickets are $12. For Illinois Wesleyan faculty, staff, and students tickets are $5. Illinois Wesleyan students with meals plans can charge the dinner to their ID.

Martin graduated from Texas A&M in 1991 with a bachelor’s of science degree in journalism and is currently studying for his master’s degree in Christian Communication at Louisiana Baptist University.

As a journalist, Martin has won more than 20 professional awards including a regional Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television News Directors, two citations from the National Associated Press-Managing Editors Conference, and several first place awards from the Dallas-Fort Worth Association of Black Communicators.

More

Founders’ Day Speaker Vocal on Global Warming Threat

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Climate expert James E. Hansen is calling on today’s youth to reign in global warming.

Director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Hansen will deliver the address for Illinois Wesleyan University’s annual Founders’ Day Convocation at 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, Feb. 19 in Westbrook Auditorium (1210 N. Park St., Bloomington). The evening event will cap a day of Founders’ Day activities, honoring the University’s founding in 1850, and is free and open to the public.

Hansen’s speech, titled “Climate Tipping Points: The Threat to the Planet,” will address the nature of the global warming problem that he sees as a potential “perfect storm” – an accelerated disaster out of humanity’s control. Hansen believes young people may provide a “tipping point” to draw needed attention to global warming.

One of the nation’s foremost researchers on climate change, Hansen has been called upon to testify before Congress on global warming and has published more than 50 articles in scientific journals and reviews on the subject. For decades, he has advocated an open dialogue on global warming, and been critical of both the Clinton and Bush administrations’ stances on climate changes.

A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Hansen has twice received the NASA Presidential Rank for Meritorious Executive Award. He has been awarded the John Heinz Environment Award in 2001, the Roger Revelle Medal from the American Geophysical Union in 2002, the Duke of Edinburgh Conservation Medal from the World Wildlife Fund in 2006 and the Leo Szilard Lectureship Award from the American Physical Society in 2007.

More

IWU Joins Global Warming Teach-In

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – To prepare millions of students to become leaders in the largest civilizational challenge any generation has faced, an unprecedented educational initiative is about to take place. On Wednesday Jan. 30, and Thursday, Jan. 31, thousands of institutions, mostly colleges and universities, will participate in teach-ins focused on global warming.

Called Focus the Nation: Global Warming Solutions for America, these teach-ins are designed to engage millions of students and citizens on the issue of climate change, as well as draw the attention of decision makers and political leaders in advance of the November presidential elections. Focus the Nation has organized a model centered on three pillars for today’s youth, aimed to embrace solutions to global warming: education, civic engagement and leadership. Teams of students come from individual colleges, universities, high schools, middle schools, places of worship, civic organizations and businesses.

Leslie Morrison, a senior environmental studies major and co-president of the Sierra Student Coalition, a student organization dedicated to environmental sustainability on Illinois Wesleyan’s campus, expresses the importance of understanding global warming, “College students have a responsibility to understand this issue and solutions to this issue because we are the future, and the future looks complicated. It is important for everyone to understand the implications of global climate change and what they can personally do to be a part of the solution,” said Morrison.

On IWU’s campus, the GREENetwork, the Sierra Student Coalition, the Office of Resident Life, and the Environmental Studies Program are involved with the preparation of events. Kicking off the Focus the Nation events, on Tuesday Jan. 29 at 8 p.m., the film An Inconvenient Truth will be shown in the Hansen Student Center (300 Beecher St., Bloomington). On Wednesday Jan. 30, at 7 p.m. a Webcast, 2% Solution will be shown in the Hansen Student Center. The central event is a teach-in that will take place throughout the day on Thursday Jan. 31 and will have five different panels organized around specific themes regarding global warming. Examples of the panels are: “Where Are We and How Did We Get Here,” “What is at Stake With Climate Change,” “What is Our Carbon Footprint,” and “The Moral/Ethical Implications of Climate Change.” Illinois Wesleyan faculty members along with selected staff and students who have diverse experience in these areas will speak and lead panel discussions.

More

National Holiday Gospel Festival Celebration to Honor MLK

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Illinois Wesleyan University will host the 18th annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. National Holiday Gospel Festival Celebration on Monday, Jan. 21, from 3-9 p.m. in Westbrook Auditorium of Presser Hall (1210 Park St., Bloomington).

Free and open to the public, the gospel festival honors the birth of Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. Also honoring King is the Fellowship Dinner on Saturday, Jan. 19. See all MLK events at IWU.

Founded by the United Community Gospel Singers of Bloomington and Normal, a not-for-profit organization, and cosponsored by Illinois Wesleyan, the gospel festival was launched in 1991 by Corine G. Sims, executive director of the United Community Gospel Singers as a way to continue King’s legacy. This year numerous choirs, soloists, singers and dancers such as Malcolm Williams and the Voices of Great Faith, Gayles Memorial Mass Choir and the Fantastic Jones Family will pay tribute to Sims, who passed away on Aug. 3, 2007.

