Author and guest speaker Tara Westover, center, with UCSB Arts & Lectures ambassador Meg Burnham and Arts & Lectures Council member Dan Burnham at The Granada Theatre in Santa Barbara during A&L’s opening night reception for its 2019-2020 season. 
Event sponsors Diana and Simon Raab. 
Supporters Luci and Richard Janssen. 
Arts & Lectures Leadership Circle member Mary Becker, left, A&L associate director Roman Baratiak and A&L Producer Circle member Jane Eagleton. 
A view of the sold-out crowd streaming into the lecture at The Granada Theatre. 
Author Tara Westover answers questions. 
UCSB Arts & Lectures Miller McCune executive director Celesta Billeci speaks at the pre-lecture dinner. 
Arts & Lectures Leadership Circle members Susan and Bruce Worster. 
An autumn-hued floral centerpiece. 
The Granada Theatre marquee.
Author and guest speaker Tara Westover was presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures in association with the UCSB Writing Program at a festive season opening night reception and dinner Oct. 1 in the Founder’s Room at The Granada Theatre. The Westover lecture sold out the 1,500-seat venue.
The event sponsors were Diana and Simon Raab. UCSB Arts & Lectures also acknowledged its 2019-2020 Community Partners, the Natalie Orfalea Foundation and Lou Buglioli, and its Corporate Season Sponsor, SAGE Publishing.
Dubbed as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People of 2019, Westover grew up in rural Idaho in a radical, survivalist family with no birth certificate, no medical care and no formal schooling. At age 17, she decided to educate herself, escaping her family to eventually earn a doctorate from the University of Cambridge.
“I learned good things from my family and also not so good things from my family,” she told the pre-lecture dinner audience.
Westover said her Mormon parents were opposed to public education. As a result, she never attended school and spent her days working in her father’s junkyard or stewing herbs for her mother.
However, her brother, Tyler, exposed her to opera music, which led her to a love of singing and an interest in history. She taught herself algebra at a young age.
As a young woman, her thirst for knowledge moved her to break ties from an early life of hardship and brutality. From her unique experience, she explored the tension between loyalty to one’s family and loyalty to oneself, and she told a universal story about the transformative power of education.
Westover said she taught herself enough mathematics, grammar and science to take the ACT exam and was accepted at Brigham Young University. At age 17, she set foot for the first time in a classroom and continued learning for a decade. At BYU, she learned for the first time about the Holocaust, the U.S. civil rights movement and other historical events.
Ultimately, she graduated magna cum laude from BYU in 2008 and subsequently garnered a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. She earned a master’s degree in philosophy from Trinity College at Cambridge in 2009, and in 2010, she was a visiting fellow at Harvard University. She returned to Cambridge, where she earned a Ph.D. in history in 2014.
Her bestselling book, Educated, is a story that gets to the heart of what education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one’s life through new eyes and the will to change it. Westover argues that education is not just about job training, but a powerful tool of self-invention.
UCSB Arts & Lectures’ 2019-2020 series kicked off with the Westover lecture. Special supporters enjoyed an intimate social hour upstairs in The Granada’s Founder’s Room followed by a gourmet dinner prepared by chef Kay Bowman. Guests also enjoyed a selection of Potek wines. After a short talk, Westover answered a variety of questions by the assembled guests before her public address at the sold-out theater.
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— Noozhawk contributing writer Rochelle Rose can be reached at rrose@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkSociety, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Become a fan of Noozhawk on Facebook.