The annual Martin Luther King Jr. Banquet will be held Sunday, January 16, at 5:30 p.m. in the Memorial Union Ballroom at Michigan Tech, followed by a keynote address by nationally known scholar and educator Troy Duster. This event is partially funded by the Ford Motor Company Fund.
Banquet tickets are available in the Educational Opportunity Department (Alumni House) from Sandy Henkel (shenkel@mtu.edu 487-2920) for $12 for the general public, $5 for students. Tickets may also be purchased at the Memorial Union Solicitations Booth from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.
Duster will present "Rip Van Winkle as the Organization Man: Waking Up To a New Version of Competence" at 7:00 p.m. following the banquet. His address is open to the public at no charge. Seating will begin at 6:50 p.m. in the Memorial Union Ballroom.
Then, on Monday, January 17, Duster will present a public lecture, "Social Issues in the New Genetics: Hidden Social Issues" at 12:15 p.m. in Memorial Union Ballroom A.
Duster is currently Chancellor's Professor of Sociology and director of the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of California, Berkeley, and professor of sociology at New York University. He is the recipient of a number of research fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Senior Research Fellow Award from the Ford Foundation. He is a member of the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research, the Board of Directors of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, and has served as chair of the Advisory Committee on Ethical, Legal and Social Issues of the Human Genome Project.
"In his capacity as vice chair of the National Center for Human Genome Research on Ethical, Legal and Social Issues, he tackles some of the weightiest ethical and social issues surrounding the human genome and identification of genes that may contribute to disease," Black Issues in Higher Education (December 23, 1999) said of Duster:
"Throughout US history, the debate about how African Americans can and should best relate to this country has waged back and forth, between assimilation/integration to separation/autonomy," Duster says. From 1955 to 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X personified this debate. "But this was also the decade of 'The Organization Man'-a singular version of a competent and successful person, lock-step white, male, and with increasing homogenization, middle class," he said.
Racial integration or separation had a very different meaning in tha period than it does today. In his presentation, Duster explores an alternative to this either/or version of assimilation vs. separation and suggests that we are now witnessing a convergence of the legacies of both King and Malcolm.
Duster has been a member of the Assembly of Behavioral and Social Sciences of the National Academy of Sciences; the Committee on Social and Ethical Impacts of Advances in Biomedicine, Institute of Medicine; the Special Commission of the Association of American Law Schools; and the Commission on Meeting the Challenges of Diversity in an Academic Democracy. He was also a member of the Science Advisory Panel, National Institutes of Health, Research on Violence.
His books and monographs include The Legislation of Morality, Aims and Control of the Universities, Cultural Perspectives on Biological Knowledge (co-edited with Karen Garrett), and Backdoor to Eugenics, a book on the social implications of the new technologies in molecular biology. He is also the author of a number of articles, most recently "The Social Consequences of Genetic Disclosure Culture and Biology," which was published in a major report to the Office of Energy Research, Office of Health and Environmental Research of the US Department of Energy entitled "Pathways and Barriers to Genetic Testing and Screening: Molecular Genetics Meets the 'High-Risk' Family."
Duster's visit and the Martin Luther King Jr. Banquet are sponsored by the Office of Educational Opportunity, the Black Students Association, Society of Intellectual Sisters (SIS), Society of African American Men (SAAM), Alpha Kappa Psi, National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), Nosotros, and the American Indian Science and Engineering Society.
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