About Professor Lawrence Blum
Lawrence Blum is Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Education and Professor of Philosophy. His scholarly interests are in race theory, moral philosophy, moral psychology, moral education, multiculturalism, social and political philosophy, philosophy of education, the philosophy of Simone Weil, and, more recently, philosophy and the Holocaust, and ethics and race in film. He has taught at UMass-Boston since 1973, and has been a visiting professor at UCLA (in Philosophy), Stanford (in Education), and Teachers College, Columbia (in Education).
Professor Blum is the author of a forthcoming book, High Schools, Race, and America’s Future: What Students Can Teach Us About Morality, Diversity, and Community, to be published by Harvard Education Press in early September. The book is based on a course on Race & Racism he taught at his local high school to a racially and ethnically diverse class of seniors.
Blum has written four books: “I’m Not a Racist, But”: The Moral Quandary of Race (Cornell UP, 2002) (which was selected Best Book of the year in social philosophy by the North American Society for Social Philosophy); Moral Perception and Particularity (Cambridge UP, 1994); A Truer Liberty: Simone Weil and Marxism (co-author: V.J. Seidler) (Routledge, 1989); Friendship, Altruism, and Morality (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980).
Most of Professor Blum's teaching is in Philosophy, where his courses are Moral and Social Problems, Philosophy, "Race", and Multiculturalism, Philosophy and the Holocaust, Egoism and Altruism, and Race and Racism. He teaches a course on Philosophy and the Holocaust in the Honors Program. He also teaches a course in Education and the Critical and Creative Thinking Program, Issues and Controversies in Antiracist and Multicultural Education. He is very interested in race and K-12 education and on four occasions taught a course on race and racism to a racially mixed class of seniors at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School (which his three children attended), and has written and published on this class.
Blum is married to the historian and film scholar, Judy Smith, who is the Director of the Masters Program in American Studies at UMass-Boston.