Speakers at colleges

Not long ago I was watching a talk given by Weijian Shan -- who wrote Out of the Gobi, about which I have cooed -- at Berkeley, where he got his PhD. Early in the talk he comments about how honored he was that students were there at his talk: "when I was at university I would have been studying," he said, or somesuch.

Me too. When I was in both college and grad school I pretty much went and heard speakers who were directly related to what I was studying. In college I recall in particular going to see the poets Voznesensky and Evtushenko and the novelist Bitov and probably a few more like that. Plus some sexy theorist types. In grad school it was pretty much the same.

Which is a shame, because in fact going to hear people speak about what they do and think about is one of the best ways to open one's mind up about other ways of approaching the world, particularly if they are good speakers. Listening to speakers rocks because it demands little of the listener, you just sit there and listen, and drift off if you feel like it. The dynamism of the speaker draws you back to what she was saying. Or, if it doesn't, it's because she's not worth listening to and you get a little time off to chill or kvetch.

At one level, this is just another instance of a theme I have returned to over the years in this blog, the importance of finding a balance in one's life between focus and breadth. If you don't have some focus, you can easily become useless and indistinguishable from the next goon. But if you don't have any breadth, you're just a glorified screwdriver, and nobody will be able to find you to make use of you.

For institutions of higher learning, this suggests a few things:

• Why aren't there central listings of speakers coming in to universities? Maybe there are. There could be a central bulletin board. Even better, an XML standard or RSS-type thing that everybody would put their speaker listings into. The data would have tags so that people could turn filters on and off as they liked.
• Why not offer students credit for going to hear different speakers? Say, half a credit per semester if they attend 12 different lectures sread across distribution requirements, validate their presence with geolocation using phones or a sign in on an iPad (or QR reader), and then have the students write reflections on what they heard. Even better, force the students to contribute a certain number of words/posts to a moderated Wiki/Talmudesque thingie for each speaker. That would be fun.
  
  This would be a great requirement for frosh.