Publicize Events Better

In case you happened to miss it (which is almost certainly the case – I saw in total no more than a dozen undergraduate students at the three lectures I attended) Boston College's Institute for the Liberal Arts sponsored a symposium about the importance of the natural and social sciences to a liberal arts curriculum. For my money, the symposium proved to be the most interesting and worthwhile event that the school has hosted during my six-plus semesters here. It's unfortunate that so many people missed it.

Since attending Elizabeth Kolbert's talk at 9 a.m. was so obviously out of the question, I began my day by waking up and immediately heading to Steven Pinker's lecture on the history of violence titled, "The Better Angels of Our Nature." If you had read any of his works, of which The Blank Slate is my favorite, you would have expected Pinker to be incredibly intelligent, articulate, and witty. And your expectations would have been sublimely fulfilled, as Pinker captivated a packed Heights Room for nearly an hour and a half. He presented material from his new book – also titled The Better Angels of Our Nature – in which he claims that despite Sept. 11, the Iraq War, and Darfur, we are living in the most peaceful era in the history of the human species. I won't reproduce his argument here, as you can always pick up the book in stores.

Next came Siva Vaidyanathan, who unfortunately was done the great disservice of being asked to speak after Pinker. I had never heard of Vaidyanathan prior to Saturday, but apparently other people knew something I didn't, as the room was conspicuously half-empty when it was his turn to speak. He lectured about the science as a way of thinking rather than simply as a fixed dead body of knowledge, emphasizing the importance of being able to think and see with the same critical eye that scientists do every day when they go to work. I found myself a bit disinterested at times while he spoke about information sharing and "the technocultural imagination," but all in all it was worth my while.

Last came Brian Greene, who gave a riveting talk about science, physics, and a subcategory of theoretical physics he has been working on called string theory. Unfortunately, I had heard it all before when I watched The Elegant Universe, a science program hosted and narrated by Greene, in my high school physics class, but for Greene-neophytes it would have been great.

He made himself seem like a fool at the end though, when he tastelessly prevented physics professor Jan Engelbrecht from asking a tough question that would have put him on the spot.

I applaud the Institute for the Liberal Arts for hosting the symposium and hope to see similar events in the future. Whoever is in charge of publicizing these events ought to do a better job, as no one I spoke to had heard anything about it. Job well done though, BC. I almost forgot about that Fall Concert cancellation.