NewsRelease

Harriet Elliott Lectures to Address Inequality in American Life,
March 24 & 25 at UNCG 
 
GREENSBORO — The average income of the highest-earning 5 percent of U.S. families was 11 times more than the lowest 20 percent in 1979. Two decades later, it was 19 times higher. The wealthiest 1 percent of American households owns more than 40 percent of the country’s wealth.

The 2003 Harriet Elliott Lectures at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro will address these and related issues in the program “Inequality in American Life: National Impacts, Backyard Realities,” organized by the Department of Sociology.

“On many measures of inequality, America today mirrors the America of the 1920s,” said Steve Kroll-Smith, department chairman. “There are comparatively few winners and a vast number of losers in this new Gilded Age.”

Dr. Katherine Newman of Harvard University will deliver the keynote address, “Rising Tides Lift the Yachts: Inequality in the U.S. and North Carolina,” at 7 p.m. Monday, March 24, in the School of Music Recital Hall. She is the Malcolm Weiner Professor of Urban Studies and dean of social science at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Her 1999 book, “No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City,” won the Sidney Hillman Book Prize and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. Her other books include “Falling From Grace” (1988), “Declining Fortunes” (1993) and “A Different Shade of Gray: Mid-Life and Beyond in the Inner City” (2003).

A follow-up colloquium from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday, March 25, at the Alumni House will focus on problems of inequality in the areas of crime, health and the environment. It will feature scholars from The College of William & Mary and Brown, Wake Forest, North Carolina State and East Carolina universities.

All events are free and open to the public. For more information, call the Department of Sociology at 334-5609.

The lecture series is named for political science professor Harriet W. Elliott, namesake of the Elliott University Center, who served as dean of women from 1935 until her death in 1947. President Franklin D. Roosevelt called her to Washington in 1940 to serve on the National Advisory Defense Commission.
 

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