2013 Glickman Lecture

The Glickman Lectureship

Each year Plan II is fortunate to be able to invite prominent speakers to campus thanks to a generous gift from Julius Glickman ’62 and Suzan Glickman.  Julius Glickman, a Plan II major, received his BA from the University of Texas at Austin in 1962 and his LLB from the University of Texas School of Law in 1966. As a UT student, Mr. Glickman was student body president ('62-'63), outstanding student and an active member of the Friars, Silver Spurs and the Tejas Club.

The invited speaker gives a public lecture and, in addition, meets with Plan II students in several classes and typically at a brown bag lunch.

The 2013 Glickman Lecturer: Louis Menand, The Condition of the Humanities

This year, the Glickman Lecture features Louis Menand, speaking on The Condition of the Humanities.  His most recent book is The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (2010).  We hope that this topic will resonate with Plan II alumni who will recall their precious time here in class with a great many influential and distinguished professors. 

Menand is a Pulitzer Prize-winning professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University, and a writer for The New Yorker magazine.  Menand's work engages the worlds of both academia and popular high culture.  As he notes, "The modern American higher education system was and remains a great social accomplishment." 

As a professor and leading academic, he has written incisively on the problems and challenges of higher education, and on the role of the university in modern America. He has recently published several important books and papers of intellectual history and literary criticism. His book The Metaphysical Club, was awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for History and the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians. He was an associate editor at The New Republic from 1986 to 1987, and was a contributing editor at The New York Review of Books from 1994 to 2001.

Menand is currently the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University.  Previously, he was a Distinguished Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Princeton, Columbia, and the University of Virginia School of Law.  He received both his M.A. (with high honors) and PhD (with distinction) from Columbia University.

He has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1991 and became a staff writer in 2001. In that role he examines important issues in the worlds of literature, art, pop culture, television, politics, history, and journalism.  He also serves on the Editorial Board for The Penguin History of American Life. Menand is currently at work on a new book in which he examines the interaction between art and politics during the Cold War.

What: Glickman Lecture, featuring Louis Menand, The Condition of the Humanities
Date: Thursday, April 25th
Time: 7pm - 8:30pm
Where: Alumni Center, Connally Ballroom

Here is a map showing the new CLA and the Alumni Center.  Parking is available in the San Jacinto Parking Garage, which is only a short walk from the CLA and the Alumni Center. Here is a map showing the San Jacinto Garage.