Dr. Robert Harrison and President Cullinan at Dr. Harrison's presentation.
On Monday evening (February 13), Dr. Robert Harrison packed Hannon Library’s Meese Room for the Winter Term Distinguished Lecture. Faculty, staff, students, and community members filled the chairs, perched on window sills, and leaned against the walls as Dr. Harrison walked us through centuries of history in a clear, succinct, and captivating manner.
The Distinguished Lecture Series was established in academic year 2010-2011 to celebrate the tremendous work of SOU faculty. Very often even our own campus community members don’t know what is being done outside their own department and throughout the campus.
Now many more people know about the work Dr. Harrison has been doing at SOU since 1990—and, before that, at Biola University and as a Fulbright Scholar in Egypt. He spoke without notes—but with the assistance of a few useful maps—as he traced the roots of the Arab Spring back over a thousand years and through multiple invasions and wars.
In one brief foray into European and U.S. history, he sketched the slow and painful emergence of democracy through the Magna Carta in AD 1215 and the French and American Revolutions and 20th Century voting rights to illustrate the complexity and painful slowness of change. Change is happening in the Middle East, but he stressed that major cultural and political transformation can’t happen overnight.
Kudos to Dr. Harrison for providing an illuminating and exhilarating tour of a part of the world that is confusing and mysterious to many of us.
We will have another Distinguished Lecture in spring term with Dr. Mark Tveskov. Mark your calendar for April 18!
Our institution was first founded as Ashland Academy in 1872 and has gone through myriad names and transformations since then. The early December party got everyone in the holiday spirit.
Over the break, I spent a few days at Timberline Lodge near Mount Hood, which had more snow than just about anywhere else in Oregon.
