Boyd-Lubker Visting Scholars Program

Description

• Title of endowment – Boyd-Lubker Visiting Scholars Program
  
• Date established – May 4, 2000
  
• Purpose of endowment – Provide support for the Boyd-Lubker Visiting Scholars program within the College of Education and Behavioral Sciences.
  
• College/department where housed – College of Education and Behavioral Sciences
  
• Status – Filled
  
• Date occupied – Presentation held February 24, 2005
  
• Occupant information:
• Name – Dr. Ervin Staub
  • Dr. Staub's passion to understand genocide arose from his own rescue from the Holocaust as a child in Hungary. "From his own deliverance, Dr. Staub developed a lifelong passion to understand the roots of mass evil, silence in the face of such evil, and altruism," said Dr. Sam McFarland, a WKU psychology professor and friend of Dr. Staub. "Both his writing and practical work center on this passion, and he is universally recognized as one of the world's leading scholars on these concerns."

    His books include "The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence" and "The Psychology of Good and Evil: Why Children, Adults, and Groups Help and Harm Others."

    "The Roots of Evil" reviews the Nazi Holocaust, the Turkish genocide of the Armenians, the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia and the mass killings during the Argentine dictatorship, and seeks commonalities, early warning signs and means of prevention. The book also served as the inspiration for a 1998 Discovery Channel and BBC television series.

    In 1999, Dr. Staub co-founded a project to promote healing and reconciliation in Rwanda in the wake of that country's 1994 genocide. In his trips to Rwanda, he has conducted seminars with government and community leaders, trauma counselors, journalists and others and has conducted research on the processes of reconciliation and forgiveness following ethnic conflict.

    Dr. Staub earned his doctorate at Stanford in 1965 and has been at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst since 1971. He also has held faculty positions at Harvard, Stanford, the University of Hawaii, and the London School of Economics and Political Science.

    A fellow of the American Psychological Association, Dr. Staub is past president of the International Society of Political Psychology and The Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict and Violence.

Program Information

• Dr. Ervin Staub, a leading scholar on the psychology of genocide, is the 2005 Boyd-Lubker Visiting Scholar at Western Kentucky University.

  Dr. Staub, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, visited WKU February 23-25, 2005. He lectured on "Genocide and Mass Killing: Origins, Prevention, Healing, and Reconciliation" at 7 p.m. February 24, 2005 at the Mass Media and Technology Hall Auditorium.