This fall the Honors College has welcomed two amazing plenary guest speakers as a part of the Zeltzerman Lecture Series.  In September, Anne Fadiman, author of UVM’s first-year read, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, visited UVM, giving a public lecture and joining Associate Dean Peter VonDoepp’s first-year seminar for a discussion of her work.  Fadiman’s book describes the story of Lia Lee, a young Hmong child diagnosed with epilepsy, highlighting the conflict between American health professionals and her family over her medical treatment.  During her talk, perfectly pitched to our first-year students, Fadiman described lessons she learned in writing her book and reflected on developments since it was first published.   On their part, our students asked excellent questions on not only the content of the book, but also about Fadiman’s personal experiences undertaking the research and writing.  The following day, Fadiman visited one section of our first-year seminar, The Pursuit of Knowledge, using the time to ask the students about the ethical issues raised in the book.  The rich and lively conversation continued well beyond the scheduled class time.

In October, Professor Jennifer Eberhardt of Stanford University joined our plenary. A social psychologist and recipient of a prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, Professor Eberhardt described her research on the consequences of the psychological association between race and crime.  As students learned, unconscious racial biases affect the entire criminal justice process, shaping, among other things, investigation decisions, police treatment of African Americans held in custody, and sentencing patterns. Her talk also highlighted the ways that law enforcement agencies have become aware of these problems and are undertaking efforts to address them.  As our students are presently engaged in the study of “how we know”, Professor Eberhardt offered a sober reminder of the ways that implicit assumptions can erroneously, and tragically, affect conclusions we draw. 

Both speakers came to UVM as a part of the Honors College Zeltzerman Lecture Series. The lecture is named for Michael Zeltzerman, who was a graduate student at UVM. His parents, Dr. and Mrs. Morris Zeltzerman, established the lecture in 1966 in memory of their son to continue a tradition of inquiry in which Michael had been very interested.  This is the relation of science to other areas of knowledge concerning people as individuals or societies, or, the other way around, in the development of sociological and humanistic ideas in the world of science.