Lectures & Symposiums

The Tanner Center sponsors the Distinguished Faculty Honor Lecture in September and the Tanner Symposium in October of each year and provides a stipend or honorarium to the presenters. The faculty lecturer is selected by a committee established by the Faculty Senate. This year, the Distinguished Faculty Honor Lecture was held at 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday, September 13, 2011. Titled Always Having to Say You're Sorry: A Comprehensive Content Analysis of the Public Apologies of Global Leaders, Organizations, and Celebrities During the Past Century, the lecture was presented by Professor Kevin Stein in the SUU Auditorium.

The Tanner Symposium titled Democracy and Culture: Teaching the Liberal Arts Today was held on Thursday and Friday, October 20–21, 2011, in the Tanner Room of the Sherratt Library. Presentations were given as follows: Leah Bradshaw, Brock University, Hannah Arendt: How Thinking Saves Us ; Molly Flynn, Assumption College, Edmund Husserl : Transcending Ideology ; and Daniel Mahoney, Assumption College, Raymond Aaron's Educative Legacy. Faculty participants include Lee Trepanier, Saginaw Valley State University; John von Heyking, University of Lethbridge; and Kirk Fitzpatrick, Bryce Christensen, and James Messina of Southern Utah University.

Delivered annually at Southern Utah University and funded by the Tanner Trust for Utah Universities, the purpose of the Grace Adams Tanner Lecture
in Human Values is to encourage the pursuit of excellence in all matters pertaining to human values.

To this end, the lecture provides a forum in which to promote scholarly and scientific learning in the field of human values while embracing moral, artistic, intellectual, and spiritual values—both individual and social—and advancing the full register of values pertinent to the human condition, interest, behavior, and aspiration.

Accordingly, the lecture may involve the cultivation of ethical, aesthetic, and political theory and such matters as scientific research into the foundations of value behavior, whether in social, psychological, or natural sciences. The Tanner lecturers, therefore, may be drawn from philosophy, the sciences, the creative arts, and the various areas of statesmanship and leadership.

The Tanner Summer Symposium titled Great Teachers and Texts was held Thursday and Friday, August 11-12, 2011. Presenters and participants are pictured below in the Tanner Room with director, Jim Harrison.

The Grace Adams Tanner Lecture
in Human Values

presents

Jared Diamond

COLLAPSE:
How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Tuesday, March 6, 2012 at 11:30 a.m.
in the Gilbert Great Hall, Hunter Conference Center
at Southern Utah University
Free to the public

Jared Diamond, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse is the epitome of the celebrity scientist. He is one of the most influential thinkers of our time. His lectures routinely draw thousands of rapt listeners who walk away with a deeper and more nuanced view of the development of human civilization and the continued gulf between rich and poor in the global community.

Diamond's lectures tackle the giant questions. Why do some societies thrive and prosper, while others shrivel and die? How can humanity maximize the opportunity for human happiness, while saving the planet from ecological ruin and collapse? Are there lessons we can learn from other great civilizations who have grown to world dominance? The huge crowds that attend his talks are testament to his reputation as a great speaker who can spellbind an audience with insights into the most important issues we face.

His Collapse lecture discusses the ruined cities, temples, and statues of history's great, vanished societies (Easter Island, Anasazi, the Lowland Maya, Angkor Wat, Great Zimbabwe and many more). They are the birthplace of endless romantic mysteries, but these disappearances offer more than idle conjecture: the social collapses were due in part to the types of environmental problems that beset us today.  

Yet many societies facing similar problems do not collapse. What makes certain societies especially vulnerable? Why didn't their leaders perceive and solve their environmental problems? What can we learn from their fates, and what can we do differently today to help us avoid their fates? Audiences will walk away with profound insights into how we got where we are and what this may mean for where we are going. Entering an intellectual maelstrom, they will be discussing and debating these ideas for months to come.

Currently a professor of Geography at UCLA, Diamond is also the author of two other bestselling books, The Third Chimpanzee and Why Is Sex Fun? He has received some of the world's most prestigious awards, including a MacArthur Genius Grant, the Dickson Prize in Science, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement and the National Medal of Science, America's highest civilian award in science.