By MICHAEL BÉRUBÉ
In my first year as a humanities director, at the University of Illinois, I invited a well-known filmmaker to the campus. Her agent’s response came over the fax a few days later, with a list of necessaries: so much per day, first-class air travel, four-star accommodations or better. “Well,” I said to my associate director, “if you’ll float the bond issue, I’ll hire the subcontractors -- we haven’t got a four-star hotel in Champaign.” For that matter, we didn’t have first-class air travel, either.
It turned out that the filmmaker in question was a gracious and generous woman. Her tiny turboprop arrived from St. Louis more than an hour late, and she got to her some-star hotel at 11 p.m. Having flown in from Los Angeles, she inquired at the desk as to whether the restaurant was still serving. Yes and no, she was told: The kitchen was open until 11:30, but she would have to call from her room for room service. All very well -- except that the room into which she had been booked turned out to be occupied.
She told me that story the next morning, quite lightheartedly, almost as if she were simply adding a comic chapter to her personal Travails of Travel. And what could I do? I shambled as best I could: “They did ask me whether you wanted a smoking or nonsmoking roombut they didn’t ask about occupied and nonoccupied.”
Where did I learn such silly banter? At the Catskills in the late 1950s, working two shows a night behind Shecky Greene? Actually, I learned it in my own travels and travails as a guest speaker and host -- like my journey some years ago to one of Pennsylvania’s small, excellent liberal-arts colleges. An undergraduate aide had apparently done the booking, which explains why I had to hail a cab from the airport at 8 p.m. to take me to a Godforsaken Hampton Inn 20 miles west of the campus -- indeed, 20 miles west of any human habitation.
Hampton Inns, as every business traveler knows, are basically upscale motels: free “continental” breakfast, but no restaurant; coin-op laundry; indoor pool; “fitness” room consisting of a stationary bike and a treadmill. Disdaining the options for dial-up dinners from local pizza-and-grinders establishments, I boldly set out on foot across the thigh-high grass of the corporate park into which I had been deposited, passing a Keebler’s cookie factory. Clambering over the concrete divider to the road, I realized that I had only two options within hailing distance, Burger King and Gyro King. I chose the local king.
The next morning, the faculty members who were supposed to take me to brunch could not find me -- not because I had gotten lost in the corporate park or kidnapped by cookie-baking elves, but because no invited speaker had ever been put up in that Hampton Inn before. When, at last, I was found, there were profuse apologies. “It’s perfectly all right,” I said. “But if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, I really would like to stay someplace closer to campus.” Within an hour I was transferred to a gorgeous, rambling old hotel, where the desk clerk said, “Smoking or nonsmoking?” When I replied nonsmoking, he really did follow with, “Occupied or nonoccupied?” -- waiting a crucial half-beat before dryly adding, “Kidding, of course.”
I promise myself that I will never become the Guest from Hell, partly because I’ve played host to two or three of those in my life, and it’s just astonishing how much trouble and nonsensical work they can cause. The guest who rebooks his own flight at the last minute, bumping his fare from $350 to $1,200; the guest who fails to turn up for dinner; the guest who’s too hung over to make the informal coffee get-together at midmorning. It’s hard enough to schedule a good campus visit in most college towns, threading your guest through the hubs and spokes of the American air-travel system, checking to make sure there are no home football games or other major cultural events that will fill the local hotels, double-checking with the desultory and erratic taxi service, watching for dietary restrictions, personality clashes, and arranging side events with co-sponsors.
At Illinois one year, I almost had to cancel a small conference upon realizing that it conflicted with Mom’s Weekend, with every hotel within a 15-mile radius full of Moms and the prospect of lodging our five guests in faculty homes. Worse still, a husband-and-wife team we’d invited were no longer husband and wife, which meant that they would need two rooms unless we could somehow get them back together (to no avail, we consulted sitcoms for possible solutions). We were saved by the sudden, unexpected Grand Opening of a place called Extended StayAmerica Efficiency Studios. And none of our guests, thank goodness, was a Guest from Hell.
