BUniverse

Especially for Women: How to Get Paid What You Are Worth

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:30:00 EDT

Evelyn Murphy, president of the WAGE Project and a former lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, addresses a female audience on gender and wage parity. Noting that women earn 23 percent less on average than their male coworkers, Murphy argues that the only way for women to close the wage gap is to fight individually for fair treatment. Throughout the talk, she encourages audience engagement as she provides useful tactics for negotiating a higher salary.

Most women find it difficult to talk about money, Murphy says, but it is crucial to have a greater understanding of the context of one’s earnings. Bias and stereotypes still exist in the workplace, and the wage gap prevails because women fail to act to eliminate it. The key element women must remember, she says, is that salary negotiation is a discussion. Murphy suggests that when speaking with an employer, women should set a positive tone and be matter-of-fact and flexible. She advises listening carefully to determine what is in the employer’s best interests, so that female employees can properly determine how to cast their personal characteristics in a positive light, thus bettering their chances. She urges women to aim high but be realistic when negotiating salary, and concludes by emphasizing that effective wage negotiation is best learned through practice.

October 19, 2009, 3:30 p.m.

Sargent College

Video length is 01:09:37.

About the speaker:

Evelyn Murphy is president of the WAGE Project, an organization that strives to end wage discrimination against women. She began her political career in the late 1970s as Massachusetts’ secretary of environmental affairs and later served as the state’s secretary of economic affairs. In 1986, she became the first woman in the state’s history to hold a constitutional office when she was elected lieutenant governor. Now a resident scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, Murphy has published a book on women’s wages, Getting Even: Why Women Don’t Get Paid Like Men — and What To Do About It (2005). She is a corporate director of SBLI USA Mutual Life Insurance Company and Citizens Energy Corporation. She also serves as a founding director of the Commonwealth Institute, a trustee of Regis College, honorary chair of the Lost Coin Women’s Fund, Inc., and a director of the Polaris Project.

Aeroecology: The Next Frontier

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:00:00 EDT

Professor of biology and director of Boston University’s Center for Ecology & Conservation Biology Thomas Kunz invites the audience to consider the air around them. In Aeroecology: The Next Frontier, Kunz explains the new discipline of aeroecology, which studies airborne organisms and how they depend on the support of their aerospheric ecosystem. Kunz’s presentation is Boston University’s 2009 University Lecture, established to honor faculty engaged in outstanding research.

According to Kunz, the aerosphere — the boundary of the Earth’s atmosphere that supports life — is the least-understood part of the biosphere. Adiabatic forces in the aerosphere strongly influence the evolution of organisms that depend upon this fluid environment. The goal of Kunz’s research is to understand and interpret responses of organisms under different meteorological and atmospheric conditions and anthropogenic perturbations.

Kunz stresses that aeroecology is vitally important because it directly relates to climate change, air pollution, altered landscapes, emerging pathogens, invasive species, and declining bird, bat, and insect populations. Bats and birds are harmed by the ever-changing aerosphere — a serious issue because they play such a crucial role in countering insect populations.

The challenges of counting and tracking bats are enormous, Kunz says. However, most of the advances in aeroecology are being conceptually and technologically driven. New technologies like vertical profiling, computer simulations, thermal imaging, and radio transmitting are greatly increasing the information gained about bats’ common behaviors.

A question-and-answer session follows the lecture, as well as an interactive demonstration of thermal imaging technology.

October 19, 2009, 7 p.m.

Tsai Performance Center

Video length is 01:12:00.

About the speaker :

Thomas H. Kunz is Professor of Biology and Director of the Center for Ecology & Conservation Biology at Boston University. A BU faculty member for the last 35 years, he has authored more than 200 publications and is the editor of five books on bat ecology. He is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a winner of both the Gerrit S. Miller Jr. and C. Hart Merriam awards for his work with bats, and is Past-President of the American Society of Mammalogists.

Holy Hullabaloos: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church/State Wars by Jay Wexler

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:00:00 EDT

Jay Wexler, a School of Law professor of law and a humor writer, reads from his new book, Holy Hullabaloos: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church/State Wars. After spending six months visiting the schools, towns, and landmarks that shaped important Supreme Court decisions on religious freedom, he says, “I’ve written what I like to call the first-ever First Amendment memoir-travelogue-comedy.”

