Yep, the speaker committees on private college campuses are way OT for this thread. There is a long story and a short story about my old campus. Let's see if I can give the short one. The concept we tried to work with was to push the speaker invitation concept as far down the chain as possible. Put a bit of money in department hands, in student hands, in program hands, and keep as little centralized as possible. You need the latter for those very expensive folk. So there were multiple speaker committees.
If a group had a budget for speakers and wished to invite someone, they could do so. I would guess, though it never happened during my time, at least not publicly, that some invitations would be frowned upon, perhaps rejected---KKK types and the like. But the aim was to spread it as broadly as possible.
The only effective censorship was that of the purse, on two levels. If a group wished to invite someone but lacked the budget, someone from the group had to dig around for the money. Those with could then say whether they would be willing to let their budget be used for that person. The second level were to the two or three centralized budgets--the President had one, there was a faculty one that was campus wide, and there was a student one. Those were meant for expensive types and had committees to deal with issues at that level.
I have no idea how this generalizes to public campuses. I would guess the issues are quite different because the money public, taxpayers money.
Complicated. |
