Convocations Continue with Symposium on the Nature of Civility By Marci Janas
	RELATED STORIES 1999-2000 Convocations		NOVEMBER 9, 1999-- Oberlin College will continue its yearlong consideration of the future of the United States when a panel of distinguished intellectuals--Stephen Carter, Amy Gutmann and Michael Sandel--discuss the nature of civility and the American conversation Thursday, November 11, at 8 P.M. in Finney Chapel. Harlan Wilson, associate professor of politics, will moderate the free public event. A session for students, faculty, and staff called a Learning Conversation will take place earlier in the day--4:30 P.M.--in King 306. Carter, Gutmann, and Sandel will join Yinghao Ingrid Huang, president of the senior class, and Peter Goldsmith, dean of students, in a conversation about the future of multiculturalism at Oberlin. The evening symposium will attempt to illuminate, among other issues, what civility is, what encourages (or discourages) its presence in the American liberal democracy at the millennium, and in what ways Americans--individually and collectively--might work to promote greater civility in their discourse and in their actions. The afternoon session, which Paul Dawson, professor of politics, will moderate, will include a question-and-answer segment and opportunity for students and faculty to partake as additional panelists. Under consideration will be such questions as Who should have a stake in understanding diversity at Oberlin--or in the broader world? If, as Leon Wieseltier once wrote in the New Republic, "The American achievement is not the multicultural society, [but] the multicultural individual," on what basis are we to judge who is like us--or unlike us? The Finney Lecture and Student Assemblies committees sponsor the 1999-2000 convocations with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Office of the President of Oberlin College.
			Please send comments, questions, and suggestions about Oberlin Online news and feature articles to Linda.Grashoff@oberlin.edu.