Campus & Community

Today’s freshmen students have a 50 percent chance of living to see their 100th birthdays. They are in the middle of a demographic revolution that will shape every aspect of their lives. A new interdisciplinary course for freshmen introduced this fall, “When I’m Sixty-Four: Transforming Your Future,” aims to prepare students for this aging revolution and to encourage them to examine their present and future lives in more detail.

Bestselling novelist Curtis Sittenfeld will close the fall Washington University in St. Louis Assembly Series with a talk on “St. Louis, Novels, and St. Louis Novels” at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 12, in Simon Hall’s May Auditorium. The lecture is sponsored by University Libraries and is also the annual Neureuther Library Lecture. It is free and open to the public.

Acclaimed journalist and author Thomas Friedman will headline the annual Founders Day celebration at Washington University in St. Louis Saturday, Nov. 8, at the Hyatt Regency St. Louis at the Arch. The annual banquet and ceremony that honors the 1853 founding of Washington University also confers the Distinguished Faculty Awards, Distinguished Alumni Awards and the Robert S. Brookings Awards.

The Association of College Unions International has awarded the Danforth University Center the Bernard Pitts Role of the College Union Award in recognition of its DUC Presents series and other outstanding programming.

Internationally distinguished architect and teacher Nasrine Seraji will visit the campus of Washington University in St. Louis Friday, Nov. 7, to open the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts symposium “Women in Architecture: 1974-2014.” The Assembly Series lecture will take place at 6:30 p.m. in Steinberg Hall Auditorium. A reception at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum will begin at 5:30 p.m.

For the past year and a half, dedicated students, faculty and staff have come together through the university’s Mosaic Project to help move us toward a more inclusive campus community. Now, as this initiative is concluding, the efforts of the eight Mosaic Project working groups are taking root at the university.

​Known to generations of Washington University students and faculty members as “Sam and Betty,” Sam Lachterman and Betty Wynn, a homeless brother-and-sister who spent decades attending programs on campus, bequeathed $54,000 to Washington University. Half of their gift will fund the Nov. 1-2 performances of an Assembly Series event chosen just for them, “Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host” at Edison Theatre. The other half will live on in bequests to the School of Law, the Kemper Museum and Arts & Sciences.

Some 300 youngsters from across the St. Louis region were welcomed to the South 40 on the Danforth Campus of Washington University in St. Louis Oct. 25 for Safe Trick of Treat, an annual tradition.

Three years before American troops liberated the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps, experiencing the true horror of Nazi brutality, a handful of Soviet-Jewish photographers bore witness to Nazi atrocities in their homeland. Seven decades later, historian and scholar David Shneer shares their story for the Washington University Assembly Series and annual Holocaust Memorial Lecture, “Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust.” The free and open event will be held at 5 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 4 in Wilson Hall Room 214.

Adam Schefkind, a biology major in Arts & Sciences with minors in public and jazz studies, says his two passions – medicine and music – both demand precision and creativity. Schefkind and his band will perform at Jazz at Holmes at 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 30. He is the first student to headline the venerable jazz series, according to his mentor William Lenihan, professor of the practice in music and director of jazz performance.