Events

For more than thirty years, humankind has known how to grow enough food to end chronic hunger worldwide. Yet while the “Green Revolution” succeeded in South America and Asia, it never got to Africa. More than 9 million people every year die of hunger, malnutrition, and related diseases every year—most of them in Africa and most of them children. More die of hunger in Africa than from AIDS and malaria combined. Now, an impending global food crisis threatens to make things worse.

In the west we think of famine as a natural disaster, brought about by drought; or as the legacy of brutal dictators. But in this powerful investigative narrative, Thurow & Kilman show exactly how, in the past few decades, American, British, and European policies conspired to keep Africa hungry and unable to feed itself. As a new generation of activists work to keep famine from spreading, Enough is essential reading on a humanitarian issue of utmost urgency.

Although America’s universities have become the envy of the world for their creative energy and their production of transformative knowledge, few understand how and why they have become preeminent. This groundbreaking book traces the origins and the evolution of our great universities. It shows how they grew out of sleepy colleges at the turn of the twentieth century into powerful institutions that continue to generate new industries and advance our standard of living. Far from inevitable, this transformation was enabled by a highly competitive system that invested public tax dollars in university research and students while granting universities substantial autonomy.

Today, America’s universities face considerable threats. Even greater than foreign competition are the threats from within the United States. Under the Bush administration, government increasingly imposed ideological constraints on the freedom of academic inquiry. Restrictive visa policies instituted after 9/11 continue to discourage talented foreign graduate students from training in the United States. The international financial crisis, which has depleted university endowments and state investments in higher education, threatens the vitality of some of our greatest institutions of higher learning. In order to sustain and enhance the American tradition of excellence, we must nurture this powerful—yet underappreciated—national resource.

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Kenzaburō Ōe, recipient of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature, will return to the University of Chicago’s Center for East Asian Studies to deliver this year’s Tetsuo Najita Distinguished Lecture. Ōe will speak in Japanese, with English translation provided by Norma Field, the Robert S. Ingersoll Distinguished Service Professor in Japanese Studies.

Ōe previously visited the University of Chicago as a visiting scholar in the 1980s and the 1990s. During that time, he became acquainted with Tetsuo Najita, the Robert S. Ingersoll Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History and of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and Ōe has written recently about the impact of Najita’s writings on his work. In his lecture, Ōe will discuss the contemporary relevance of Najita’s approach to intellectual history, including Najita’s Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan: The Kaitokudō Merchant Academy of Osaka, a landmark study of the rise of an independent school of economic and moral philosophy in 18th–century Japan.

Born in 1935 in rural Shikoku, Ōe is one of modern Japan’s most respected novelists and public intellectuals. He began publishing fiction while a university student, and in 1958 was awarded the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award. He since has published many celebrated novels and stories, including A Personal Matter,  The Silent Cry, Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, The Pinch Runner Memorandum and Somersault. His most recent novel, Suishi (Death by Drowning), was published in Japan to great acclaim in late 2009. His works have been translated into many languages, and in 1994 he became the second Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In addition to his fiction, Ōe has throughout his career provided a model for the engaged intellectual. He has written widely on the dangers of nuclear proliferation, on Japan’s history of military aggression and in defense of Article 9, the peace clause of Japan’s postwar constitution. Ōe recently successfully defended himself in a highly publicized libel case brought against him by the families of two Japanese wartime military officers who claimed that Ōe’s 1970 book Okinawa Notes had exaggerated the role of the military in mass civilian suicides in Okinawa during the closing months of World War II, with the judges in the case declaring that his book had accurately depicted the events in question.

The University of Chicago Committee on Japanese Studies at the Center for East Asian Studies launched the Tetsuo Najita Distinguished Lecture series in 2007 to honor the legacy of Najita’s contribution to the University during his long career.

Ōe’s lecture is free and open to the public. For additional information, please contact Sarah Arehart at the Center for East Asian Studies at sarehart@uchicago.edu or 773–702–8647.

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Irving Kane Pond (1858-1939) was a partner with his brother Allen in Pond & Pond, an important architectural firm in Chicago from 1890 through 1929. Their buildings are among the best Chicago examples of the Arts and Crafts style. Among their best known structures are the Hull House dining halls, the American School of Correspondence Building (850 E 58th), the Lillie House (5801 S Kenwood) and several other buildings near the University of Chicago campus. Irving Pond was a distinguished Chicago architect, author, gifted storyteller, and national president of the American Institute of Architects. His richly anecdotal autobiography, published for the first time in 2009, gives us an irreverent account of Chicago architecture and its architects at the turn of the last century. It should be read alongside the autobiographies of Sullivan and Wright to remind us that seminal developments in architecture, like those of the Italian Renaissance, emerge from a collaborative environment, and are not the product of an individual genius working alone.

Irving Pond wrote his autobiography between 1937 and 1939. The handwritten manuscript was given to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1939 where it has been kept since. The lecture is presented by Chicago architect David Swan, who along with Terry Tatum (Supervising Historian and Director of Research for the Landmarks Division, City of Chicago) edited the text of the autobiography and gathered the several hundred photos and line drawings that accompany it. David Swan is a Chicago architect who studied architecture and city planning at IIT. In 2008, David edited and published the facsimile edition of The Book of the Fine Arts Building. His own architecture is listed in the 2004 edition of the AIA Guide to Chicago.

The lecture will be followed by Pond & Pond Walking Tour at 2.00pm. On the tour, Mr. Swan will be accompanied by Tim Samuelson, Sam Guard and Jack Spicer.