Wexler reads from a chapter on prayer in schools, imagining a dialogue between feuding Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy about the constitutionality of a Rhode Island school’s graduation prayer and recounting his trip to a football-crazed East Texas high school whose traditional pregame “invocation” caused controversy.

In the question-and-answer period following his reading, he delves deeper into some of his trips, including a visit to an animal-sacrificing Santería cult in Florida and an Amish community in Wisconsin. He explains the importance of church-state debate, especially in schools, “the battlegrounds where we fight over how we’re going to transmit values to the next generation.” It’s precisely because people take the issue so seriously, Wexler says, that he wrote his book from a humorous perspective: “I wanted to make the point that it’s possible to talk about these issues without losing our temper.”

September 29, 2009, 7 p.m.
Barnes & Noble at BU

Video length is 00:48:08.

About the speaker:
Jay Wexler, a School of Law professor of law, teaches law and religion, administrative law, and environmental and natural resources law. In 2008, he taught at the Edouard Lambert Institute of Comparative Law in Lyon, France, and at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, as a Fulbright Scholar. Prior to joining the LAW faculty in 2001, he served as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and to Judge David Tatel on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and worked in the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. He is a graduate of Harvard University, the University of Chicago Divinity School, and Stanford Law School. An oil painter and writer in his spare time, Wexler is a regular contributor to McSweeney’s and other literary publications. Holy Hullabaloos is his first book.

Louis Sullivan Honors Carl Franzblau

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:00:00 EDT

Louis Sullivan (MED’58), president emeritus of the Morehouse School of Medicine and a former professor of medicine at Boston University, gives the keynote address at a symposium honoring Carl Franzblau, a School of Medicine professor, chairman of the biochemistry department, and associate dean of the Division of Graduate Medical Sciences. The Franzblau Symposium, held June 15-16, 2009, celebrated Franzblau’s numerous accomplishments as he ends his nearly fifty-year medical and teaching career, all of it spent at BU.

Sullivan describes Franzblau as a true leader, extolling the courage, determination, integrity, and flexibility he exemplified for his students. For instance, he recalls, Franzblau helped organize a program to increase African-American enrollment at medical schools in and around Boston. In 1968, Sullivan and Franzblau, along with eight other colleagues, invited African-American students from universities and colleges in the South to spend the weekend after Thanksgiving at one of New England’s medical schools. The program was so successful, Sullivan says, that the following year, black enrollment at the medical colleges involved in the program increased tremendously. Sullivan commends Franzblau for his continued efforts to increase diversity in the biomedical sciences and end health disparities

June 15, 2009, 7 p.m.

Metcalf Ballroom

Video length is 00:28:28.

About the speaker:

Louis Sullivan (MED’58) is founding dean and president emeritus of the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta. Sullivan graduated from Morehouse College in 1954 and earned his medical degree at Boston University. He went on to serve as an instructor at Harvard Medical School and an assistant professor of medicine at Seton Hall College of Medicine in New Jersey. From 1966 to 1975, he taught medicine at Boston University Medical Center, where he also co-directed the hematology unit and founded the BU Hematology Service at Boston City Hospital. He later became the founding dean and director of the Medical Education Program at Morehouse College. When the medical school became independent from Morehouse College in 1981, Sullivan became its first dean and president. In 1989, he was appointed Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He returned to Morehouse School of Medicine in 1993 to serve as president until 2002.

2009 College of Communication Commencement Address: Bonnie Hammer

Sun, 17 May 2009 09:00:00 EDT

Bonnie Hammer (CGS’69, COM’71, SED’75) is president of NBC Universal Cable Entertainment and Universal Cable Productions. She launched her television career at WGBH, the public television station in Boston, where she produced This Old House and Zoom. She became executive producer at Good Day! (a show on Boston’s ABC affiliate) and later a programming executive at Lifetime Television Network, where she oversaw the production of several award-winning documentaries. In 1989, she joined USA Network as a programming executive. She has been president of USA Network since 2004 and of the Sci Fi Channel since 2001. Both are owned by NBC Universal.

This year, Hammer was sixty-sixth on Fast Company’s list of 100 Most Creative People in Business. The magazine, which notes that shows such as Monk and Battlestar Galactica have “blossomed” under Hammer, says, “the USA Network’s ratings have soared under her watch - its 2008 prime-time viewership was the largest ever for any basic-cable channel, and her products contributed more than $1 billion to NBC Universal’s profits last year.”

