Jane Goodall to Speak at 10th Birthday Celebration of Honors College

Photo Submitted

Jane Goodall with an orphan chimpanzee that lives at a sanctuary. Goodall does not handle wild chimpanzees. Photo © Michael Neugebauer.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Legendary primatologist and conservationist Dr. Jane Goodall, DBE, founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and a United Nations Messenger of Peace, will speak at 7 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 5, at Barnhill Arena on the University of Arkansas campus. The event will headline the University of Arkansas Honors College 10^th Birthday Celebration. The lecture is cosponsored by the University of Arkansas Honors College and the student Distinguished Lectures Committee.

Goodall’s lecture, “Making a Difference: An Evening with Jane Goodall,” is free and open to the public. No tickets are required. A book signing will follow her remarks.

“We’re delighted to work with the Honors College to bring Dr. Goodall to campus,” said Autumn Lewis, an honors political science and economics major in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences who co-chairs the Distinguished Lectures Committee. “It’s been one of our long-term goals to bring her here, and we can’t wait to hear firsthand from a woman who is so committed to our environment and its preservation.”

Kayln Williams, who co-chaired the Distinguished Lectures Committee last year and graduated with honors in international business economics from the Sam M. Walton College of Business in May, was among those who were instrumental in inviting Goodall to visit the University of Arkansas.

“I am personally thrilled to attend this lecture as my first Honors College alumni event and I look forward to returning to campus this fall,” she said.

In 1958, Goodall sailed to Africa to pursue a lifelong dream of living with and writing about wild animals. After working with legendary anthropologist Louis Leakey, she was offered the rare opportunity to study wild chimpanzees on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika at the Gombe Stream Reserve. Armed with a diploma from the Queen’s Secretarial School in London and accompanied by her mother, Goodall persevered in an environment where others had lasted only months.

Her patient, unrelenting study and observation yielded surprising results. Chimpanzees fashion and use tools — a task previously thought to be a purely human characteristic — and they hunt and eat meat. Care of the young is long and close. Chimpanzees are sociable and expressive — sometimes when friends meet they fling their arms around each other in a delighted embrace. When National Geographic documented Goodall’s early discoveries in articles and television specials, “Jane Goodall” became a household name.

In 1965, Goodall founded the Gombe Stream Research Centre, and the following year earned a Ph.D. in ethology, the scientific study of animal behavior, from Cambridge University. In 1977, she established the Jane Goodall Institute, which today is a global organization with more than 27 offices that support research at Gombe, as well as community-centered conservation programs in Africa, and youth leadership and education around the world. Goodall’s book, The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior, culminated the first 20 years of the Gombe research and is recognized as a milestone in the understanding of wild chimpanzee behavior.

Goodall has won numerous awards for her environmental and humanitarian work. She was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace in 2002, and in 2004, in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace, Prince Charles invested Goodall as a Dame of the British Empire, the female equivalent of knighthood. She has also received the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, the French Legion of Honor, the Medal of Tanzania and Japan’s prestigious Kyoto Prize, among many other honors.

Goodall’s lecture will headline a series of events marking the 10^th birthday of the Honors College. The Honors College was created in 2002 through part of a $300 million gift from the Walton Family Charitable Support Foundation. This gift is the largest gift in the history of American public higher education to date. Today, more than 2,400 students and 500 professors from every college and major on campus participate in innovative courses and research in classrooms, laboratories, studios, and sites around the world.

The Distinguished Lecture Series is a student-sponsored program. Speakers are chosen by a committee of students, faculty and staff, and the events are funded by a student-approved fee, appropriated by the Programs Allocation Board.

Recent distinguished lecturers have included the Dalai Lama, Elie Weisel, President George H.W. Bush, Gen. Wesley Clark, Anderson Cooper and Aron Ralston.