Senior Symposia

"Science, Morality, and Modern Life Styles" was the topic examined during the year's first Senior Symposia Focus held on November 12-14. Discussing subjects from environmental combination to heart transplant, the resource leaders for the fall Focus included Robert S. Browne, black economist, author, and professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University; Guido Calabresi, a professor at Yale Law School and expert on the legal implications of human organ transplants; W. H. Ferry '32, former vice president of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions; and Lawrence B. Slobodkin, ecologist and biology professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The three-day program included a combination of large meetings addressed by all the speakers and small informal discussions with individual visitors at participating dormitories and fraternity houses.

Throughout the current year, according to Theodore A. McConnell '70, director of the Senior Symposia, the Focus programs will consider the relevance of scholarship and the professions to modern life and will thus be related to the Bicentennial theme, "Liberal and Professional Learning in a Changing Society." Each term a division of the faculty is responsible for viewing contemporary problems from its own academic perspective, with the Sciences Division concerned with "Science and the Changing Environment" in the fall term, the Humanities Division with "The Humanities and Changing Values" in the winter term, and the Division of Social Sciences with "The Social Sciences and the Changing Community" in the spring term.

The Focus topics are planned to coincide with this three-part program for the academic year. The winter-term program will offer a week-long montage of creative expression, supplementing a poetry symposium January 21-23, and the spring term program on May 11-12 will consider "Institutional Change and Violence."