Nobel Peace Prize winner and former president of Costa Rica Oscar Arias kicks off the Fall 2000 President's Lecture Series Sept. 21.

Arias will deliver the Raoul Wallenberg Humanitarian Lecture, titled "The Struggle for Peace in the New Millennium." He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1987 for his work to end political violence in Central America and has since become an international spokesman for peace.

Other speakers in the series include:

-Oct. 5 - Ernest Gaines, author of "A Lesson Before Dying," a 1993 book about his native Louisiana, and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. His talk is titled "Gaines on Gaines."

-Nov. 9 - Conservative legal scholar Dwight G. Duncan and New England School of Law associate professor Richard D. Mohr will discuss "Who Should Be Allowed to Marry: The Same-Sex Marriage Debate." Duncan was the principal co-author of the Supreme Court briefs in the 1995 case of a veterans' group forced to include a gay contingent in its annual St. Patrick's Day Parade. Mohr is the author of "A More Perfect Union: Why Straight America Must Stand Up for Gay Rights" (1995).

-Nov. 30 - Michael Wood, producer and host of the PBS television series "In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great," will discuss "The Conquistadors 500 Years On: Perceptions of the Victors and the Vanquished" for the Distinguished Presidential Lecture in History.