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Professor William Dorman to present
Livingston Lecture Oct. 17

Professor of Government and Journalism William Dorman

Usually the Faculty Senate’s prestigious John C. Livingston Lecture focuses on the noted research of the honored faculty member delivering the lecture.

In a break from tradition this year, featured speaker Professor of Government and Journalism William Dorman won’t discuss his ground-breaking research on the media and U.S. foreign policy. Instead he will talk about the man for whom the lecture series is named, John C. Livingston, who was known as an inspiration to both faculty and students.

The 2006 Livingston Lecture will be held on Tuesday, Oct. 17 from 3 to 5 p.m. in the University Union Ballroom. Dorman is the first faculty member to have been selected twice to present the lecture. The title of his talk is "A Teaching Life: Values Then and Now." His lecture on institutional values will be followed by a reception.

The Livingston Lecture is one of the top awards for faculty at Sacramento State. The annual lecture, organized by the Faculty Senate, recognizes a faculty member who has played an active role in the life of the University and has shown strong commitment to students while remaining active in creative and scholarly work.

Dorman, who first received the Livingston Lecture honor in 1995, retires next May after a 40-year career at Sacramento State. He developed a national reputation as one of the few academics working in the area of mass media and its relationship to American defense and foreign policy. He has written extensively on foreign affairs and on the performance of the media for publications ranging from the Columbia Journalism Review to the World Policy Journal. Dorman was a member of the 1990-91 Social Science Research Council’s panel on the Press and Foreign Policy, which produced one of the most highly regarded studies of the 1991 war with Iraq titled “Taken by Storm: The Media, Public Opinion and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Gulf War.” Dorman received the California State University system’s most prestigious honor, the Wang Family Excellence Award, in 2002. The honor is given to only four faculty annually in the CSU system.

Dorman said he wants to use this year’s lecture to pass on to the many faculty who have joined the University in recent years some of the lessons he learned from his mentor and friend, Jack Livingston, as he was called by his friends.

“Since we now have so many new faculty who have replaced those who have retired, I want the faculty to know about an extraordinary man who I think was one of the most unique and influential faculty members in the 60-year history of the University,” Dorman said. “Jack played a vital role on this campus and he was the faculty member that all the faculty members looked up to.”

Livingston was a professor of government at Sacramento State from 1954 until his death in 1981. As a member of the faculty, Livingston chaired the Department of Government for many years and served as acting dean of the then School of Arts and Sciences from 1971 to 1972. He was chair of the Faculty Senate on campus in 1970. Livingston helped found the CSU’s statewide Academic Senate and served as its head in 1965.

Charismatic and principled, Livingston was a legend among his faculty colleagues on campus, Dorman recalled. “He cared very deeply and was very passionate about issues such as academic freedom, shared governance and civil rights,” he said.

For example, while at Sacramento State during the civil rights movement, Livingston served on the board of the NAACP and on the CSU Chancellor’s Commission on Human Rights. Livingston also was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War, Dorman said.

An advocate of arms control, Livingston published articles on unilateral disarmament and was the author of the influential textbook Consent of the Governed: An Introduction to American Government.

“Jack had the natural ability to influence people like no other faculty member,” recalled Dorman. “During the crisis times on college campuses in the 1960s, Jack was the public face of the faculty and defended threats to academic freedom on campus.”

Dorman said Livingston always seemed to be at the forefront of emerging social issues. “Livingston stood up for issues such as affirmative action in the 1960s, long before it was fashionable,” Dorman said.

Dorman recalled that Livingston also was involved in opposing McCarthyism. Before joining the Sacramento State faculty, Livingston taught at the University of Denver where he fought for school teachers who were falsely accused of being Communists. “He stood up against a state senator in Colorado who wanted to keep them from teaching. Jack said that was unacceptable and he fought for those teachers.”

At Sacramento State, Livingston worked to ensure that shared governance played a central role in how the University was run, Dorman added.

One of Livingston’s most admired qualities was his integrity, Dorman remembered. “He did not believe in personal attacks. He may have disagreed with your argument but he would not make it personal,” Dorman said. “Jack Livingston is a reminder that values mattered then and they should now and in the future.”