Distinguished Professor Lecture Series

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  Disclosing Versus Concealing Personally Distressing Information: A Personality Perspective

  Jeffrey H. Kahn

  This lecture draws upon Dr. Jeffrey Kahn's research program to examine the issue of disclosing versus concealing psychological distress from a personality perspective. Put another way, this lecture explores individual differences in people's tendencies to disclose (versus conceal) personally distressing information across time and situations. Among the questions tackled are: What are some ways in which emotional disclosure has been defined in the psychology research literature? How does a personality perspective add to these definitions? How can people's disclosure versus concealment tendencies be identified empirically? And perhaps most importantly, what consequences do disclosure and concealment tendencies have for domains such as the quality of interpersonal relationships, mental health and well-being, and even success in psychotherapy?

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  Risk Has a Price, But Prices Have Risk, Too

  Krzysztof Ostaszewski

  In this lecture, Dr. Ostaszewski asks the question: “What is the effect of risk faced by the seller?” In other words, what is the uncertainty of demand on the actual price charged on the consumer?

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  Will Accounting Help Save The Planet? Reflections on Corporate Environmental Disclosure

  Den Patten

  Based on the desire to better explain what drives differences in corporate environmental (and other social responsibility) disclosure, legitimacy theory posits that, because the social legitimacy of organizations is monitored through the public policy process, corporate managers have an incentive to use environmental disclosure to reduce exposures to social and political pressures. In this lecture, I lay out evidence from research over the past 30 years documenting that differences in the extent of this disclosure are associated with differences in exposures including firm size, the environmental sensitivity of the industry in which a firm operates, the level of media scrutiny, and importantly, firms' underlying environmental performance. I also document the impacts of existing environmental disclosure both in terms of reduced negative investor reactions to regulatory cost-inducing events and in terms of enhanced perceptions of companies' environmental reputations. I then question whether these benefits are really in the best interest of the planet.

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  The Rise of Autocrats—Democratic Backsliding and the Middle Class

  Ali Riaz

  The euphoria of the 1990s–that the world had entered into a new era of democracy, and that the people’s power was bringing down brute authoritarianism– is long gone. Instead, when it comes to the global state of democracy, despair and gloom have become the order of the day. We are witnessing the erosion, decay, and in some instances, outright collapse of democracy like never before. Organizations that track the state of democracy all over the world, Freedom House, Varieties of Democracy, and the Economist Intelligence Unit inform us that in the past 15 years more countries have earned negative ratings on overall democracy scores compared to those that scored high in positive ratings. Net declines in scores have outnumbered net gains between 2006 and 2020. Less than half of the global population now lives under some sort of democracy. Countries that embarked on the democratic journey after the end of the Cold War have suffered the most. Citizens’ confidence in democracy is waning even in countries once considered “consolidated democracies.” Indications of deconsolidation of democracy in the United States and in European countries are discernible. This is the global phenomenon called democratic backsliding, defined by Nancy Bermeo (2016) as “the stateled debilitation or elimination of the political institutions sustaining an existing democracy.” Notwithstanding the particularities of the countries that experienced the process, scholars have pointed to the economy, particularly the decimation of the middle class, as the primary factor. This tentative conclusion, drawn from the experiences of the United States and Europe, is being projected as a universal lesson. The enduring political science theory that the middle class is the harbinger of democratic values is the basis of

  such an argument. Barrington Moore’s (1996) oft-quoted pronouncement “no bourgeois, no democracy” engendered the notion, supported by others, that economic growth will help create and strengthen the middle class who will spearhead and protect democracy. This lecture challenges this conventional explanation drawing on data from six countries of Asia, Africa and Europe, namely Bangladesh, Kenya, the Philippines, Poland, Tanzania, and Turkey, from 2005 through 2019. In the past decades as these countries experienced significant economic growth, measured by gross domestic product growth rate, they have also seen democratic erosion and a gradual slide toward authoritarianism, measured by Freedom House aggregate scores, scores on press freedom, and voice and accountability in governance, and rule of law. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, this lecture will argue that the rising new middle class, a product of neoliberal policies and lopsided globalization, has become the primary supporter of the undemocratic regimes of various shades. Recent political developments in these countries demonstrate that institutional changes in these countries do not portend well for the future.

