WIlliam Mazzocco

Annual Mazzocco Lecture in Distributive Justice, Feb. 23: David Schmidtz

February 17, 2017

Philosopher David Schmidtz will deliver “Markets in Education,” as the 2017 Mazzocco Lecture in Distributive Justice, on Thursday, February 23, at 5 p.m., in Shiley Hall 301. Schmidtz is Kendrick Professor of Philosophy and Eller Chair of Service-Dominant Logic at the University of Arizona, ranked as the top graduate program in the world in political philosophy. He is editor of Social Philosophy & Policy and is the Freedom Center’s founding director. He is the author of dozens of articles and several books, including: Rational Choice and Moral Agency, The Elements of Justice, and Environmental Ethics: What Really Matters, and What Really Works (with Elizabeth Willott).

The Mazzocoo Lecture is an annual lecture made possible by a gift to the University to honor the memory William James Mazzocco ’37, and is presented by the political science department. This year, additional funding has been provided by the John Templeton Foundation though a grant from the Institute of Humane Studies.

For more information contact Bill Curtis, political science, at curtisw@up.edu.

2013 Mazzocco Lecture

February 18, 2013

The annual William James Mazzocco Lecture in Distributive Justice will take place on Wednesday, February 20, at 7:30 p.m., in Buckley Center room 163. Debra Satz (pictured left), the Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society at Stanford University, will present “Should Everything Be For Sale?” The lecture is free and open to all. Satz will explore the controversies around diverse goods (human organs, votes, sex, credit derivatives, etc.) and whether they should be treated as marketable commodities. She will draw much of her argument from her 2010 book, Why Some Things Should Not Be For Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets. Other works by Satz include Toward A More Humanist Justice: The Political Philosophy of Susan Moller Okin (2009) and Occupy the Future (2013). Her areas of academic specialty include the place of equality in a just society and theories of rational choice, and she is currently leading a multi-year research project which aims to clarify plausible interpretations of equality of educational opportunity and their implications for public policy.

The William James Mazzocco Memorial Lecture in Distributive Justice was established in 2006; Mazzocco earned his economics degree on The Bluff in 1937. A lifelong world traveler, Mazzocco had a long, distinguished career which included military intelligence assignments during World War II, diplomatic posts in Paris, Rome, Rio de Janeiro, and Abidjan, and significant contributions to the Marshall Plan. He credited his years at the University of Portland with giving him a solid moral foundation that would guide his life and work for the remainder of his 89 years, most notably his steadfast belief in distributive justice—the principles of equitable and fair distribution of wealth.

For more information contact Gary Malecha, political science, at 7452 or malecha@up.edu.

Martin Cenek, Shiley School of Engineering, presented “Machine Learning and Data Science ABMs: How to build cognitive, spatially aware, adaptive agents from limited data” (with Maxwell Franklin and student co-presenters Cory Shaeffer and Henri Thomas-Morgan) at the International Society for Ecological Modeling Global Conference 2019 (ISEM2019), October 1, 2019, in Salzburg Austria. He also presented “The data-science driven model construction of coupled socio-ecological system dynamics: development of the decision support tools to study the salmon and caribou subsistence harvest in Alaska” (with Maxwell Franklin and student co-presenters Cory Sheaffer and Henri Thomas) at the 10th Annual Northwest Climate Conference, October 8-10, 2019, Portland, OR.

Sarina Saturn, psychological sciences, and her research team, co-led by Deirdre Katz, education, presented their findings as oral presentations at the Society for the Study of Human Development conference, “Stress, Resilience and Character Development Across the Life-Span,” October 11-13 in Portland, OR Her talk was entitled, “Transgenerational Prosociality: The Relationship between Facets of Resilience and Vagal Regulation during Moral Elevation” and psychology students Sabrina Legaspi and Rachel Mehlman will discuss their research on UP students with a presentation entitled, “How Diverse Identities and Values of College Students Relate to Resilience and Mental-Illness Stigma.”

Randy Hetherington, education, published “Partnering with school leaders: Principal assessments of completers” in the Journal of Education & Social Policy 6 (3), 1-7, October 2019. Coauthors are James Carroll, Jacqueline Waggoner, Hillary Gaudio, and Bruce Weitzel.

Jacqueline D. Van Hoomissen, biology, attended the Human Anatomy and Physiology Society’s mid-year Board of Directors meeting in Atlanta, GA, October 11-12, 2019. She is the secretary of the board of directors and past chair of the 2019 Annual Conference Planning Committee.

Simon Aihiokhai, theology, presented “Christian Forgiveness As Incarnational: Turning To The Black Existential Experience In An Era of Hate,” a keynote address given at the 30th Annual meeting of the Black Catholic Theological Symposium, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC, October 10, 2019.

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