2008 Melvin Oliver Lecture

Melvin Oliver Lecture Welcoming Remarks and Introduction
“What Has Happened to the Dream? Race and Wealth in the 21st Century”
Sunday, Jan. 20, 2008
Pruis Hall

Good evening to all of you. It’s my pleasure to welcome you to campus for another of the events we are hosting here at Ball State in commemoration of the life of Doctor Martin Luther King Junior. Before I introduce tonight’s speaker, I want to urge you to attend two other activities in this series.

Tomorrow morning at 7:00, Ball State hosts the community’s annual Martin Luther King Day breakfast in the Pittenger Student Center. And on Tuesday evening at 7:00, we welcome Doctor Terrence Roberts, one of the Little Rock Nine, for a lecture in this same room. My thanks to Doctor Charles Payne and the staff of our Diversity Policy Institute; Doctor Derick Virgil and the staff of our Multicultural Center; and a very hard-working group of Ball State students for putting these wonderful events together.

Of all of Doctor King’s speeches, none is more famous than his “I Have a Dream” speech delivered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Tonight’s speaker looks at that dream 40 years after Doctor King’s death, and he does so from a perspective not often examined—that of today’s overwhelming economic inequality and the role that race plays in questions of wealth and poverty in 21st century American society.

Doctor Melvin Oliver is the Dean of the Division of Social Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he also is professor of sociology. The UCSB Division of Social Sciences includes 12 departments and programs, 180 faculty members, 300 graduate students, and almost 6,000 undergraduates. Professor Oliver leads that division with more than 25 years of experience in both philanthropy and higher education.

Before his arrival in Santa Barbara, he was vice president of the community development program at the Ford Foundation, where he helped to build human, social, economic, and environmental assets among poor and disadvantaged people and communities around the globe. From 1978 to 1996, he was a faculty member at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has won numerous awards for teaching, including two in 1994, when he was named California Professor of the Year and earned the Luckman Distinguished Teaching Award from the UCLA Alumni Association.

An expert on racial and urban inequality and poverty, Doctor Oliver is the author of “Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality,” published in 2006. That book has received the Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award from the American Sociological Association, the C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the award for outstanding book on the subject of human rights from the Gustavus Myers Center. He has co-edited four other books and special journals and is the author of more than 50 scholarly articles.

Doctor Oliver earned his bachelor’s degree from William Penn College in Iowa and earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. He earned the latter’s Distinguished Alumni Award in 2004.

Please join me in welcoming Doctor Melvin Oliver to Ball State University.