Goucher Honors Eli Velder With a Lecture by Jonathan Kozol

Release date: April 16, 2008 |

Goucher College will honor the 50th anniversary of Eli Velder, professor of education, with a talk by renowned author and education advocate Jonathan Kozol on Wednesday, April 16, at 8 p.m. in Haebler Memorial Chapel.

The lecture, “The Soul of a Profession,” has generated widespread interest, and no more tickets will be available to the greater community. Students, faculty, and staff who want to attend should contact Goucher's box office at 410-337-6333 or boxoffice@goucher.edu as soon as possible.

Dr. Eli Velder came to Goucher College as a part-time faculty member in 1958, while also teaching at Baltimore Hebrew University. After a short time juggling positions at both institutions, he opted to teach full-time at Goucher and celebrates his 50th anniversary at the college this year.

During his five decades at Goucher, Velder has taught an impressive breadth of courses, including the history of education; the philosophy of education; educational psychology; schools and the disadvantaged; and pre‑industrial, industrial, and post-industrial societies’ issues in education.

He served as director of the college’s first graduate program in education and headed Goucher’s Education Department from 1983 to 1990. He also coordinated Goucher’s Judaic Studies Program from 2000 until this year, when the first dedicated director was hired for the program.

For his dedicated service to Goucher College, Velder was given the Award for Outstanding Teaching in 1979, the Award for Service to the college in 1986, and he was appointed to the Dean Van Meter Chair.

Velder serves a number of statewide organizations, including as a member of the Maryland State Task Force on the Future of Teacher Education, an executive board member of the Maryland Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, treasurer of the Maryland Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, and chair of the Maryland Association of Small Teacher Education Programs.

Although he now teaches half-time, Velder says he has found great satisfaction in seeing his students mature into polished professionals in his classroom and in the schools where they student-teach.

For more than four decades, Jonathan Kozol has worked as an educator, author, and nationally recognized advocate for equity in education.

Impassioned by the civil rights campaigns of the 1960s, he became a Boston public schoolteacher in the low-income, predominately black neighborhood of Roxbury — first in a free alternative school and later in a public elementary school.

Kozol wrote Death at an Early Age, a description of his first year as a teacher, which was published in 1967 and received the 1968 National Book Award.

Kozol’s Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America, received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for 1989 and the Conscience in Media Award of the American Society of Journalists and Authors.

His examination of economic disparity in education, Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools, won the New England Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992.

In 2005, in The Shame of the Nation, Kozol exposed the conditions he found while visiting nearly 60 public schools in 30 districts in 11 states. He found that the large majority of inner-city children were more isolated racially than at any time since federal courts began dismantling segregation with the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.

In his most recent work, Letters to a Young Teacher, Kozol draws upon his four decades of experience to guide first-year educators through the joys and pains of the profession.

Kozol is an outspoken critic of the voucher movement, and he continues to condemn the inequalities of education and speaks often about the segregation of black and Hispanic children from white children in public schools in almost every major city in the nation.