1780 – The Official Blog of Transylvania University

1780 | The Official Blog of Transylvania University

R. Owen Williams

R. Owen Williams inaugurated as Transylvania University’s 25th president

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LEXINGTON, Ky.—R. Owen Williams was inaugurated as Transylvania University’s 25th president on the steps of historic Old Morrison this morning. Before an audience of students, faculty, staff, alumni, trustees and guests, including Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear and Lexington Mayor Jim Gray, Williams was presented with the presidential medallion and the university’s mace. In his inaugural address, “Question Everything, Accomplish Anything,” Williams invoked Transylvania’s history as a “lamp in the forest” in the early days of the American republic. Reflecting on the meaning of Transylvania’s liberal arts philosophy, Williams stated that the liberal arts could be better called “the liberating arts,” because “they liberate us from the limits of our own experience, from prejudice, ideology and impetuousness, but most of all, from the inclination toward hubris instead of analysis.” Williams challenged students to ask questions and have big ambitions. “Dare to change your surroundings,” he said. “Embrace the world’s ailments as your opportunities. Transylvania will help you find your passion, but to be successful, you must clothe that passion with perseverance.” Gray and Beshear expressed their optimism about Williams and the university’s future. “In the nine months he’s been president,” Beshear said in his remarks, “he’s made it very clear that his mind is focused in a laser-like fashion on not only what Transylvania has been, but on what it can be in the future.” Gray stated that Transylvania “represents the best of [Lexington’s] purpose and promise.” David W. Blight, professor

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Civil War film starring Academy Award winner to be screened at Transylvania Friday, April 29; director to give presentation; free and open to the public

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LEXINGTON, Ky.—Hollywood writer and director Robby Henson will screen “Pharaoh’s Army,” Friday, April 29, at 2:30 p.m. in Transylvania University’s Cowgill Center. The Civil War film stars Academy Award winner Chris Cooper as Union Army Captain John Hull Abston and Academy Award nominees Patricia Clarkson and Kris Kirstofferson. Henson wrote and directed the film, which chronicles a Yankee raiding party’s confrontation with a Confederate mountain woman and her son in Kentucky. Shot on location near Danville, Ky., and in the Red River Gorge, the film focuses on the region’s unique divisions during the Civil War and is based on true events from 1862. In his presentation following the screening, Henson, originally from Danville, will speak about how oral history transitions into film. The event is part of the celebration of the inauguration of R. Owen Williams as Transylvania’s 25th president and is free and open to the public.

Transylvania announces lecture series named in honor of U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, an 1852 graduate of Transylvania’s law department

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LEXINGTON, KY.—President R. Owen Williams announced today the creation of the John Marshall Harlan Lecture Series at Transylvania University, made possible by the generosity of McBrayer, McGinnis, Leslie & Kirkland, PLLC.  Harlan, an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1877-1911, was a Kentucky lawyer and politician and an 1853 graduate of Transylvania’s law department. An early champion of civil rights, he is most notable as the lone dissenter in the Civil Rights Cases (1883) and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which, respectively, struck down as unconstitutional federal anti-discrimination legislation and upheld Southern segregation statutes. There are intriguing coincidences—one involving Harlan—between Williams’s scholarly interests and the history of Transylvania. His Yale dissertation, “Unequal Justice Under Law: The Supreme Court and the First Civil Rights Movement, 1857-1883,” has Justice Harlan as one of its primary protagonists. “John Marshall Harlan is my hero and the central figure in my dissertation,” Williams said. “So I felt as if there were a spiritual connection between Transylvania and me even before coming here.” Transylvania will launch the series this fall. William Wiecek, legal and constitutional historian and professor of public law and legislation at Syracuse University, will give the inaugural Harlan Lecture on September 26, followed by a spring 2012 lecture presented by Akhil Reed Amar, professor of law and political science at Yale University. “We created this lecture series to bring to campus highly esteemed legal figures of national or international prominence who have

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Juried student exhibition opens April 27 in Transylvania’s Morlan Gallery; opening reception one of the events for inauguration of R. Owen Williams

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LEXINGTON, Ky.—The Juried Student Exhibition opens Wednesday, April 27, in Transylvania’s Morlan Gallery.  All students who made art during the 2010-11 academic year were invited to show their work in the exhibition, which runs through Friday, May 20.  A public reception honoring the artists will be held Wednesday, April 27, from 7-8 p.m. The reception is held this year in connection to the celebration of the inauguration of R. Owen Williams as Transylvania’s 25th president. Jurors’ awards will be presented at 7:45 p.m. William Pollard, vice president and dean of the college, will select one piece to receive the Dean’s Purchase Award. The award-winning piece will become part of Transylvania’s permanent collection. Morlan Gallery is open weekdays, noon to 5 p.m., and the exhibit and reception are free and open to the public.

Inaugural symposium on the Civil War features nationally recognized historians and authors David W. Blight, Annette Gordon-Reed, John McCardell Jr. and Jed Shugerman

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LEXINGTON, Ky.—Four nationally recognized speakers will discuss “The Civil War and Reconstruction in the Border States: History and Memory at the Sesquicentennial,” on Thursday, April 28, at 3 p.m. in Haggin Auditorium. The symposium, part of the inauguration celebration of R. Owen Williams as the 25th president of Transylvania University, is free and open to the public. The symposium topic is the focus of Williams’s scholarly work and the panelists—David W. Blight, professor of American history at Yale University; Annette Gordon-Reed, professor of law and history at Harvard University; John McCardell Jr., vice chancellor and president of The University of the South; and Jed Shugerman (moderator), assistant professor of law at Harvard—are former colleagues. Panelist: David W. Blight is professor of American history at Yale University and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale. He is the author of “The Civil War in Modern Memory: Robert Penn Warren, Bruce Catton, Edmund Wilson, James Baldwin,” to be published in September by Harvard University Press. He is working on a biography of Frederick Douglass, scheduled for publication in 2013 by Simon and Shuster. Blight’s book, “A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including their Narratives of Emancipation,” focuses on rare slave narratives that were the subject of a front page story in the New York Times in 2004. Blight also wrote “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory,”

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