Academy Award Winning Actor Richard Dreyfuss Speaks at BHCC

Academy Award Winning Actor Richard Dreyfuss Speaks at BHCC

BOSTON, Feb. 1 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Richard Dreyfuss, Academy Award winning actor and social activist spoke to an overflow crowd at Bunker Hill Community College on Tuesday in a lecture that addressed everything from his opinions on the Middle East conflict to his feelings on God to his assertion that there's a need for civic engagement, during his lecture as part of the College's Compelling Conversations Speaker Series.

Dreyfuss, who received a standing ovation after his talk, said that he was going to "take advantage of the word conversation in the program's title" by stepping outside the traditional lecture format to involve the crowd of more than 500 spectators in a dialogue about current issues. "Your questions and answers will be far more interesting than the talk I had prepared," he said.

In response to a question from a student, Dreyfuss talked about his acting as the host for the launch of the Geneva Accords in 2003. From that experience, and from his own attempts to bring political leaders together to come to a solution to the conflict in the Middle East, Dreyfuss said that forgiveness was the only way to peace in that region. "There might be an answer to the problem in the Middle East when we understand the word 'forgiveness,'" he said. "There is no original sin in this situation. There is no beginning to it, no villainy that stands out first. It is not a situation where you can say where or when it began. In the interest of solving the problem, and not of winning, you have to learn to forgive."

Born Jewish, Dreyfuss shared his thoughts on religion, "I don't know about God. I do know that a life that is led asking questions about God and questions about what is mysterious in the universe is a prettier life than the life that does not ask those questions. I also know that so far at least, we've never come up with any answers that are big enough and so I remain a secular agnostic with a large curiosity."

Dreyfuss also discussed the importance of teaching civics in schools as a means for bringing about better citizenship and understanding of the Constitution's role in American society. "Do you celebrate the Constitution as a done deal or as a process?" he asked. "If we can approach it as something we are responsible to everyday, we might get out of the mess we are in. Being a part of an American Democracy is a daily effort. These things are complex and they require expertise. Teaching civics is taking the greatest idea in the history of the governance of mankind and making it real."

Bunker Hill Community College is the largest community college in Massachusetts. The College enrolls more than 8,300 students on two campuses and at five satellite locations each semester. More than 1,700 students take classes online. BHCC is one of the most diverse institutions of higher education in the Commonwealth. Six in ten students are people of color and more than half of BHCC's students are women. The College also enrolls more than 600 international students who come from more than 95 countries and speak more than 75 different languages.

Source: Bunker Hill Community College

CONTACT: Carolyn Assa of Bunker Hill Community College, +1-617-228-2177

Web site: http://www.bhcc.mass.edu/

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