The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University
Moses Hadas and Historical Black Colleges and Universities - Classics, Racism, Segregation, featuring Rachel Hadas, Roosevelt Montás, and Dan-el Padilla Peralta
Wednesday, January 25, 6:10-8:00PM, EST
A virtual event
Register at: https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0ucuCqrDkpGNd6dMs…
In the summer of 1963, Moses Hadas (1900-1966), Jay Professor of Greek at Columbia, used what was then a new AT &T technology to deliver a series of telelectures. Passionate about transmitting the classical legacy to the broadest possible audience, Hadas delivered 18 lectures to students at historical black colleges and universities in Mississippi and Louisiana. The initiative, sponsored by the Fund for the Advancement of Education (funded by the Ford Foundation), allowed the famed classicist to deliver lectures on the "Great Ideas of Antiquity" via telephone to students whose lives in segregationist states were distant in many ways from those of his Columbia students.
Materials pertaining to these historic lectures will be presented by Rachel Hadas -- poet, translator, educator, essayist, and the youngest daughter of Moses Hadas. Using these materials as a starting point, Hadas, Roosevelt Montás, and Dan-el Padilla Peralta (SOF 2014-16) will discuss the context of these lectures and the cultural shifts that have had an impact on pedagogy and technology, the classical tradition, and equity in education-- all issues which, sixty years later, remain not only relevant but urgent.
