April 24: Lunchtime Talk

[kinetic_elaboration]

I lost the second half of today to various Events, which is fine. I went to a lunchtime talk–no actual lunch, at least for me–and then a staff birthday party where we mostly talked about various experiences in middle school history class and then specifically gym. Then I stopped in at a farewell event for a professor who’s leaving for a better job. Then it was time to go home.

The lunch event was interesting. I’m glad I went, but I have some mixed feelings about it. It was a panel of 7 professors (and a moderator) talking about T/rump’s first 100 days, which is an interesting topic obviously, and I felt like it would be a bit hypocritical of me not to go. It was immediately obvious the audience would not fit in the designated classroom so it moved one over to one of the biggest classrooms in the building and we still needed extra chairs.

I think…. the problem was that the panel was too large for the allotted time of the event, which was one lunch period. Seven people got to speak for four minutes on their designated topics, that’s already 21 minutes, more when you consider that people do go over etc., and then you get to the questions but your time is halfway gone.

But you can’t do anything with four minutes, especially on such big topics as these. So some of them dealt with it by speaking really fast, some by being very cursory about a large number of subtopics, some by being slightly less cursory about a smaller number of topics, some by just rambling. Some combined strategies. It was just a LOT.

I’m pretty sure one person was only there to be, ironically, a diversity inclusion, because he’s right-leaning. Well, more than leaning. But he was talking about the economy, which someone else covered. Another person (unfortunately, the organizer) kind of just rambled. So it could have easily been five people. But even then it should have been five people and a solid 90 minutes, maybe 2 hours long. Another way of doing it might have been to JUST do substantive issues: immigration, the economy/tariffs, and 1st Amendment issues. Procedural stuff is important too but it’s so much harder to summarize. Or you could do 1 person on APA-related stuff instead of 2.

I think this is the sort of panel where the questions are really the most important thing: for me, I wanted to see what law students were interested in; but also, this audience must be presumed to be, you know, decently up on what’s happening, so information summarizing maybe isn’t the most important thing (this is not me saying I didn’t learn anything). On the other hand… q&a’s always leave me dazed. I never fully understand either the q or the a. And it’s a crapshoot if you’re going to get something interesting and well-thought out or something kind of obvious I could have answered myself. So maybe a better format would have been to have questions submitted beforehand and the moderator could have chosen like the 5 best or something of that nature.

Anyway. Overstuffed as it was, it was worth going to. I could have stood to not have to listen to right wing bullshit, like that’s a drain on my time. And as always the law/legal community suffers often from this… film between it and anything Real. But there’s also something satisfying and even soothing about listening to people talk as experts. Yes we live in a world of complexity. I am sooooo tired of pretending we do not.