A two-day symposium, "American Society: Diversity and Consensus," will be held at Cornell this Sunday and Monday, both to honor Robin M. Williams Jr., the Henry Scarborough Professor Emeritus of Social Science, and to consider a key challenge in contemporary American society.
Sunday's talks will be in the David L. Call Alumni Auditorium, Kennedy Hall, from 8:30 a.m. to 4:45 p.m., and Monday's will be in the Statler Hotel Amphitheater, 8:45 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. The talks are free to members of the Cornell community and open to the public.
"In the past, dominant values of American society, as discussed in Williams' own pathbreaking book, American Society: A Sociological Interpretation, have mirrored Judeo-Christian values of tolerance and concern for others, along with the values of rationality and achievement," said Phyllis Moen, director of the Bronfenbrenner Life Course Center at Cornell and a symposium co-organizer. "But cleavages, such as counter-themes of racist particularism and anti-cosmopolitanism, among others, have come to the fore recently and sharp polarizations raise questions regarding our severe ideological conflicts."
The symposium, which is co-sponsored by Cornell, the colleges of Human Ecology and Arts and Sciences, the departments of Sociology and Rural Sociology, the Peace Studies Program and the sociology department at the University of California at Irvine, is to acknowledge and build on the contributions of Williams, a renowned scholar and social scientist, who for over a half-century has focused on the problems and potentials of diversity and consensus in values, beliefs and the broader social fabric.
Symposium topics include a consideration of diversity and inequality in the United States in a variety of forms: economic, racial, gender, immigrant, demographic, religious, cultural and educational. But the symposium also tackles consensus, seeking out issues and themes that unite rather than divide.
On Sunday morning at 9:30 a.m. in Kennedy Hall, William Julius Wilson, the Malcom Wiener Professor of Social Policy at Harvard and a Cornell A.D. White Professor-at-Large, will discuss the absence of jobs in urban America. His new book, When Work Disappears: The World of the Urban Poor, is sparking debate about the causes and solutions of poverty in America's inner cities.
The symposium will conclude on Monday at 4:15 p.m. in the Statler with a brief response by Williams, a former chair of the departments of sociology and anthropology at Cornell. Williams is co-editor most recently of A Common Destiny: Blacks and America Society and the co-author of numerous books, including Mutual Accommodation: Ethnic Conflict and Cooperation; American Society: A Sociological Interpretation and Strangers Next Door. He is author of more than 150 articles, monographs and chapters in edited volumes and was the recipient of the Commonwealth Award of Distinguished Service in 1988 for "his work on race relations [that] mark him as one of the outstanding sociologists in the United States."
To register for the program and to receive a packet of information, contact Donna Dempster-McClain, assistant director of the Bronfenbrenner Life Course Center and symposium co-organizer, at telephone 255-5557, fax 255-9856 or e-mail did1@cornell.edu .