Hammer studied photojournalism at BU’s College of Communication and earned a master’s in media technology at the School of Education. She received a Distinguished Service to Profession Award from COM in 2007.

May 17, 2009, 9:00 a.m.

Agganis Arena

Video Length is 00:29;49.

2009 School of Social Work Commencement Address: Ellen McCurley

Fri, 15 May 2009 16:00:00 EDT

Ellen McCurley (SSW’05, SPH’06) is cofounder and executive director of the Pendulum Project, a nonprofit humanitarian organization that provides grassroots support to communities and families in Malawi that are affected by HIV/AIDS. Before establishing the project in 2001, McCurley spent more than 15 years as a business and marketing executive for various companies, including Thunder House, a division of McCann Erickson Worldwide Advertising. She cofounded the Donovan Group, an Inc. 500 advertising agency, where she led new business development and client services for a diverse client base comprising Fortune 500 and high-technology companies. She has served as a board member, advisor, and fundraising volunteer for several nonprofit humanitarian organizations devoted to women and children and the AIDS effort. In addition, she has produced two documentaries on the AIDS pandemic in Malawi. McCurley, a clinical social worker, earned master’s degrees in public health and social work at Boston University.

May 15, 2009 at 4:00 p.m.

Fitness and Recreation Center

Video Length is 00:34:02.

Creative Writing Program Annual Faculty Reading

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 19:30:00 EDT

Maggie Dietz (GRS’07), a CAS lecturer in creative writing, reads from a selection of poems in her 2006 collection, Perennial Fall. Leslie Epstein, a CAS professor and director of the Creative Writing Program, reads from his novel-in-progress about the childhood of one of his well-known fictional characters, Leib Goldkorn. David Ferry, a CAS lecturer in creative writing, reads two passages of translation from Virgil’s Georgics, and two of his own poems. Kathleen Foster (GRS’00,’09), a graduate of the program, reads an excerpt from a short story titled “Admission.” CAS lecturers Allegra Goodman and Daphne Kalotay (GRS’94,’98) both read from recent work, Goodman’s The Other Side of the Island and Kalotay’s Calamity and Other Stories. CAS professor Ha Jin reads from his forthcoming novel, A Good Fall, and Robert Pinsky reads recent poems and selections from his collection, Gulf Music.

April 28, 2009, 7:30 p.m.

Photonics Center

Video length is 01:25:54.

About the speakers:

Maggie Dietz (GRS’97), who coedited Americans’ Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology (1999) with Robert Pinsky, is the former director of the Favorite Poem Project and has taught in Boston University’s Creative Writing Program, of which she is an alumna. She published her first collection of poetry, Perennial Fall, in 2006.

CAS professor Leslie Epstein has published 10 books of fiction: P. D. Kimerakov; The Steinway Quintet Plus Four; King of the Jews; Regina; Goldkorn Tales; Pinto and Sons; Pandaemonium; Ice Fire Water: A Leib Goldkorn Cocktail; San Remo Drive; and his most recent, The Eighth Wonder of the World. He has received many fellowships and awards, including a Rhodes Scholarship and an award for Distinction in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Epstein has been the director of the Creative Writing Program at Boston University for more than 20 years.

David Ferry is a CAS lecturer. His books of poetry and translation include the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize–winning Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations; The Eclogues of Virgil; The Odes of Horace: A Translation; Dwelling Places: Poems and Translations; Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse; Strangers: A Book of Poems; On the Way to the Island; and The Limits of Mortality: An Essay on Wordsworth’s Major Poems. Ferry’s other awards include the Sixtieth Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets, the Teasdale Prize for Poetry, and a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. He is the Sophie Chantal Hart Professor Emeritus of English at Wellesley College. In 1998 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Kathleen Foster (GRS’09) holds a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing and an MA in English from Boston University. She is a recipient of BU’s Florence Engel Randall Graduate Fiction award and an Emerging Artist award from the St. Botolph Club Foundation.

