This past week, Columbia's been drawing in high-powered speakers like it's nobody's business. Last Saturday, Jeffrey Sachs gave an impassioned speech calling for Americans to reclaim their political system before heading down to Wall Street. On Monday, famed linguist Noam Chomsky spoke on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Tuesday, we had Tom Sherak, the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences giving a talk in Dodge, and Thursday, Zadie Smith giving a lecture on creative writing.
That's all quite impressive ... but am I the only one who thinks this is all a bit too high-brow? Has it not occurred to anyone else that we need to break the shackles of elitism and go, well, lower in our choices? I'm not necessarily talking about dropping our standards, because we can keep the high-brow guests for special occasions. The fact of the matter, though, is that we should also learn to relish the kitsch. We need to wallow in the depraved every once in a while, and the best way to do that would be to retool the guest list.
