At today’s teaching discussion meeting, the matter of last year’s student salon came up by chance. It was held three times and then no more. As for why it was stopped, ZW seemed to have said something about the reasons; I wasn’t paying close attention. But after I got back, I kept thinking about it, and I always felt it was a pity that the student salon had been discontinued.
From what Teacher Li said, the department still planned to provide support, which shows that the halt would not have been caused by obstacles from the department; the main issue was that the students no longer wanted to do it. Why not? Probably nothing more than too few participants.
The problem of too few participants can in turn be divided into two kinds: first, too few people willing to give the main talk; second, too few listeners.
If too few people were willing to be the main speaker, a large reason for that was probably that the strategy and positioning at the time were inappropriate. What I most hoped for then was to begin with a reading salon, inviting a few classmates each time to recommend several books to everyone, and then, once the salon gradually got onto a regular track, to hold a few individual lectures from time to time. But in the end, we still had to give the first talk ourselves, and before that there was even a big campaign of publicity, with the post pushed all the way onto the top ten. I said at the time that being pushed like that made me nervous, though that was secondary—I could handle it—but if it kept happening, it would certainly put pressure on future speakers. Beyond the three sessions originally planned, who would be willing to speak later on was anyone’s guess—and as it turned out, just as I said, no one really spoke afterward!
If it were up to me to plan it, we should not have started by looking for big shots (I can at least count as one, in any case; at least I look like one). Big shots are the kind of thing you keep in reserve; it would not be too late to bring them out once the salon had gotten onto a regular track. If, from the outset, several sessions in a row were all given by big shots, then sustainable development afterward would become a problem, and others might not dare to step up. Lowering the standard a bit at the beginning might not create much of a splash, but it would be beneficial for long-term development. Of course, if it were left to me, starting with a reading-recommendation salon would be best.
Even if it were not a reading-recommendation event but a lecture format instead, lowering the standard would still not make it hard to find speakers. In fact, many of the courses we took had requirements such as giving a personal report or a one-off PPT lecture. For example, when I took the course on paradox studies then, Mist and I each gave a one-class report; this semester Teacher Bobo called us back to give another talk to a new batch of students. This shows that the effect was still pretty good (Mist’s talk on Escher was especially wonderful); for example, Teacher Yang’s studies of globalization and ontology also required each person to speak once; and courses like philosophy of mind required group reports, and so on. There certainly is no shortage of resources for these talks and reports! It would also be good to find those classmates who did well in class and have them speak to more classmates; it would not require much extra preparation either. Or else find students in their graduating year to do a thesis “defense,” which would be good practice as well.
In short, the resources for speakers should not be lacking. As long as the requirements are lowered and talent is tapped more often in daily life, that should do it. If the department can provide some support and give speakers a little reward, that would of course be even better. The more the salon gets onto a regular track, the easier it will be to find speakers.
So, is the problem that there are too few listeners? Then how many listeners count as enough? Judging from the few salons held back then, there were definitely not too few listeners. For example, the one I gave probably had ten or twenty people, right? For the scary topic I spoke on—EPR—that many listeners was quite rare already (I was only a little disappointed that there were too few male students who came). The session ZW gave also had quite a lot of people, and the one given by Senior Brother Haha—I missed it because I happened to be in a daze at the time—but thinking back, it couldn’t have had too few either. No matter how you look at it, it surely wouldn’t have been fewer than three or five people, would it?
For undergraduates to run an academic salon, even if only three or five people come to listen, that is by no means too few—if each session can reliably have three or five listeners, that would already be meaningful enough! If the average can be around ten listeners, then it would be very successful indeed! That “Keke Forum” run by the Keke teaching-and-research office in our department is only about that big anyway!
The Keke Forum originally opened very discreetly. Up to now, all it amounts to is posting a news item on the Keke homepage and the philosophy department homepage each time, and each session’s audience is only a dozen or so; when attendance is low, it is said to be only five. But Teacher Wu said that the forum’s value lies in persistence. Indeed, once a pattern is formed and it is maintained as a regular weekly practice, the forum’s influence will naturally expand, without needing publicity efforts whose effect is limited to the moment.
Some other academic forums also often have very few listeners; some classes opened by teachers are still taught even if only two or three people come to hear them. Teachers do not mind having few people, so why should we students’ salon set the bar so high? As long as someone gives a talk and someone listens, that is enough. The value of the student salon does not lie in how successful any single session or a few sessions happen to be; the greatest success is to keep it going.
Since it was held three times, that shows the student salon was by no means a pipe dream. Could the future student union bring the salon back again? If we are going to do it, we should strive not to do it “too well,” but instead strive for sustainable development, so that the salon can continue as a regular, habitual activity even after the student union changes over. This would surely be a great good deed.
2007-04-17 22:12
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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