TONIGHT: Polaris Lecture, 'Pre-Occupied: Higher Education, Anger and the Wall Sreet Protests' with Peter Wood, Nov. 4

Friday, Nov. 4, 7:30-9:00 p.m.
Consortium Library, Room 307

The American temperament has undergone a profound transformation since the end of World War II. We went from a nation that treated self-control as an ideal and looked upon anger as a weakness to be mastered, to a nation in which venting anger is treated as healthy and in which public exhibitions of anger are often a source of pride to the performer and entertainment for the audience.

In the last few weeks, "Occupy Wall Street" has emerged as a national protest movement, drawing to a large degree on the anger and frustration of recent college graduates who are unemployed or under-employed. The movement provides a striking example of this "New Anger" in action. Peter Wood's lecture places the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon in the context of how contemporary American higher education fosters New Anger, and by doing so sets its graduates on a path of profound alienation from their own society.

Peter W. Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars. He is author of A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now (Encounter Books, 2007) and of Diversity: The Invention of a Concept (Encounter Books, 2003), which won the Caldwell Award for Leadership in Higher Education from the John Locke Foundation. He is a graduate of Haverford College, Rutgers University, and the University of Rochester, from which he received a Ph.D. in anthropology in 1987. He previously served as provost of The King's College in New York City, and as the president's chief of staff at Boston University, where he was also a tenured member of the anthropology department.