Campus trifecta

I scored a hat trick on campus activities on my first day back from the conference today.

I started by hearing an elderly liberation theologian do a Q&A session. Gustavo Gutierrez quietly answered written questions from a large audience. He wasn't as inspiring as I thought he'd be, but he fanned the coal of discontent I've felt in the pit of my stomach recently--you know, the one that says I should be fomenting revolution.

I stopped by a talk given by our head of Special Collections after that. James is a great guy--and an awfully good speaker. He talked about some of the hidden treasures that are tucked away in the library and how they came to be here and how we are trying to increase access to them. Here's a little nugget I picked up: during WWII, there was a conscientious objector camp in Waldport. It was a camp just for artists. He didn't discuss what they did (a lot of the camps either did make-work labor or had medical experiments done on them), but he did claim that in some realy sense, the Beats started there, as many of the writers moved to San Francisco after their release--even if they weren't from there originally.

This makes a nice transition to the final talk of the night: a pair of Israeli refuseniks. They rocked!

I'll finish up about the conference tomorrow--and probably post a few links. Overall, it was a good trip. I may have even picked up a couple collaborators for an info behavior study I've been trying to put together here.