Contact: Bruce Conley, Associate Director of College Relations
Phone: (605) 274-5526
Fax: (605) 274-4903
www.augie.edu

March 29, 2005

Harvard Professor Keynote Speaker at Augustana Symposium

SIOUX FALLS – The fifth annual Augustana Symposium will be held Saturday, April 16, 2005.

The event showcases original student research conducted in collaboration with members of the faculty. Students present their research to the community from 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. in the Madsen Center on the Augustana campus. Oral presentations are followed by a question/answer period, while students presenting posters will be available to answer questions.

Dr. Richard Swanson, professor of religion, and a group of students will present a performance based on the students’ research beginning at 5:20 p.m. in the Actors Studio located in the Edith Mortenson Center.

Dr. J. Russell Muirhead, associate professor of government at Harvard University, is the keynote speaker. He was educated at Harvard and Oxford, and taught at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., before joining the Harvard faculty.

His book “just Work” was published last year. It is an account of the moral meaning of work that balances the aspiration for fulfilling work against a hard-headed recognition of work’s necessity.

He is currently writing a book on the “ethics of partisanship.” His keynote address is entitled “A Defense of Party Spirit” and is a timely topic in light of the recent presidential and congressional elections.

From his précis for the address: “Not for a century has party spirit in America been so vital or so vitriolic. We inhabit a partisan age. This is a cause of great anxiety to many, since partisanship is seldom admired. It is usually seen as an expression of prejudice, thoughtless inheritance, and faltering devotion to the common good. Against such anti-partisan views, this talk will show why partisanship deserves more respect than it usually gets.”

Dr. Muirhead’s areas of interest center on contemporary theories of justice, and 17th and 18th century English and Scottish political thought.His presentation begins at 7:00 p.m. in the Edith Mortenson Center main theatre. It is free and open to the public.