PGHIMC - Pittsburgh Independent Media Center

2006 Thomas Merton Center New Person Awards
by Jeremy Shenk Tuesday, May. 02, 2006 at 4:31 PM
jeremy@thomasmertoncenter.org 412-361-3022

This year's Thomas Merton Center New Person Awards is celebrating Academic Freedom. Come support this fine group of individuals as we give 10 local groups and individuals a New Person Award for their work around the theme of Activism and Academia.

New Person Awards 2006: Celebrating Academic Freedom

The New Person Award is an annual event that serves to honor local activists with a commitment to peace and justice. We have a date and location for this year’s event. Please mark it in your calendars and help us celebrate this year’s wonderful group of awardees.

La Roche College, College Center Square
East Campus, 9000 Babcock Blvd., Pittsburgh, PA 15237
Thursday May 18 from 7-10

Reservations are $20 or $10 Low income and can be ordered online at http://www.thomasmertoncenter.org or by sending payment to the Thomas Merton Center at 5125 Penn Ave. Pittsburgh PA 15224. For more infromation call 412-361-3022 and ask for Jeremy.

The theme for this year’s New Person Awards is “Celebrating Academic Freedom: Honoring Activism in Academia.” In choosing this year’s theme, the Thomas Merton Center affirms and supports the right of students, faculty, and staff at area universities to dissent. Whether in the classroom, on their campus, on the streets, or on the airwaves members of the broader academic community play a vital role in the movement for peace and justice. This year’s awardees come from many different area schools including the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, Carlow University, LaRoche College, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Duquesne University, and Slippery Rock University. Come join us to honor this incredible group of people who serve as shining examples and guides to lead us, inspiring us to join them to create a better world.

Lisa D. Brush (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1993) teaches feminist sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work is about converting research into feminist intelligence. She is inspired to practice activist research - and to protect academic freedom - so we can do the work of understanding what Simone de Beauvoir called “the genuine conditions of our lives.” Those conditions shape the struggles for justice and peace that are the source of what de Beauvoir called “our strength to live and our reasons for acting” - the sense of purpose and meaning we make for ourselves and our communities.

Jennie Roth founded the La Roche Social Forum in 2005 which brings together socially conscious La Roche students to act on local and global issues. Jennie was the outreach and public relations coordinator for the 2nd annual "Global Problems, Global Solutions" conference at La Roche College where she also moderated a panel discussion about the United Nations Millennium Development Goals with panelists from The World Bank, Oxfam America, and The United Nations.

Harvey Holtz is from the Bronx. He received his Ph.D. from the City University of New York in 1983. He has been a professor of Sociology at IUP for the last 33 years, and has twice served the department as chair. Harvey has been involved with APSCUF, the faculty union, where he has been a representative to the Indiana Central Labor Council and a delegate to the union’s state-wide Legislative Assembly. Harvey has been responsible for the creation of a variety of groups, including the Indiana Progressive Alliance, he worked with the IUP Women for a Change, and he was advisor to the IUP/NAACP for seven years. He had also been involved in anti-nuclear groups, he worked with campus groups struggling against heterosexism, a variety of other activist groups through the years, and he initiated Indiana Voices for Peace prior to the invasion of Iraq. Harvey is presently the advisor to Liberation Ground, a radical left student group that he helped form.

WRCT Public Affairs Programs (Rust Belt Radio, Fightin’ Lefty Review, Left Out, With the Lid Off, Ebony Spectrum, Latin American Hour): WRCT is a rabble-rousing community- and student-run radio station from Carnegie Mellon University on 88.3 FM. These homegrown and radical programs help inspire and inform a diversity of social movements throughout the city.

Matt Pratter was one of the key students in starting the Gay Straight Alliance at Duquesne University. As a co-founder of the group he has dealt with pressure admirably and now the club is fully established.

Tom Buchele is the director of the Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. Tom has worked tirelessly under extreme political pressure to provide legal support for grassroots environmental groups.

Chiseko Matambanadzo is a professor at Slippery Rock University teaching African, African-American, and World History. He works on anti-racism, anti-colonialism, and anti-neocolonialism. He also teaches and talks about the westernization of culture as a modern problem.

Sr. Marilyn Bergt’s activism spans the globe and has benefited thousands of people over the years. Her most recent national and international outreach projects include collecting donations for 80 Humanitarian Relief Kits and 125 children’s school kits for Iraqi citizens; responding to Hurricane Katrina in a number of ways—including taking groups of La Roche College students to New Orleans for construction projects and tutoring; adopting a 19 person extended family and two schools that were destroyed in the floods; and spearheading the BandAID project to replace all instruments for the St. Mary’s Academy band. She also collected over $1300 in donations after the Tsunami in order to adopt “Moo Dan Dek,” a children’s school village in rural Thailand, and she conducted a wide array of aid projects after the floods in the Pittsburgh area.

Michal Myers (in memoriam) began her activism as a union activist in the Oakland Education Association and the United Teachers of Los Angeles, where she became a union chapter chairperson. At Pitt, she was in the Education Ph.D. program but found history more interesting and was admitted to the history program last year. She was very involved in the International Socialist Organization, and helped to found both the Pitt chapter of Campus Anti-War Network, and Pitt Against War. She served as a mentor to a number of undergrads, and passed away after a long battle with stomach cancer.

Amanda Fritz, Stacy Deldonne, and FEMME
Amanda Fritz and Stacy Deldonne are from the Carlow University group FEMME – a feminist student group on campus. For both Amanda and Stacy, their motivations behind the foundation and work of FEMME are personal. They feel that as women, what happens to one, happens to all. Today in America and around the world, women and girls face violence, persecution, sexism, and injustice. They see it as their responsibility to stand up and try to end that.

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