The Ernest L. Boyer Sr. Family Lecture Series

David W. Orr, Ph.D., right, will present  "Education in a Black Swan World" at the 2013 Ernest L. Boyer Sr. Family Lecture at the 2013 All College Conference on Wednesday, March 20. Orr is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics and senior advisor to the president at Oberlin College.

Orr is the author of seven books, including "Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse" (Oxford, 2009), and co-editor of three others. He has authored nearly 200 articles, reviews, book chapters and professional publications. In the past 25 years, he has served as a board member or advisor to eight foundations and on the boards of many organizations, including the Rocky Mountain Institute and the Aldo Leopold Foundation.

Currently, he is a trustee of the Bioneers, Alliance for Sustainable Colorado and the WorldWatch Institute. He has been awarded seven honorary degrees and a dozen other awards including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation and, recently, a Visionary Leadership Award from Second Nature. He has lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia.

Orr headed the effort to design, fund and build the Adam Joseph Lewis Center, which was named by an American Institute of Architects panel in 2010 as “the most important green building of the past 30 years,” and as “one of 30 milestone buildings of the twentieth century” by the U.S. Department of Energy. He is the executive director of the Oberlin Project and an editor of the journal Solutions.

The Ernest L. Boyer Sr. Family Lecture Series was established in 2004 by Kathryn Boyer in memory and honor of her late husband, Ernest L. Boyer, who was chancellor of the SUNY System from 1970 to 1977 and instrumental in the founding of Empire State College in 1971.

The lecture series honors also honors Boyers' son, Stephen Paul Boyer ’86, an adjunct mentor at the college’s Center for Distance Learning; grandson, Gabriel Boyer ’04; and wife, Kathryn, who graduated in 1978.