Colloquium on Social Change: Radical Democracy and the Moral Economy of Social Change
Sponsored by the Libraries’ Department of Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA), this year’s Colloquium on Social Change will examine how ideas about social justice have shaped American lives with speakers who represent distinctly different radical challenges to American society. Todd Gitlin and Raymond Mungo, renowned writers/activists, are the keynote speakers. The event is free and open to the public.
While a college student in the early 1960s, Todd Gitlin rose to national prominence as a writer and theorist of the New Left. A president of Students for a Democratic Society in 1963-1964, he was a central figure in the civil rights and antiwar movements, helping to organize the first national mobilization against the war in Vietnam, the March on Washington of 1965. After receiving degrees from the University of Michigan and the University of California Berkeley, Gitlin joined the faculty at Columbia University, where he is currently Professor of Journalism and Sociology and Chair of the doctoral program in Communications. Over the past thirty years, he has written extensively on mass communication, the media, and journalism. The author of twelve books, Gitlin is today a noted public intellectual and prominent critic of both the left and right in American politics, arguing that pragmatic coalition building should replace ideological purity and criticizing the willingness of those on both sides to use violence to reach ends to power.
Raymond Mungo was a key figure in the literary world of the late 1960s counterculture. A founder of the Liberation News Service -- an alternative press agency that distributed news reflecting a left-oriented, antiwar, countercultural perspective -- Mungo moved to western Massachusetts during the summer of 1968 and settled on a commune. A novelist and writer, his first book, Famous Long Ago: My Life and Hard Times With Liberation News Service (1970) is considered a classic account of the countercultural left, and his follow-up Total Loss Farm (1971), based on his experiences on the Packer Corners commune, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Mungo has written several novels, screenplays, dozens of essays, and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles during a literary career of more than three decades. For the past ten years, he has worked as a social worker in Los Angeles, tending primarily to AIDS patients and the severely mentally ill.
The colloquium is supported in part by the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, the UMass Amherst Libraries, the Dean of the Graduate School, the Department of History, the Program in Social Thought and Political Economy, Food for Thought Books, the Rosenberg Fund for Children, the Vermont Action for Political Prisoners, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.