Speakers On Campus

Major League Lineup

The buzz all spring was “Don’t miss this speaker”

“Rhetoric has outstripped action in the world’s response to genocide in Darfur,” said New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof during an appearance on campus. He shared with students his experiences documenting the crisis in Sudan, and his hope that the first-person accounts, many written from refugee camps, would trigger a more emphatic U.S. response.

Afterward, members of the audience were invited to sign petitions asking Congress to “stop the genocide in Darfur” in a drive mobilized by political science professor Dr. Barrett McCormick and student members of the Darfur Action Coalition. In all, 4,370 signatures were gathered and later the petitions were presented to U.S. Congresswoman Gwendolynne Moore with a request to take them to Washington, D.C.

Kristof’s visit came during a busy spring, when nationally known figures spoke on topics ranging from the origins of life, a lecture by director of the Vatican Observatory Rev. George Coyne, S.J., to the intersection of bioethics and Christian ethics in end-of-life care, presented by Dr. M. Therese Lysaught, associate professor of religious studies at the University of Dayton. Mixed in were lectures by the New York Times’ Kurt Eichenwald, who wrote a series exposing the child pornography underground; Dr. Juan Gilbert, scholar in computer science and software engineering from Auburn University and president of Brothers of the Academy; Diane Sykes, judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit; Dr. Marilyn Cochran-Smith, the John E. Cawthorne Millennium Professor of Teacher Education for Urban Schools at Boston College; and acclaimed authors David Haynes and Richard Russo.