College of Arts and Sciences

A public humanities event that featured a public talk and roundtable on the Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Dayton and the state of the fight against hate in Ohio today.

Keynote address by UD Historian and faculty member William Trollinger on the KKK in 1920's Dayton and the University of Dayton's response, followed by a roundtable of civil rights leaders from across the state, including Kelly Fishman of the ADL's Cleveland Office, David Whitehead, VP of the Cincinnati NAACP and Fr. Satish Joseph of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception.

The discussion was moderated by Natalie Hudson, Executive Director of the Human Rights Center at the University of Dayton.

Event Archives

Visit the Alumni Chair in Humanities archive for materials from past events.

With the stimulus of faculty members such as Michael Payne (philosophy) and with the guidance of Dean Frank Lazarus, the College submitted a proposal to the National Endowment for the Humanities in the mid-1980s. On 15 December 1986, Lazarus announced that the NEH had awarded a Challenge Grant to support "an endowed professorship in the Humanities". The three-to-one Challenge Grant of $300,000 required the university to raise $900,000 by 1990 in order to realize the grant's full $1.2 million potential. Because this challenge was met to a great extent by the generosity of University of Dayton alumni, the professorship became known as the Alumni Chair in Humanities.

As planning for the position progressed, the chair holder's work was focused less on the Core Program and more broadly on the task of demonstrating through interdisciplinary measures the centrality of the humanities to the intellectual life of the university. Eventually, the chair's duties were defined to include teaching one course per term in the humanities, organizing and serving as keynote speaker for an annual humanities symposium, conducting scholarly research in the humanities, assisting other faculty in developing interdisciplinary courses, and managing a humanities library fund. Each Alumni Chair would hold the office for four years.

The history of what is now called the Alumni Chair in Humanities dates back to at least the early 1980s and is rooted in the formation of the Core Program. This program, created by a dedicated group of humanities faculty, achieved an extraordinary integration of required courses in English, history, philosophy and religious studies.

The Core program, however, had limitations at the time. By its nature, it depended upon a small group of faculty members working together closely, and thus it could enroll only a comparatively small number of students, usually about 120 per year.

The faculty and the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences began to work toward ways to extend the benefits of interdisciplinary study to larger numbers of faculty and students.

• Eugene August
• Michael Barnes
• Richard Benedum
• John Heitmann
• Patricia Johnson
• Ellen L. Fleischmann
• Julius A. Amin
• Samuel Dorf

Each chair has traditionally chosen to focus a large part of their endeavors on a broad-ranging theme that is of critical interest to the university community.