April 14, 2005
UW community to shine in first-ever ‘Washington Weekend’
With popular lectures, tours, open houses, music, drama, dance, discussions and a healthy dose of springtime football in the planning, the UW community is preparing to show its stuff at Washington Weekend, a new campuswide celebration that organizers hope will become an annual tradition — maybe even several new traditions.
“The organizing idea behind Washington Weekend was to put together some compelling reasons for alumni, students and the community to come back to campus in the springtime,” said Sue Brockmann, director of marketing communications for the UW Alumni Association, the main sponsor of the three-day campus party. “We’ve tried to put together enough — ‘scope’ if you will — for people to say this weekend would be worth marking off as a time to go back to campus and see what’s going on.”
And what is going on? Quite a lot, really, morning through evening, Thursday April 21 through Saturday, April 23 — on the main Seattle campus as well as at UW Bothell and UW Tacoma.
From a Dance Department open house starting Thursday morning to “green” building and art tours to an evening with renowned UW-based author and scholar Charles Johnson Friday, the schedule of events is crowded indeed. From arts presentations all weekend to the Spring Football Scrimmage on Saturday, organizers hope to offer events to accommodate visitors with widely varied interests.
Featured in the weekend are the first installments in two new lecture series. One is the Samuel E. Kelly Diversity Lecture Series, named to honor the UW’s first vice president of the Office of Minority Affairs in the turbulent early 1970s. During those years, Kelly created new models of admissions, counseling and academic support that helped create new pathways for educational access and success for students of color and from low-income backgrounds.
Quintard Taylor Jr., a professor of history, will honor Kelly’s legacy by delivering a lecture from his area of research expertise titled From Civil Rights to Black Power in the West: The Movement in Seattle, 1960–1970. Taylor said the presentation will detail “what I call the struggle in Seattle” for racial equity during those days. He said the bracketing years are chosen a bit arbitrarily, “as the movement continues to this day and certainly didn’t begin in 1960.”
Still, Taylor said, the 1960s were a “major transformative period” in the national effort for civil rights, and Seattle was very much a part of that. Samuel Kelly himself came to the UW in 1970, Taylor said, which provided a natural concluding point for Taylor’s lecture. Taylor says the work by Kelly and others in the 1960s and 1970s sought greater presence on the UW campus of faculty and students of color and increased awareness and interest in minority history and culture. “And, you know, that’s exactly what I do,” Taylor said. “I am a manifestation of those efforts.” Taylor’s lecture will be at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 21, in the Ethnic Cultural Center.
A new lecture series titles “Who Gets the Last Word?” gives seniors a chance to vote for a favorite professor or lecturer to deliver a creative, unconventional talk as the seniors’ college careers wind to a close. This first year, the students voted for Wolfram Latsch, a lecturer in the Jackson School of International Studies. The “Last Word” lecture is a courtesy to the senior class meant to inspire and also entertain — and the lecturer picks the topic.
Latsch, a relative newcomer to the UW campus after only a year here, said he was delighted to be chosen and meet the challenge of this assignment (for which he had fairly little prep time). Toni Read, assistant director of the Jackson School, has no doubt Latsch is up to the task. “He’s very funny, has a wonderful sense of humor,” she said. “His humor, combined with his ability to laugh at himself, are very appealing.”
In an e-mail, Latsch said he had decided, “I am calling the lecture An Apology. But I’m afraid I can’t tell you what the apology is for, that will have to be a surprise. But the apology will be aimed at current and past students, mine as well as other people’s.” The rest will be known in 120 Kane at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 21.
Other lectures include A Sea of Microbes: How Ocean Biology Shapes the Health of Our Planet, given by Virginia Armbrust, UW associate professor of oceanography and Art and the Culture of Germany: Bismarck and the Cult of Leadership at the Frye Museum in a series on the art, history and culture of Germany.
The two lectures will be joined by a wide variety of other department offerings, from the School of Drama’s performances of Salman Rushdie’s play Haroun and the Sea of Stories to tours of campus art, libraries and places of geological consequence in the Seattle area.
UW Bothell will participate with a lecture by that campus’ 2005 Distinguished Teacher, Alan Wood, a professor of interdisciplinary arts and sciences, who will deliver the annual “Choice Words” lecture on Saturday, April 23, which will be accompanied by a lunch. Wood will pose the provocative question, Can Democrats and Republicans Find Perfect Happiness?
UW Tacoma will offer Keith Boykin, speaking on the topic of his book One More River to Cross: Gay and Black in America, on Thursday, April 21, and A Patriot’s History of the United States given by Marine Corps veteran, author and UW Tacoma associate professor of liberal studies, Michael Allen.
Brockmann of the Alumni Association said her hope for Washington Weekend is to group enough attractions of different types together so that alumni and community members alike will say, “This looks fascinating,” and plan day trips to visit the campus.
From the elaborate schedule of events, activities and presentations, she seems to have succeeded.
For a complete schedule of the events of Washington Weekend, visit online at:
http://www.washington.edu/alumni/
