Thomas Coburn, vice president and dean of academic affairs at St. Lawrence University, will speak on "Liberal Arts Education in a Global Environment: Reflections on an Ellipse" as part of the Goodspeed Lecture Series. This talk, set for 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday (Sept. 25) in Slayter Auditorium, will examine the culture wars that have so divided higher education and American society and the underlying tensions. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Coburn serves as the Charles A. Dana Professor of Religious Studies and Classical Languages at St. Lawrence University and was the 1993 winner of the Owen D. Young Outstanding Faculty Member Award there. He is a 1995 Fellow of the Indian Society for Environment and Culture and a member of American Oriental Society, American Academy of Religion, and the Society for Tantric Studies.

"These wars are, in fact, the most recent version of a fundamental tension that lies at the heart of liberal arts education," Coburn says. "As residential liberal arts colleges turn to the task of educating students for lives with global horizons, they hold unique promise for realizing the potential of this long-standing tension in fresh ways. But whether they can realize this promise is another question, for their very viability is also at risk in unprecedented ways."

Coburn's studies include South, Southeast, East Asian, and Islamic religious traditions, methods in studying religion, and selected comparative topics in Asian and Western traditions such as goddesses, mystical experiences, and fundamentalism. He is the author or editor of three books, including Encountering the Goddess: A Translation of the Devi-Mahatmya and a Study of its Interpretation. He has had articles published in the Harvard Theological Review, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.

Coburn earned a bachelor's degree magna cum laude from Princeton University in 1965. He earned a master's degree in history of religion at Harvard University in 1969 and his doctorate in comparative study of religion from Harvard in 1977.

The Goodspeed Lecture Series features scholars whose work is in the field of religion or is related to religious issues. The fund is named in honor of the late Edgar J. Goodspeed, an 1890 Denison graduate, who was one of nine biblical scholars who worked on the Revised Standard Version of the Scriptures, published in 1946, which has superseded the King James Version in official usage in many American denominations.

About Denison:

Denison University, founded in 1831, is an independent, residential liberal arts institution located in Granville, Ohio. A highly selective college enrolling 2,100 full-time undergraduate students from all 50 states and dozens of foreign countries, Denison is a place where innovative faculty and motivated students collaborate in rigorous scholarship, civic engagement and the cultivation of independent thinking.

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