Arts & Sciences

The air chills, the leaves fall, the crops are collected and stored for winter. From India to Estonia, from Holi to Thanksgiving, virtually every culture celebrates the harvest. On Nov. 24, the WUSTL Concert Choir and Chamber Choir will honor fall’s bounty with Thanksgiving, featuring music that stretches from Renaissance Italy to contemporary Senegal.

The inaugural Danforth Distinguished Lectures is bringing nationally recognized scholars to Washington University in St. Louis Nov. 18-20 for public lectures and discussions with faculty, students and invited experts. The theme will be “Protestant Foreign Missions and Secularization in Modern America.”

A unique, long-term partnership between Washington University and the Hazelwood School District is showing eye-popping, unprecedented success in elementary and middle school science test scores — and in the process providing a roadmap for other districts to follow. The district saw scores on the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP) tests increase 22.4 percentage points for fifth graders, and 12 percentage points for 8th graders over a five-year period beginning in 2008, the year it began a collaboration with WUSTL’s Institute for School Partnership.

Veteran Ian Smith barely graduated from high school. Today, he is earning his degree in global leadership and management in University College in Arts & Sciences and is leading a team of engineers to develop low-cost prosthetics using 3D printers.

Is privacy a “right”? What are we willing to sacrifice for privacy? How consistent are our beliefs about privacy and how consistently do we “practice” it? In response to these types of questions, Washington University in St. Louis experts on privacy issues, ranging from the history of privacy to privacy law, will participate in a roundtable discussion, titled “Privacy and Surveillance,” from noon to 2 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 20, in Anheuser-Busch Hall, Bryan Cave Moot Courtroom.

At a Board of Trustees meeting in October, several faculty members were appointed, promoted or granted tenure. Read more to find out the details.

The 21st century is bringing challenges to urban areas like never before, as if A Tale of Two Cities is being played out over and over again, in your neighborhood and in cities all over the world. The problems are both local and global, and so are the solutions. It’s this context that has led three Washington University in St. Louis faculty to compile an impressive array of international scholarship in a two-volume book titled Urban Ills: Twenty-first-Century Complexities of Urban Living in Global Contexts.

This spring, Washington University students may take a variety of Semester Online courses ranging from Trinity College Dublin’s “Ireland and Rebellion” to Wake Forest’s “Introduction to Bioethics.” The online consortium now boasts 21 top peer institutions.

For U.S. veteran Robbie Garrison, ­attending University College tuition-free was a dream come true. “One of my goals was to attend Washington University,” said Garrison, a first-generation college student. “I was not sure how I would afford it, until I learned about the Yellow Ribbon Program.”

Like a duel set to music, the malambo is hard and fast, explosive and competitive, as forceful and graceful as the Argentine cowboys — the legendary gauchos — who have been performing it since the 1600s. On Friday and Saturday, Nov. 22 and 23, Edison will welcome Che Malambo to St. Louis as part of the group’s first North American tour.