Tuesday Talks
Tuesday Talks are scheduled in Faculty House on the Morningside campus on alternate Tuesdays during the academic year. EPIC members, faculty, and invited guests speak on topics that range across the academic spectrum and also address issues of particular importance to the retired academic community.
Participants can continue their discussion at lunch in the Faculty House Dining Room at a special reduced rate for EPIC members.
Guests are welcome.
Time: 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.
Location: Faculty House, 64 Morningside Drive (please click here for map).
Tuesday Talks in Fall 2016
October 11, 2016
"Between Hitler and Adenauer: Journalists and the 'Moral Reconstruction' of West Germany after 1945"
Volker Berghan, Seth Low Emeritus Professor of History, explains that when Hitler seized power in Germany in 1933, all Germans were confronted with four choices. They could decide to go into exile (and many were even forced to leave); they could go underground, risking capture and in many cases execution; they could make their peace with the Nazis and join the Party; fourthly, they could, as did anti-Nazis before and after 1933, retreat into "inner emigration." This talk is about this fourth position. It uses the example of three journalists who survived and became very prominent after 1945, wrestling, on the one hand, with how to interpret in their influential papers what had ended in 1945 and, on the other, with how to rebuild West German society's moral and ethical foundations that a criminal regime had so completely destroyed. Having lived through twelve years of un-freedom, one of their main causes was to re-establish freedom of expression--a struggle in the course of which they repeatedly ran up against the autocratic government of Konrad Adenauer. Hence, Berghahn explains, the title "Between Hitler and Adenauer". But there were other key issues that Berghahn will also broach.
October 25, 2016
Professor Philip Genty (Law), Chair of the University Senate Structure and Operations Committee, will discuss retiree representation in the senate.
November 15, 2016
Come and explore how earlier professors at Columbia did their work and what records they have left behind them. The University Archivist, Jocelyn Wilk, will show us a special selection of materials she has chosen for us. The Rare Books Library also will have on display exhibitions about the history of the Pulitzer Prize and a celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.
Meet for conversation and coffee (if you wish) on the ground floor cafe of Butler Library at 11:15 a.m. At noon we will gather in the Rare Book Library, located on the sixth floor of Butler Library.
The EPIC table will be reserved in the Faculty House Dining Room at 1:30 p.m.
December 6, 2016
Caitlin Hawke, "Community Matters: The BAiP Model"
Bloomingdale Aging in Place is a vibrant community of older adults residing in Manhattan's west side in an area bounded by 96th and 110th Streets. Over 1200 members strong, it is a grassroots, all-volunteer non-profit organization that relies heavily on peer-to-peer exchange to achieve its mission to keep retirees connected. In great part, it does this through over 1000 activities each year, which range from ongoing reading and exercise groups to social opportunities to informational panels. Caitlin Hawke, Senior Science and Strategy Officer at the Columbia Aging Center, co-leads the BAiP activities committee and serves on its board in her community work. She will discuss what has worked (and what has not) as the organization has grown and sought to become sustainable. Incorporated in 2009, BAiP recently received the 2016 Joan H. Tisch Prize from Hunter College "for outstanding accomplishment in the field of urban public health" and may be one of the best kept secrets outside its Upper West Side catchment.
December 20, 2016
Festive Holiday Lunch
"Using Music Visualization to Enrich Student Learning in Music Humanities"
Professors Susan Boynton and Brad Garton will discuss the project for which they received a Provost's Hybrid Learning Course Redesign and Delivery grant. While at the Columbia Global Center in Paris, Professor Boynton participated in teaching music and art humanities as parallel and contemporary courses, and she drew on her extensive knowledge of the visual arts to make connections between works of music and what students were seeing in Paris. Come see, listen and learn about how the course is working in the Columbia classroom