Ed Board was proud to see so many students attend the TateLecture Tuesday.
It does our collective hearts good to see people show an activeinterest in current events. Ed Board would love to see this levelof involvement continue throughout the rest of the Tate LectureSeries this year.
Even though Al Gore and Bob Dole are perhaps the most instantlyrecognizable names on this year’s Tate Lecture Seriesschedule, the other guest lecturers who will be speaking at SMU infuture months deserve equal consideration.
Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball and columnist forThe New York Times magazine and Bloomberg News, willbe here Oct. 19, presenting the Tolleson Lecture “Wall Streetand Baseball: Winning an Unfair Game.”
While Lewis may not be as famous as either Al Gore or Bob Dole,it doesn’t make what he has to say any less important.
Fame should never be a criterion when deciding whether or not toparticipate in an event specifically intended to educate andenlighten.
You may not know the name Fareed Zakaria. Zakaria is the editorof Newsweek International and will be at SMU Nov. 9, presenting theGregg and Molly Engles Lecture. His face may not be featured on thecover of magazines or newspapers, but that doesn’t mean thatwhat he has to say is any less interesting or educational.
The people who come to our school as a part of the Tate LectureSeries are our guests.
Ed Board thinks we did an outstanding job welcoming Gore andDole to our campus Tuesday.
Now we need to do it again for the rest of the lecture guests.They came all this way to speak to us, the least they deserve is afull house.
In related news, Ed Board was not particularly happy with theseating arrangements at Tuesday’s Tate Forum. So many of thegood seats were reserved for high school and community collegestudents that very few SMU students were able to get decentseats.
While Ed Board recognizes the fact that high school andcommunity college students have as much to gain from the forum aswe do, we find it unfortunate that students of the school hostingthe forum were deprived of the only good seats in the house.
Maybe in the future, some of the middle seats could be allocatedto SMU students, because Ed Board believes that being able toactually see the guests of honor is never a bad thing.
