Scholar discusses importance of community

Restoring a sense of community is vital to improving American society, George Washington University Professor Amitai Etzioni told over 100 students and professors during a speech last week. Etzioni inaugurated the College's new lecture series last Monday night with a speech on the communitarian movement in the United States. That movement views the family as the main source of morals and ethics for children, Etzioni said. "The fact is, throughout all human history?there never was a single society without a nuclear family," he stated. "[Yet] we have 10 million latch-key children who come home to a television and liquor cabinet." Etzioni linked the failure of nearly half of American families to the decline of schools, the community and the "community of communities," which is comprised of many diverse communities. Etzioni stated that although each group should each celebrate its heritage, it is their diversity that "leads to war of one against all others?as in L.A. and Bosnia." College Dean Matthew Santirocco, the coordinator of the College Lecture Series, said the four-part series was founded "to send a signal throughout the campus that the college is not just a student service bureau?but also a center of rich intellectual resource for students in the college and all four undergraduate schools." The first lecture was co-sponsored by both the college and Wharton's SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management. Santirocco said he found it "appropriate that the first College lecture series should be co-sponsored by a center at Wharton because it shows we really are one university." Following Etzioni's speech, students in one of Santirocco's courses gathered to discuss their feelings on the lecture in his Quadrangle apartment. College junior Thao Nguyen said he enjoyed Etzioni's speech because it "related a lot to the family and the importance of early education." College freshman Laurie Moldawer said she agreed with many of the ideas and issues Etzioni used in his lecture, but was "left unfulfilled" because he never concluded his thoughts or suggested ways to fix the problems of the community. Dissident Russian poet Yez Geny Yez Tushemko, the next speaker in the series, will come to campus in December. Tushemko is known as a "defender of free speech, opponent of censorship [and a] dissident voice in the old Soviet Union," according to Santirocco. The spring term will conclude the series with two lectures – a scientific lecture and the high point of the Frankenstein reading project, "Frankenstein: Morality in Science, Society and Education."