Few people have written about the phenomenon of the Invited Speaker, perhaps because the subject bumps up uncomfortably against the phenomena of academic stardom and professional resentment: Apparently, it is widely assumed that Invited Speakers routinely fly first class, stay at the Four Seasons, dine on quail, collect 10 or 20K a pop, and spend their free time thinking up ways to break Cornel West’s record for Most Speaking Engagements in One Year. The reality, of course, is far less alluring, as I remarked to myself one scary night in a Wyoming bed-and-breakfast whose proprietor had left town, leaving me, his only guest, with a set of instructions on how to feed his three feral Dobermans.
I have witnessed visits that required the distinguished invitee to conduct three seminars in one day; visits that were derailed by feuding faculty members who could not agree on restaurant reservations; visits when speakers were delivered to the wrong building and left to wander around the campus at night in search of their lecture hall. Setting up a successful visit requires almost artisanal attention to minute detail, not only with regard to the quality of the lecture hall and its equipment, but also with regard to the requirements of the speakers themselves -- from the one who must observe Passover, to the one who requires access ramps, to the one who needs a ride to the town’s only black-owned radio station, where her afternoon interview will generate terrific publicity for her evening’s presentation.
My own needs as a speaker are few. I’m easy to feed and lodge, but I do like to work out every day. Most universities are happy enough to accommodate me whenever I find myself in a hotel without so much as a single stationary bicycle, but I reserve a special place in my heart for hosts above and beyond the call, like the one who, when he learned that the university gym did not make towels available to guests, simply ripped his own in half and handed it to me. So much depends on the minor grace notes of hosts and guests alike.
It is rare that invited speakers complain; the vast majority of them feel that it is a privilege and a treat to be invited anywhere. For someone like myself, who had never seen any of the United States west of Hershey, Pa. (save for a brief visit to Los Angeles), until being hired by the University of Illinois, traveling to the Far West is especially thrilling. But there is nonetheless a thriving culture of complaint about invited speakers -- and a host of people (other than the speaker’s hosts) who have made a cottage industry out of criticizing, protesting, and, on extreme occasions, even disrupting public lectures at universities.
The complainants come from all points on the political spectrum, and the complaints run from the deadly serious to the unimaginably trivial. Even in my limited experience as a host, I have handled objections from my colleagues that one or another speaker was unacceptable because he did not have a theory of subjectivity, because she would attend to Chicano/a literature but not Latino/a literature, or because his account of distributive justice did not include a denunciation of NATO bombing in Kosovo. Such complaints, of course, are mere irritations when compared to the kind of political histrionics involved when a speaker turns out to be unacceptable to far-right commentators on the Middle East or to the local Committee of People in Solidarity with People. Or, for that matter, when the speaker is a flamethrower whose work is free of intellectual content.
The organizers of speakers’ series may then ask themselves, first, why any group would expect that all campus speakers or symposia would be “acceptable” to its constituency and, second, whether the intellectual rewards of playing host to a speaker are really worth all the trouble.
Most of the time, however, it is worth the trouble. A good lecture and a good visit can have ripple effects that go on for months, sparking further exchanges among faculty members and students, creating a critical mass of people devoted to a subject, and generally enhancing a campus’s intellectual quality of life. I have been so fortunate as to have been a host or co-host to a fair number of such visits, for example, by the performance artist Joe Goode and the Russian émigré artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, by the philosopher Nancy Fraser and the museum director Marcia Tucker.
In each case, my fellow lecturegoers and I left knowing that we’d learned something new, that we’d been asked to rethink what we thought we knew about our social or affective lives, and that we’d be slightly different people as a result. And in each case, I left thinking that a good lecture is one of the most edifying and challenging aspects of campus life, for hosts and guests alike.
Michael Bérubé is a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University at University Park.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 28, Page B5