Our campus hosts a variety of community events including film screenings, author talks, guest lectures, and music performances that are open to the public.
Stonewall: The Riot That Built a Community
Thursday, April 18 | 7:00 - 9:00 PM
Free, advance registration required
Mark Segal was 18 years old on the night of June 28, 1969, when he entered the Stonewall Inn. Raised by the only Jewish family in South Philadelphia’s Wilson Park housing project, Segal was no stranger to being an outsider. He told his parents he was leaving Philly to go to school in New York. In truth, he’d left to find a gay community. Watching an episode of The David Susskind Show years earlier, he’d learned that gay people existed in New York and knew that was where he belonged.
Segal went on to organize some of the earliest American LGBTQ+ organizations; help plan the first pride march in 1970; found the longest running LGBTQ+ weekly newspaper, the Philadelphia Gay News and become one of the most important figures in the alternative gay press. But on that night at Stonewall, he was still a teenager just exulting in the chance to drink and socialize with other LGBTQ+ people at a time when homosexuality was still treated as a psychological affliction by the medical establishment, immoral by most religions, and criminal under law.
Nature's Best Hope with Doug Tallamy
Tuesday, May 7 | 7:00 - 9:00 PM
Free, advance registration required
Recent headlines about global insect declines, the impending extinction of one million species worldwide, and three billion fewer birds in North America are a bleak reality check about how ineffective our current landscape designs have been at sustaining the plants and animals that sustain us. Such losses are not an option if we wish to continue our current standard of living on Planet Earth. The good news is that none of this is inevitable. Doug Tallamy, a professor in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware, will discuss simple steps that each of us can - and must - take to reverse declining biodiversity and will explain why we are nature’s best hope.
Tallamy earned a Ph.D. in entomology from the University of Maryland and an M.S. in entomology from Rutgers University. He currently teaches insect taxonomy, behavioral ecology, and other related subjects. Chief among his research goals is to better understand the many ways insects interact with plants and how such interactions determine the diversity of animal communities. Tallamy won the silver medal from the Garden Writer's Association for his 2007 book Bringing Nature Home, and authored The Living Landscape: Designing for Beauty and Biodiversity in the Home Garden with Rick Darke in 2014. Among his awards are the Garden Club of America Margaret Douglas Medal for Conservation, the Tom Dodd Jr. Award of Excellence in 2013, and the 2018 AHS B.Y. Morrison Communication Award.