Ghost of Midnight

Robert Putnam to Speak at UVM

Robert Putnam will speak at the University of Vermont on April 28, 2008, sharing a lecture titled “Civic Engagement in a Diverse and Changing America.”

Putnam’s Bowling Alone was a ground-breaker documenting the decline of many facets of American community life. Steve Yelvington writes about Putnam briefly this week… here.

Rich Gordon writes in more detail about Putnam’s more recent work, part of which Putnam summarizes as “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ – that is, to pull in like a turtle.”

UPDATE:  Just got the following details…

2008 Mark L. Rosen Memorial Lecture
Robert D. Putnam
‘E Pluribus Unum: Rebuilding Community in a Diverse and Changing America’
Monday, April 28, 7 PM – Free and Open to the Public
Silver Maple Ballroom, Dudley H. Davis Center
Reception immediately following
Co-Sponsored by UVM Political Science Department and the Vermont Humanities Council

Professor Putnam is Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard, where he teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses. He has written a dozen books, translated into seventeen languages, including the best-selling Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, and more recently Better Together: Restoring the American Community, a study of promising new forms of social connectedness. His previous book, Making Democracy Work, was praised by the Economist as “a great work of social science, worthy to rank alongside de Tocqueville, Pareto and Weber.” Both Making Democracy work and Bowling Alone rank high among the most cited publications in the social sciences worldwide in the last several decades.