Allegra Goodman, a CAS lecturer, is the author of four novels: the New York Times bestseller Intuition; National Book Award finalist Kaaterskill Falls; Paradise Park; and The Other Side of the Island. She has also published two collections of short stories: The Family Markowitz and Total Immersion. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Commentary, and Ploughshares. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review and The American Scholar. She has received the Whiting Writer’s Award, the Salon magazine award for fiction, and a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Ha Jin (GRS’93) studied in the Creative Writing Program and returned as a full professor in September 2002. Born in China in 1956, Xuefei Jin (Ha Jin is his pen name) was a teenager when China entered the Cultural Revolution and became a member of the People’s Liberation Army at the age of 14. His novel, Waiting, which won a National Book Award and a PEN/Faulkner Award, was based on his experiences during his five-year service in the Red Army. He earned a master’s degree at Shandong University in China, and in 1986 came to the United States to begin doctoral work at Brandeis. He received the PEN/Hemingway Award for his first collection of short stories, Ocean of Words, and the Flannery O’Connor Prize for his second, Under the Red Flag. His book War Trash won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2005. His latest book, A Free Life, is his first set entirely in the United States. Ha Jin was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.

Daphne Kalotay (GRS’94,’98), a lecturer in the Creative Writing Program, has an MA in creative writing and a PhD in modern and contemporary literature, both from Boston University. Her awards include BU’s Florence Engel Randall Fiction Prize, a Transatlantic Review Award from The Henfield Foundation, and fellowships from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, the Fondation de La Napoule, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the W. K. Rose Fellowship in the Creative Arts from Vassar College. Her collection of short stories, Calamity and Other Stories, was published in 2005, and a novel, Russian Winter, is forthcoming.

CAS Professor Robert Pinsky is the author of seven books of poetry: Gulf Music; Jersey Rain; The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966–1996, winner of the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and a Pulitzer Prize nominee; The Want Bone; History of My Heart; An Explanation of America; and Sadness and Happiness. He has published four books of criticism, including The Sounds of Poetry, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Poetry and the World; and The Situation of Poetry; two books of translation: The Inferno of Dante, which received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, and The Separate Notebooks by Czeslaw Milosz (with Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass); and a computerized novel, Mindwheel. During his unprecedented three terms as U.S. poet laureate, from 1997 to 2000, Pinsky created the Favorite Poem Project to document, promote, and celebrate poetry’s place in American culture. In 1999 he coedited Americans’ Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology with Maggie Dietz (GRS’97), now the project’s director. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Last Lecture: Achieving Your Adult Realities

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 19:00:00 EDT

Download available on iTunesU.

When Randy Pausch delivered his last lecture at Carnegie Mellon University in September 2007, the computer science professor had less than a year to live. The moment marked an ending in his career; but his legacy carries on — with what is known as the Last Lecture.

Doe West, a College of Arts & Sciences lecturer in psychology, delivered the inaugural Last Lecture at Boston University, as part of a new annual series sponsored by the Undergraduate Psychology Association.

West is worried. The youth culture of the 1960s fought hard to achieve certain freedoms, but now we appear to have gone too far. With everyone doing his or her own thing, we have lost respect for the value of insight and wisdom in our lives. Instead, she observes, we seek entertainment that focuses on the weakness and sickness of others.

To achieve the real power and promise of education, she says, we must sort through the barrage of messages encountered in youth and consumer culture. In fact, the real question is not what we find entertaining, but rather where we seek our information. With this question comes the understanding that knowledge brings with it responsibility—toward ourselves and others.

April 8, 2009, 7 p.m.
Photonics Center

Video length 01:12:53.

About the speaker:
Doe West (GRS’80), a College of Arts & Sciences lecturer in psychology, received her doctorate from Northeastern University and her master’s in rehabilitation counseling from BU. She is the coauthor of Coping+Plus: Dimensions of Disability (Greenwood Publications) and numerous journal publications. She currently is the chaplain and pastor with Overlook Life Care Community, an assisted living facility, in Charlton, Massachusetts. In addition to practicing psychotherapy, West has served as the executive director of Social Action Ministries of Greater Boston, an interfaith coalition that offers direct services to and advocacy for the homeless and the hungry, and for Springboard Inc., a parent-founded group that teaches socialization skills to adults with developmental disabilities.

Remembering Alberto de Lacerda

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:00:00 EST

Former colleagues, students, and friends gather to remember and celebrate the life and work of Alberto de Lacerda, a renowned Portuguese poet and a University Professor emeritus of poetics and comparative literature, who died in London in August 2007. As well as publishing more than 12 volumes of poetry, many translated into English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, and Bengali, de Lacerda was a collage artist, a collector and connoisseur of the arts, a critic, and a broadcaster and linguist. Organized by Lacerda’s former student and longtime friend Jhumpa Lahiri (GRS’93, UNI’95,’97), a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, the event is part of the ongoing University Professors Program Poetry Series.

