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There’s a good short post up at the law blog The Volokh Conspiracy on the do’s and don’ts of bringing a speaker to campus. (It’s intended for Federalist Society clubs, but most of the advice is universal.)
Here’s the meat of it:
Debates seem to get more of a turnout than lectures.
If you can’t set up a head-to-head debate, set up a two-person panel, or a talk-plus-commentary.
Events that involve a local professor — a debate, a panel, or even the professor’s just introducing a guest speaker — will probably get more of a turnout.
Publicize, publicize, publicize, using all the tools at your disposal — e-mail, flyers in mailboxes, postings on bulletin boards, postings on class chalkboards, if your school allows that, and whatever else you can think of.
For topics, the usual sexy ones are good: affirmative action, gun control, abortion, church-state separation, campaign finance, and the like. Other topics can work as well, especially if you can find a well-known visitor. But generally speaking the old standards work well.
If you want to bring in a relatively prominent speaker from out of town, offer to coordinate with other chapters in your city, so that the speaker can give several talks on one trip.
Provide lunch — the better, the better.
June 4 update: Although it wasn’t the point of this post, I should probably mention that I’m available for campus speaking engagements myself.
A tongue-in-cheek call for a campus club to “advocate for men in the same manner that female groups advocate for women” has resulted in the formation of a men’s advocacy organization at the University of Chicago.
Back in March, UC junior Steve Saltarelli wrote an op-ed in the Chicago Maroon announcing the creation of Men in Power, a new student group founded “to spread awareness and promote understanding of issues and challenges facing men today.” Proposing “a tutorial on barbecuing” and “fishing, hunting, and flag-football retreats” as club activities, Saltarelli soon started receiving emails from men looking to join.
So he set it up. MiP applied for official campus recognition and funding, and held its first meeting in mid-May.
The Chicago Tribune had no trouble finding men’s rights activists to cheer the group’s creation and feminists to deplore it, but it remains unclear just how serious Saltarelli is. His Maroon op-ed was an obvious spoof — “many don’t realize that men are in power all around us,” he noted, pointing out that “the last 44 presidents have been men.” But if the club itself is a hoax, it’s a subtle one, as interviews like this one make clear.
That said, the club is clearly uncomfortable with the charges of misogyny (and douchebaggery) that are directed its way. Its Facebook group and website each include a prominent notice that those “looking for a (white) male champion group that seeks to advance men at the expense of women and/or a clique to isolate yourselves … are in the wrong place.”
Links posted at the group’s Twitter feed make clear that it’s garnering quite a bit of media attention, but its first meeting drew fewer than twenty attendees. If it exists as a functioning campus group a year from now, I’ll be more than a little surprised.
Update: Okay, here’s my hunch. Saltarelli wrote the original Maroon piece as a not-feminist-but-not-antifeminist-either goof. He wasn’t serious about creating the group. But then he started getting attention, and he liked the attention, so he decided to go for it. And then he started getting a lot of attention, and a lot of questions he’d never really contemplated, and he had to start figuring out how to answer them. And now he, and the rest of the group, are trying to come up with a serious rationale for a project that didn’t start out serious, and negotiating some heavy gender politics that they don’t have a lot of tools to address.
(There are a lot of parallels here to the Veterans of Future Wars craze of 1936. I should really get some of the stuff I’ve written about those folks up online.)
I’m going to be speaking at a media conference at Hunter College this Saturday, as part of a panel called “Media for Student Activism: Building Networks, Building Movements.”
The NYC Grassroots Media Conference will feature more than forty panels in four sessions, on subjects ranging from managing online communities to queer youth media. It’s going to be an amazing conference, and student registration is only fifteen bucks!
I’m really excited about our panel too. It’s called Media for Student Activism: Building Networks, Building Movements, and I’ll be talking about Twitter and blogs. We’ve also got a documentarian, a Labor Studies prof, and two undergraduate student activists on board, each of whom will be bringing something of their own to the group.
More on the panel (and the conference) later this week.
