Nielsen Grant Programming Returns!
Ryleigh Johnson | February 4, 2024
Like many aspects of campus life at Warren Wilson College (WWC), programming funded by the college’s Nielsen grant was interrupted by Hurricane Helene. Now that a new semester has begun, planned events will also resume, starting with a talk by Dr. Meghan Sullivan on Feb.6, 2025, at 6 p.m. in Canon Lounge.
Sullivan’s lecture will focus on the debate around “effective altruism,” a movement based on the philosophy of bioethicist Peter Singer. According to Todd May, an Nielsen lecturer of the humanities, “effective altruism” is about increasing the potential good one person can achieve through maximization of their resources.
“Some people think, ‘Well, what I’ll do is I’ll take a job as a Wall Street financier, make lots and lots of money and give it away, or I’ll give away my kidney because I should give as much as I can to charitable organizations,’” May said.
This topic is one of several that will be discussed by different guest speakers at least once a semester. May hopes that these talks can make broad philosophical concepts, like ethics, history and justice, more tangible for students.
“All of these are big, important ideas in the humanities, but they're not abstract,” May said. “They're on the ground. So what I'm trying to do is get ideas that are relevant to the humanities on the one hand but topical on the other hand.”
Jay Miller, an associate philosophy professor at WWC and chair of the public humanities program, echoed this idea.
“A lot of the discussions that we have in our philosophy classes and in the humanities more general are tied into the deeper questions that arise for us in current affairs and issues that matter most to us, but it's not always clear that what we're talking about in class is part of a broader civic discourse,” Miller said. “I think for us, bringing in speakers and making this part of a bigger series of events and discussions, is making that connection to real-world issues apparent. These are issues that aren't just limited to the classroom, this is a national and global discussion about who we are, what we should be doing, or what we shouldn't be doing.”
For the 2025 fall semester, May is re-inviting Chenjerai Kumanyika, who was supposed to come last October but could not because of Hurricane Helene. Kumanyika is the creator of the award-winning “Empire City” podcast, and will be coming to WWC to speak to students about “Police, Podcasts, and Politics.” Also in the works is a talk by Jules Lobell, head lawyer in the case that ended indeterminate solitary confinement in California, with a former prisoner of Pelican Bay, California’s previously largest-in-the-country solitary confinement facility.
Beyond hosting speakers on campus, Miller and May also hope to use some of the grant funding to support joint student-faculty projects and research.
“Even though it's going to be situated in the humanities, because it's a humanities grant, there's a real emphasis on interdisciplinarity there,” Miller said. “We want to make it available to all faculty and to all students, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary projects and looking at ways that the humanities can engage with other aspects of inquiry.”
More details about the specifics of funding will be released by the end of the spring semester, in the hopes that the program will be running by fall 2026.
“This is a real opportunity to do the kinds of things that we should be doing as a college campus: hosting speakers, creating opportunities for student-faculty collaboration and other initiatives that sort of get us outside of the classroom; the college becomes alive by hosting these events and creating these kinds of opportunities,” Miller said.