Sure, you can spend your hard-saved money on life-long learning, or you can attend our Casual Conversations. Or do both. Over 200 oif our classmates have attended one or more of the over 100 such sessions.
And there are more to come.
One Monday, October 8 at 5 pm Dartmouth Provost Santiago Schnell will be with us. When I contacted President Sean Beilock to see if she would join us for a Casual Conversation, she said that she was unable to as being far too busy, and she offered up the Provost to be subject to our tender mercies. He fits right into the underlying principle that guides our Casual Conversation program. From the Dartmouth website announcement of his appointment as Provost: “Santiago Schnell . . . describes himself as a proponent of the philosophy of the ‘unity of knowledge,’ the idea that all disciplines can contribute a unique and important perspective to any given problem.” A mathematical biologist, Professional Schnell joins us as the second Provost in our group; Class President Jim Staros is the other, emeritus, although he faces the far more difficult task leading his classmates than dealing with professors.
Yale Professor Nicholas Christakis joins us on December 18, a Thursday, at 5 pm, to discuss with us his book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society (Little, Brown Spark 2019). He is a physician and sociologist with appointments in multiple departments at Yale. We are very fortunate to have with us a distinguished scholar whose research and writing have been widely praised, and justly so. We have had many participants without any connection to Dartmouth, and Professor Kristakis is a sterling (pun intended) addition to that group.
On Sunday, February 15, at Noon Tobias Becker will be our guest. He wrote Yesterday: A New History of Nostalgia (Harvard University Press 2023). I discovered this book through a review in Times Literary Supplement:
“Yesterday”, one can say without irony, is a timely book. Barely a day goes by when nostalgia is not invoked in critiques of populist political movements or as a disparaging description of the latest cultural fad. But Becker also reminds us that we have been here before. Every postwar decade and generation has pointed to the growth of nostalgia as a symptom of their epoch’s sickness. As far back as 1948 the historian Richard Hofstadter bemoaned “the overpowering nostalgia of the last fifteen years”. Yet the history of the word tells us more about the power of the “nostalgia critique” than about nostalgia itself. In fact, the more the author digs away at the conceptual sediments that have accrued around the word, the more we understand it as a polemical slogan rather than a meaningful term of analysis.
Tobias Becker even goes so far as to suggest that “nostalgia” should be discarded altogether as a tool of cultural diagnosis. To which one can only say: good luck with that. Readers of this wide-ranging, innovative and thought-provoking book will find it hard to shake the feeling that nostalgia’s future is likely to be as busy as its past.
The book is also timely to our current status as men and women in our late 70s. If we are nostalgic for the past, at least we ought to know about the very notion of the term and the condition it describes.
Bracha Horovitz joins us as a guest on Sunday, March 1 at 2 pm. The partner of classmate Bob Nadelberg, she is the author of Soldier On: A Woman’s Memoir of Resilience and Hope (Endeavor Literary Press 2022). The daughter of an Auschwitz survivor, Bracha joined the Israel Defense Forces at 18 and was runner-up in the Miss Israel beauty pageant. After giving birth to two beautiful daughters, Bracha’s son Ronny was born with severe disabilities. She earned a degree in textile engineering and is an advocate for parents with disabled children and the organizations who help them.
Classmate Sandy Alderson holds the record for participants in a Casual Conversation: 48. Help break that record by joining us on Sunday, March 15 at 3 pm for Sandy’s encore appearance. His topic: “Everything Baseball (except the Yankees).” With a thorough knowledge of the baseball world that he has played a pivotal role in shaping, the ultimate insider will handle any pitch you throw at him and knock it out of the park. The Yankees, however, are off limits!
On Monday, March 30 at 5 pm, Dartmouth Jewish Studies Professor Susannah Heschel will be making her encore appearance at a Casual Conversation, courtesy of the efforts of Bruce Alpert, chair of the Jewish Culture Group. Her topic will be antisemitism at Dartmouth and Harvard. She visited at Harvard Divinity School this Fall and will again next Spring. According to Harvard website: “During the fall semester of 2025, she will deliver the Yosef Yerushalmi Lecture at the University of Munich, and in the spring semester of 2026 she will deliver the Franz Rosenzweig Lectures at Yale University. In February 2026 she will convene a conference on “Sexual Violence and Antisemitism,” thanks to a grant from the Carnegie Corporation.”
Plan on spending time with your classmates, but not your money, by being an important part of our lifelong learning project known as the Casual Conversation.
Arthur Fergenson