The Chronicle is reporting on the fake Twitter accounts of two university presidents. (Both universities have asked Twitter to suspend the accounts, so check them out now if you’re interested.)
@JackDeGioia is supposedly the Twitter feed of Georgetown’s chief. It consists largely of topical jokes on campus events that also involve sloppy joes. But there are some pokes at how the university is run…
Had to give an honorary degree to my son today so he would take a bath. Really embarrassing. Had to do it in front of the whole faculty. 1:50 AM May 12th
Student asked me today to take action on the chicken madness. Nope. As soon as you take a student suggestion, the university’s about them. 8:15 PM May 13th
…as well as moments of more random humor:
So much human contact. So much. Thousands of beautiful hands touching mine. But now I have to wait a whole year again. 1:40 PM May 17th
In Rome. When in Rome, do what they tell you to do. The Romans, that is, or anybody who ever tells you to do something. about 3 hours ago
The @WilliamPowersJr account, which pretends to be that of the president of the University of Texas, relies heavily on puns on Powers’ last name. There are also, as on DeGioia’s account, occasional gentle jokes about him being a doofus:
I’m hosting Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi the AT&T Executive Center at 7 tonight. Hoping they don’t make me give a speech. 11:25 AM Apr 27th
Dreading going into work tomorrow, but those diplomas aren’t going to sign themselves… 1:45 PM May 17th
We really need a toaster in this office…or a microwave…whatever makes hot pockets, because I’m famished. 12:41 PM May 18th
The fake DeGioia is Jack Stuef, a Georgetown undergraduate who edits a campus humor magazine. The fake Powers is so far anonymous.
Friday update: Powers account has been suspended. The DeGioia is still up.
Before he was a movie critic, Roger Ebert was a student journalist. He wrote for the University of Illinois Daily Illini as an undergraduate, serving as the paper’s editor in his senior year.
Ebert also served a term as president of the United States Student Press Association, a national association of student newspaper editors affiliated with the National Student Association that supported campus media and advocated for student press freedom. As president of the USSPA, Ebert was invited to the White House reception at which the above photograph was taken.
March 18 update | Hello, Roger Ebert twitter-followers! To answer Roger’s questions, I found the above photo, I found it in the US National Student Association archives in Madison, Wisconsin, and I discovered it in the course of researching my dissertation on the Association. I’m heading off to teach right now, but I’ll post more details later. In the meantime, feel free to poke around. (If you want an update when I post more, you can follow me on Twitter at @studentactivism.)
March 19 update | I can’t seem to put my hands on the original of the photo right now, but it comes from a USNSA newsletter of some kind, probably the NSA News. The National Student Association was a generally liberal confederation of student governments that served as one of the incubators of sixties radicalism — many of the early leaders of Students for a Democratic Society met each other at NSA conferences, for instance, and NSA gave crucial early funding and support to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. (Until 1967 NSA itself received gobs of secret cash from the CIA, which made extensive and varied use of its international operations.)
One thing I love about the photo is how perfectly it situates Roger in the history of student organizing. It, like Ebert’s work as an advocate for student press freedoms, is emphatically of the sixties — what with him being flanked by LBJ’s wife and daughter and all. But its buttoned-up, stilted formality isn’t remotely of The Sixties. That Sixties, the Sixties of popular myth, lasted maybe four or five years, but it grew out of an earlier, murkier era — the era of Mad Men and the Free Speech Movement and Freedom Summer, an era in which a student activist who clambered up onto a police car to make a speech would take his shoes off first, to avoid doing any damage. It’s a historical moment that I’m fascinated by and more than a little smitten with, and it’s a moment that this photo captures beautifully.
Oh, yeah — I do have one more piece of trivia about Roger and the NSA. As he himself wrote in a blog post a couple of months ago, it was at the Association’s 1964 summer Congress, just five months after this photo was taken, that Roger Ebert “experienced the joy of intercourse with a female undergraduate for the first time.”
Go read that post, by the way. It’s a lovely one.
studentactivism.net 
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