More

Team to Discuss Groundbreaking China Research at Asian Studies Colloquium

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — Three Illinois Wesleyan University students and a professor who traveled to China this summer will speak about the groundbreaking work of their team at the Asian Studies Colloquium Series on Tuesday, Nov. 13, from 12:10 p.m. to 1 p.m. in Room E 103 of the Center for Natural Sciences (201 Beecher Street). The event is part of International Education Week on campus, and the public is invited to attend.

The Series is an opportunity for faculty and students to share findings from their specialized research on Asia. The presenting research team, led by Thomas Lutze, associate professor and chair of history at Illinois Wesleyan, journeyed to the Chinese cities, Beijing, Shanghai, Peking and Hangzhou, to explore urban planning in post-Revolutionary China. It is an area that has been relatively untouched in the field of Chinese history, according to Lutze.

“This is a significant research topic in modern Chinese history that has been overlooked in Western literature, and not very widely researched in China,” said Lutze, whose team investigated how the Communist government of 1949 addressed the chaos of post-war China. “After eight years of World War II and three years of Civil War, the infrastructure of urban China had been pretty much destroyed. There were a lot of people who were in desperate need of housing, of health care, of schooling.”

In order to explore the issue, the team received an ASIANetwork Freeman Student Faculty Fellows Grant that allowed them to travel for nearly three and a half weeks in June and July to universities, archives and sites in the three cities. The five IWU students on the team were each assigned a topic to research: pollution, education, housing, sanitation and health care. “We were able to go into the stacks and look up articles, with the help of translators of course,” said Christy Ivie, a junior sociology major who studied efforts of the government to provide housing. “We walked through the housing built by the government. It was incredible to actually see what we were researching right in front of us.”

More

From Dante to Hogwarts: IWU to host MUSE Undergraduate Literature Conference

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Illinois Wesleyan University will offer 35 students from 19 academic institutions the opportunity to present undergraduate work in literature during the third annual MUSE Undergraduate Literature Conference on Saturday, Oct. 6, with registration beginning at 8 a.m. and the first of three sessions to begin at 9:00 a.m. in the Center for Natural Science (CNS) (201 Beecher St., Bloomington).Wendy Wall, chair of Northwestern University’s Department of English, will deliver the keynote address titled “At Home with Shakespeare” at 12:30 p.m. in CNS E101.

The conference, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by IWU’s Alpha Eta Pi chapter of the international English honor society Sigma Tau Delta (STD) with the assistance of Illinois State University’s Lambda Delta chapter of STD and IWU’s Department of English.

Expanding significantly after its first two years, MUSE features students from IWU and ISU in addition to students from as near as Knox College and St. Francis University to as far away as the University of Pittsburg and the University of Montenegro.

Students will present works of literary analysis and criticism at MUSE that range from classic (“‘Stolen Rolls’ and Different Souls: An Examination of Plato’s Theory of Forms in the Lives of Levin and Oblonsky”) to contemporary (“What’s Wrong With Hogwarts?”) to seemingly bizarre (“‘A Backward Glance’ at The House of Mirth: How Future-consciousness is Necessary for the Creation of Fictional Memory”).

The conference will also feature a panel devoted to post-graduation options for literature students, including information on professional and graduate school opportunities, as well as careers in education.

More

Merwin and Wakeley Galleries to Present Artwork by Visiting Artists and Students

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – The Illinois Wesleyan University School of Art will present an exhibition of three concurrent solo shows featuring the works of artists L.J. Douglas, Doug Johnson and Mark Sumner Forth on display in the Merwin Gallery, and the works of award-winners from the annual juried student show on display in the Wakeley Gallery. The galleries are located in the Joyce G. Eichhorn Ames School of Art Building (6 Ames Plaza West, Bloomington).

Free and open to the public, the exhibits will run from Sunday, June 10 through Sunday, August 19. During the opening, there will be a reception from 2 to 4 p.m. and, at 2:30 p.m., there will be a gallery talk with the visiting artists.

Summer gallery hours are Friday through Monday from noon until 3 p.m.

More

Works by Ginter, Wiesener and Shaw at Merwin, Wakeley Galleries

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – The work of artists Sandi Ginter, Catherine Wiesener and Peggy Shaw will be displayed May 8- May 29 in Illinois Wesleyan’s Merwin & Wakeley Galleries (6 Ames Plaza West, Bloomington).
The exhibits are free and open to the public. Gallery hours are Monday-Friday, 12-4 p.m.; Tuesday evening, 7-9 p.m.; and Saturday and Sunday, 1-4 p.m.  The galleries will be closed for Memorial Day on Monday, May 28.
On Thursday, May 10, there will be an opening reception from 4-6 p.m. in the galleries as well as a gallery talk with the artists at 4:30 p.m.
More