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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.)
On CNN yesterday, former GOP Congressman Tom Tancredo said that the National Council of La Raza, the Latino civil rights organization of which Judge Sonia Sotomayor is a member, is “a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses.” His evidence?
The logo of La Raza is ‘All for the race. Nothing for the rest.’
One big problem with that. The motto of the National Council of La Raza is “Strengthening America by promoting the advancement of Latino families.” (Their logo, if anyone’s wondering, can be seen in this photo of John McCain’s speech to their 2008 national convention.)
Oops.
The phrase Tancredo had in mind, “Por La Raza todo, fuera de La Raza nada,” appears in a 1969 poem/manifesto associated with the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), a Chicano student activist group.
MEChA is a loose federation of campus-based student organizations, some more radical than others. California politician Cruz Bustamente was a MEChA member as an undergraduate at Fresno State University in the 1970s, and he got in hot water with conservatives during his 2003 campaign for governor for refusing to repudiate the group.
MEChA and NCLR could hardly be more different.
In a 2002 interview Judge Sonia Sotomayor said that she felt “isolated … and very unsure about how I would survive” as an undergraduate at Princeton, and that campus organizations for students of color “provided me with an anchor I needed to ground myself in that new and different world.”
Sotomayor grew up poor in the Bronx, and she discovered in her first semester at Princeton that her educational background “was not on par with that of many of my classmates.” She became involved in Accion Puertorriquena, a Puerto Rican student organization, and the campus’s Third World Center, and she credits “the third-world students who preceded me and those who had supported me while I was at Princeton” for helping her to thrive on campus.
The complete article, from Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education, is not online, but extended excerpts can be found here.
May 29 update: I look at former Congressman Tom Tancredo’s charge that Sotomayor is part of a “Latino KKK” here.
With the announcement this morning that Obama will nominate Judge Sonia Sotomayor to fill David Souter’s seat on the Supreme Court, conservative critics have pounced on comments Sotomayor made about ethnicity, gender, and judging seven years ago.
In a lecture given at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law in 2002, Sotomayor said this:
I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.
I have a hunch that we’re all going to be seeing a lot of this quote in the next few weeks, so let’s take a look at it in context.
Sotomayor’s comment was framed as a response to something Justice Sandra O’Connor had said about the role of gender in the law. A wise old man and a wise old woman, O’Connor had argued, would reach the same decisions in deciding cases.
But Sotomayor wasn’t so sure.
Wise men, she said, sometimes have blind spots. Wise men like Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Benjamin Cardozo had ruled that sex and race discrimination were constitutional, after all, and they did so as members of an all-white, all-male Supreme Court. (As Jeffrey Toobin noted on CNN after Sotomayor’s nomination, 107 of America’s 111 Supreme Court justices have been white men.)
Does this mean that white men can’t understand the perspectives of women and people of color? No. They can, Sotomayor said, and do. But “to understand takes time and effort,” and not everyone is willing and able to make that investment. “Hence, one must accept the proposition that … the presence of women and people of color on the bench” will make a difference in the decisions rendered.
If you believe that perfect objectivity is a goal that judges can and should strive to meet, then you may disagree with Sotomayor’s argument. But perfect objectivity is not Sotomayor’s goal — in that same speech she quoted Harvard Law professor Martha Minnow as saying that “there is no objective stance” available to a judge, “only a series of perspectives. No neutrality, no escape from choice.”
At the same time, she said, “I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives. … I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences.”
I’m a little nervous about Sotomayor’s position on students’ rights, as I noted a couple of weeks ago. But there’s a lot to like in this appointment.
studentactivism.net 
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