Poets and writers William Corbett, Isabel Pinto-Franco, Rosanna Warren, BU’s Emma Ann MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities, and Christopher Ricks, BU’s William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities — all friends of Lacerda’s — read both Portuguese and English translations of Lacerda’s poetry. Other contributors, including Boston University President Emeritus John Silber (Hon.’95), offer personal recollections of Lacerda, who was known for his fiery temperament, demanding teaching style, and love of art and literature during his 24 years at BU.

Lahiri concludes the tribute by reading “Alberto de Lacerda: A Remembrance,” a narrative account of her relationship with Lacerda. “Listening to him was always an intense pleasure, a voyage to a consoling world where books, paintings, and pieces of music were all that mattered,” she recalls.

March 3, 2008, 6 p.m.
College of General Studies Katzenberg Center

Video length is 01:06:06.

About the speakers:
William Corbett is an instructor and a writer-in-residence in the Program of Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT. He has published two memoirs, several collections of poetry, and a book on the sculptor John Raimondi. He lives in Boston, where he edits the small press Pressed Wafer.

Luis de Souza, a Portuguese poet and longtime friend of Alberto de Lacerda’s, is the executor of his estate.

Jhumpa Lahiri (GRS’93, UNI’95,’97) is the author of two works of fiction. Her first book, the collection of short stories Interpreter of Maladies (1999), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; her second, The Namesake (2003), was adapted for the screen in 2007. Her latest work, the volume of short stories Unaccustomed Earth, was published in April 2008.

Scott Laughlin (COM’92, CGS’90) is a poet, an English teacher, and a former editor of ZYZZYVA, a San Francisco–area literary journal. A former student of Lacerda’s, he holds a master’s degree in English from New York University.

Isabel Pinto-Franco, a native of Portugal, holds a degree in modern languages and literatures from the University of Coimbra. She is a senior instructor at the Cambridge College Medical Interpreter Program in Cambridge, Mass., and a staff interpreter and trainer at Cambridge Health Alliance.

Christopher Ricks is BU’s William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities and a codirector of the Editorial Institute at Boston University. A well-known literary critic, Ricks has written on English poets, among them Tennyson, Milton, and Eliot, as well as the importance of American folk singer Bob Dylan. He holds a dual appointment as the University of Oxford’s Professor of Poetry.

John Silber was the seventh president of Boston University, having served from 1971 to 1996, when he became chancellor; he is now president emeritus. He is a University Professor, a College of Arts and Sciences professor of philosophy, and a School of Law professor of law. His scholarly work focuses on ethics, the philosophy of law, and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

Rosanna Warren is a University Professor and the Emma Ann MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities at Boston University. The author of several award-winning books of poetry, she is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is the former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Marc Widershien (CAS’68, UNI’79) is a poet, a writer, and an educator. He has published four volumes of poetry and is the publisher of the independent press Poplar Editions. He hosts a local poetry venue in Boston and runs writing workshops throughout New England.

Jack Falla Discusses His Novel "Saved"

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:00:00 EST

Jack Falla (COM’67,’90), a lecturer in journalism in the College of Communication, reads from his new sports-fiction novel Saved. The book, about a hockey player nearing retirement who wants to win the Stanley Cup, is sportswriter Falla’s first work of fiction. Veteran Boston goaltender Jean Pierre Savard is concerned mainly with money and sex, after he lost his father and his wife at a young age. Approaching retirement, Savard and his teammate and best friend, Cam Carter, are focusing on winning the Stanley Cup. A late season trade sends Carter to another team, and the best friends face each other in the Stanley Cup final game. Falla says that the book is to a very small extent autobiographical.

February 7, 2008, 7 p.m.
Barnes and Noble at BU

Video length is 00:15:15.

About the speaker:
Jack Falla (COM’67,’90), a lecturer in journalism in the College of Communication, is a veteran sports journalist. The New England native is a former Sports Illustrated staff writer. He previously wrote Home Ice: Reflections on Backyard Rinks and Frozen Ponds, a collection of essays about the way backyard skating rinks and frozen ponds form communities. He’s also the author of Sports Illustrated Hockey: Learn to Play the Modern Way, and NCAA: The Voice of College Sports. He edited Quest for the Cup: A History of the Stanley Cup Finals, 1893-2001.