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  Visualizing the Vacuum and Infinity

  Q. Charles Su

  In this presentation, Distinguished Professor Q. Charles Su examines how the concept of infinity helps us understand the intricate structure of the vacuum and what may cause the vacuum to break.

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  From Fire to Ice: The Geologic History of Illinois as Told Through Sand

  David Malone

  Sand is a commodity that impacts our lives in a great many ways. We enjoy it between our toes on a beach, yet we lament it when a wedge shot goes awry. Sand has many uses in our modern society, including abrasives, construction materials, hydraulic fracturing, and the making of glass. Many of Illinois’ sand deposits are important aquifers. Sand can be of many compositions and shapes and is transported by wind, water, and ice to distant sites of deposition, and with luck may be preserved as part of the geologic record. Thus, scientific observations of sand deposited at a particular place and time provide important clues about sedimentary provenance, ancient climates, weathering, sediment transport, paleogeography, and mountain building. Zircon is a mineral that is present in trace amounts in sand, and along with the ubiquitous quartz, is among the most valuable of the sand grains for scientific investigation. With the development of laser technologies and the refinement of mass spectrometry during the past 20 years, age determinations for large detrital zircon data sets are now possible. Zircon is the mineral of choice because it is durable both chemically and physically, is abundant in granitic magma, and captures much of the magma’s uranium as it crystallizes. Zircon is the perfect clock for deciphering Earth history. The sedimentary succession of Illinois ranges from a few thousand feet near Rockford to more than 10,000 feet in the deepest parts of the Illinois Basin near Mount Vernon. The basement rocks in Illinois consist of granite and rhyolite; they were formed over a billion years ago. These rocks were weathered and then cleaned off by the “Snowball Earth” glaciers 650-750 million years ago. The first succession of sand in Illinois was deposited beginning about 530 million years ago in rift

  basins formed during the breakup of the supercontinent Rodinia. These early Cambrian sands are locally sourced and short traveled. By late Cambrian time, the rift basins were filled, and the local basement was buried as a marine incursion inundated the continental interior. Late Cambrian and Ordovician sands in Illinois were generated at distal source areas to the north and east and were transported by a combination of wind and water. This “sand factory” produced some of the purest deposits at any time or anywhere on Earth. The second major sand-bearing succession in Illinois, which formed after the vast inland seas receded, was deposited during the Carboniferous Period (300-360 million years ago), and it is here that much of Illinois’ energy resources reside. The Carboniferous time was dominated by receding seas, the development of mountains in the Appalachian region as Pangea was assembled, and continental glaciation in Gondwana. Carboniferous sandstones are a mixture of grains that were recycled from older sandstone and newly unroofed granite that became exposed as the Appalachian Mountains were uplifted. These sands were transported to Illinois through river systems that rival the largest modern rivers and deposited in a series of deltas and estuaries that existed here at that time.

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  Marketing in a Digitally Transformed World

  Steven Taylor

  Taylor is an internationally recognized scholar of service marketing research. His presentation will examine how marketing theory and research have changed over the last two-and-a-half decades. The audience will also get a glimpse of Taylor’s contribution to this evolution. Taylor’s research interests focus on the conceptualization and operationalization of the determinants of service value, service quality, and consumer satisfaction, and their impacts on ultimate consumer purchase behaviors and organizational strategies. His most recent focus has been the extension of these inquiries to e-commerce and e-business settings. Taylor embraced a wider and multi-disciplinary approach to the study of service marketing by focusing on judgment and decision making and social psychology literature.