We’re going through a bunch of processes this year– a reaccreditation review, a new strategic plan, and a curricular reform– that involve reviewing the wide range of activities that go on at Union, and in the process I’ve become aware of a thing that strikes me as odd. That is, a rather stark difference between academic disciplines when it comes to external speakers.

In Physics and Astronomy, we have an approximately-weekly colloquium series bringing speakers from other institutions to campus to give talks about their research. This is a very common feature of physics departments– we had the same thing at Williams when I was an undergrad, and I make moderately frequent trips to other colleges and universities to give colloquium talks– last Friday, for example, I drove down to Bard College and gave a talk there.

This is true for nearly all of the science and engineering departments at Union– in fact, it’s a bit of a problem, because for stupid daily schedule reasons, we tend to all have our departmental colloquia at exactly the same time, creating lots of conflicts. It doesn’t really hold outside of the STEM disciplines, though. I did a survey of departments and programs as part of one of the things going on this year, and most of the non-STEM departments who replied said they do external speakers once or twice per term, if that.

I just noted that down at the time, but didn’t really think much of it. The topic of conflicts between talks came up yesterday in a meeting, though, and somebody from one of those departments said (basically) “Why don’t your departments just do fewer colloquia and coordinate so they don’t conflict?” My immediate reaction to that was strongly negative, surprisingly so– I think of the colloquium series as a really essential part of what we do in educating students, for a number of reasons. It’s a big part of building a sense of community in the department– we order in food from off-campus restaurants to encourage students to come– and a chance to expose students to current research topics that they otherwise wouldn’t see.

That got me wondering, though, why this pattern happens the way it does. That is, given that colloquium talks play an essential role in the STEM departments– every department has one, and strongly feels that their majors ought to attend– why don’t the non-STEM fields do the same thing? Why aren’t there regular speaker series featuring academics from other institutions in the other disciplines, the way there are in the STEM fields?

It might just be a simple matter of finances– STEM departments have larger budgets in general, and thus are better able to order pizza with which to bribe students for coming to talks. I wonder, though, if there’s some deeper structural reason for it, because several of the responses I got when I did the survey of chairs seemed sort of surprised that such a thing might happen. I’m not sure what that would be, though.

It’s a puzzle. In the highly unlikely event that anyone reads this and wants to suggest an explanation, I’ll open comments on this post for a couple of weeks, because I’m curious.