"Courageous Behavior" is Topic of Lecture by Smith Sociologist

Myron P. Glazer, Barbara Richmond Professor in the Social Sciences at Smith College, will give this year's Katharine Asher Engel Lecture, "On the Trail of Courageous Behavior," at 5 p.m. Tuesday, February 29, in Wright Hall Auditorium.

Glazer, who is also director of the Project on Women and Social Change at Smith and a member of the graduate faculty at the University of Massachusetts, has written extensively on the sociology of activism, environmental protest and ethics in research and business.

In his lecture, he will trace a range of bold resistance to malevolent authority. He will examine French villagers rescuing Jews during the Nazi Holocaust of World War II, American Downwinders living near nuclear bomb factories and protesting radiation contamination and Czechoslovakian dissidents exposing their Communist government's harmful and deceitful environmental policies. In the lecture, Glazer will discuss how all of these courageous individuals put themselves at risk and stood as beacons of hope in dark times.

Glazer's most recent book, co-authored with his wife, Penina Migdal Glazer, professor of history at Hampshire College, is "The Environmental Crusaders: Confronting Disaster and Mobilizing Community," which was published by Penn State University Press in 1998. For this book, the Glazers spent five years interviewing 140 activists-public interest group members, journalists, union leaders and corporate and government employees in the United States, Israel and the former Czechoslovakia-in an effort to find out how the courage of ordinary people helps to build a more accountable and democratic society. The Glazers are also the authors of the acclaimed 1989 book "The Whistleblowers: Exposing Corruption in Government and Industry."

The Engel lectureship was established in 1958 by the National Council of Jewish Women to honor Mrs. Engel, its one-time president and a graduate of Smith College in the class of 1920. It is granted annually to a Smith College faculty member who has made a significant contribution in his or her field.

February 22, 2000