CAS Communications Blog

Award-winning playwright, poet, essayist, critic, and theatre director Hugo Salcedo visited the College of Arts & Sciences as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar from March 3-14, 2008.

Salcedo, of the border city Tijuana, Mexico, is a professor at the Universidad Autonoma de Baja California. With the assistance of student translators, he spoke in numerous classes during his visit.

Professor Moreno’s class studied the playwright’s most famous play, El viaje de los cantors/The Crossing, which earned Salcedo the “Tirso de Molina” for the best Spanish language play of the year. Students gave a dramatic public reading of the play on March 11, 2008 at the C. Walsh Theatre, directed by alumna Colleen Rua.

Students Alisa Cherkasova, Katiuska Cruz, Adrienne Fitzgerald, Margery Furman, Caitlin Greco, Steve McCreary, Kathleen Pena, Robert Terrero, Stanley Thermora and English professor Jeremy Solomons acted out the tragic story of 18 Mexicans trying to cross the U.S. border illegally only to meet with their death trapped in a railroad boxcar. Slides playing behind the actors on stage showed scenes of the border dangers: a barbed wire fence, a U.S. border patrol officer with rifle, a helicopter’s searchlights, a scorpion, a human skull in the desert, a map of the Mexico-U.S. border, a collection of crosses, a church. Continue Reading »

The Honorable Charles Fried, former associate justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, held a lecture on Modern Liberty, and open discussion for several classes in philosophy and human rights on March 6, 2008.

“Active liberty, as discussed with Justice Breyer earlier this week, is an exercise of joint authority in making government,” said Fried. “Modern liberty is a different concept. It is liberty before you get to government–who are we, what are our claims?”

Drawing on the examples of four different legal cases, including the Charter of the French Language in Quebec, which states that business in Quebec must be carried out in French, Fried raised a series of provocative questions. “Is liberty even possible in a modern administered democratic state?” Continue Reading »

The Honorable Stephen Breyer, US Supreme Court Justice, visited the College of Arts and Sciences on Tuesday, March 4, 2007 to speak to students, faculty and members of the Suffolk community. The webcast is available here.

He began his address with a poem by Tom Wayman, “Did I Miss Anything,” setting a humorous yet reflective tone for the event, then spoke on “active liberty”–the participation of citizens in the democratic process–and the reasons behind writing his book, Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution (2005), which included showing students the connection between themselves and their government. “What’s the most important thing we want to teach students?” he asked. “Democracy.”

He continued, “The Constitution is not a document designed to solve the problems of the community at any level—local, state, or national. Rather it is a document that trusts people to solve those problems themselves. And it creates a framework for a government that will help them to do so. Continue Reading »

Billye Avery, founder of the women’s health care movement and president of the Avery Institute for Social Change, spoke to more than 60 Suffolk students and faculty members on Thursday, Feb. 21 as part of the Distinguished Visiting Scholars lecture series.

“Know that your health is the most important thing that you have,” she said passionately, earrings swinging in emphasis above her purple turtleneck and jewel-colored blouse. “It is really one of the only things you own.”

Her dedication to sharing this belief with African American women led to her work as a health care reform activist in the ’70s, starting the National Black Women’s Health Project, which turns 25 this June. Over the past three decades, her work has grown into a national health care reform movement, improving access to health records, raising awareness of racial disparities in the health care system, joining women’s voices to obtain the health care they need, and emphasizing prevention and primary care as the vision for the future.

“We have a sick-care system,” she said, “not a health care system.”

Continue Reading »