Noam Chomsky on campus September 15, 7pm at Main Stage ...

"Tough love" is just the right phrase: love for the rich and privileged, tough for everyone else.
Noam Chomsky in Powers and Prospects, 1996 


One of the first luminaries to appear on campus this new school year will be Noam Chomsky.  Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and a major figure of analytic philosophy.His work has influenced fields such as computer science, mathematics, and psychology.

This announcement on the Williams site:
NOAM CHOMSKY on GETTING IT RIGHT: DILEMMAS IN HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION
Noam Chomsky has written and lectured widely on linguistics, philosophy, intellectual history, contemporary issues, international affairs and U.S. foreign policy. He is currently Institute Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at M.I.T. This talk is sponsored by the Class of ’71 Public Affairs Forum and is the first of a two-part dialogue on Humanitarian Intervention The event is free, but tickets are required. Book signing to follow. Tickets available online starting Sept. 1. More information to follow.
Thursday, Sept. 15, 7 p.m., MainStage, ’62 Center
  
Chomsky is an integral part of two current courses:
       •  The Syntactic Structure of English, a linguistics class in which we tried to build rules of grammar      based on usage data, our own knowledge of the language, and the transformational grammar of Noam Chomsky.
       • Two American Public Intellectuals: Noam Chomsky and Edward Said , focusing on a few major issues on which Chomsky and Said shared deep concerns: ideologies within the academy and society at large, media representations, Palestinians and the Middle East, 9/11, U.S. global dominance, and the role of the intellectual in society.


Ed Note: Chomsky's work in the application of particular language to understood concepts was the basis for a course I took in Teaching English as a Second Language. It was interesting to see people with a variety of languages learning the English words for what they already understood. By the way, the basic discipline of teaching ESL is that you speak only in English. It was a hard-earned certificate!