On April 8, 2010 noted linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky received the A.E. Havens Center’s Award for Lifetime Contribution to Critical Scholarship.
Approximately 1,500 people were on hand at Madison's Orpheum Theatre to see the award ceremony and hear Chomsky’s lecture, The Role of the Radical Intellectual: Some Personal Reflections.
Chomsky is the third recipient of the award, which is given to a scholar with a distinguished and extensive record of scholarly achievement in the critical tradition of social thought.
The first two went to Frances Fox Piven in 2004 and Howard Zinn in 2006.
Havens Center Director Erik Olin Write noted that Chomsky is almost certainly the best known and most widely read American public intellectual in the world.
Established in the Sociology Department in 1984, the A. E. Havens Center for the Study of Social Structure and Social Change is dedicated to promoting critical intellectual reflection and exchange, both within the academy as well as between it and the broader society.
The Center is named in honor of the late Professor of Rural Sociology, A. Eugene Havens, whose life and work embodied the combination of progressive political commitment and scholarly rigor that the Center encourages.
The Role of the Radical Intellectual: Some Personal Reflections from Patrick Barrett on Vimeo.