Minority lectures canceled because of low attendance

By Jocelyn Wright     10/23/08 7:00pm

Noted theoretical physicist Sylvester James Gates, Jr.'s speech last Wednesday marked the end of the President's Lecture Series of Diverse Scholars. Computational and Applied Mathematics Professor Richard Tapia, who started the series five years ago, decided to discontinue the lectures due to poor attendance. The lecture series specifically invited African-American, Hispanic and Native American scholars born and raised in the United States to speak. Tapia said he started the series because, at the time of its founding, the original President's Lecture Series had never featured a historically underrepresented minority. In addition to Gates, over the past five years the series has attracted Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sonia Nazario; Brown University President Ruth Simmons, the first black president of an ivy league university; and physicist Arlie Petters, a Belizean- American famous for his work in gravitational lensing.

Tapia said he would continue to ensure diverse speakers would be brought to campus by adding a Martin Luther King, Jr. lecturer and a Caesar Chavez lecturer, a African-American and Hispanic lecturer, respectively, to speak annually as part of the regular President's Lecture Series.

Tapia said he was very pleased with the quality of speakers the Diverse Scholars series attracted but disappointed by the lack of attendance to all of the lectures except for Gates's.

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"We saw a good amount of alums and especially older alums who tend to go to these talks a lot, and they would carry it," Tapia said. "But we saw very few students, very few staff and very few faculty. At some of the lectures, I was almost to the point of being embarrassed."

Although he was not sure how the attendance to the lecture series compared to that of other lecture series, Tapia said the series did draw fewer people than the regular President's Lecture Series.

Tapia said he began seriously considering discontinuing the lecture series after Nazario's lecture Mar. 13, on the Thursday of Willy Week, which drew a very small audience. In addition to the lecture, Tapia had organized a discussion session for students to meet with Nazario to ask her questions. Of the 200 students in his computational and applied mathematics class Tapia invited to meet with Nazario, only two showed up.

"That's when I said, 'Maybe I'm trying to push uphill or trying to put a square peg in a round hole,'" Tapia said.

Josef Sifuentes, a CAAM graduate student who has worked closely with Tapia since the series began, said he thought the lack of attendance was due to a combination of poor publicity and an apathetic attitude among students towards lectures. Sifuentes, who was also an undergraduate student at Rice, said the best way to get more students to participate was through increased advertising.

Sifuentes said the effectiveness of this strategy can be seen in the huge attendance to Gates's lecture, which he publicized intensely to minority groups around campus.

"I told [the Hispanic Association for Cultural Enrichment at Rice], the BSA [Black Student Association], the CSA [Chinese Student Association], Alliance and minority groups that if we really are going to insist on being taken seriously about increasing representation of people like us, we have to support these kinds of events," Sifuentes said.

Tapia also sent out an e-mail to students, faculty and staff urging them to attend Gates's lecture.

Sifuentes said he hoped Tapia reevaluated why the lecture series had not drawn a lot of students in the past.

"Dr. Tapia is a great professor, but sometimes I wish he would consider what mistakes were made on his end and not just on the students' end," Sifuentes said. "We did a really good job of publicizing the last talk with Sylvester James Gates by getting undergrads involved and getting the word out."

Tapia said part of the problem with attendance was that Rice students were much less likely to attend a lecture by someone who wasn't a household name.

"On Wednesday, I decided if I get a speaker that's a household name, students will come," Tapia said. "But if it's questionable, then it's much harder to sell."

Tapia said his decision to end the lecture series is not set in stone, and he is waiting to see what kind of feedback he gets.

"It's something I had to ask," Tapia said. "I worked so hard on this, and I wonder if it's really helping Rice. It's not that I need to do this but I want to do this to make Rice a better place."

Sifuentes said Tapia had begun to reevaluate his decision to cancel the series after the success of Gates's lecture.

"With very rigorous publicity, we can save the series," Sifuentes said. "We saw evidence of that with Dr. Gates, and I think Dr. Tapia believes this and that's why he's hesitant to say his decision is set in stone.

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