Building Attendance

How does one get commuting undergraduates at a public, urban university to come on their own in large numbers to hear three faculty members and three students discourse on the topic of faculty advocacy in the “Studies in Race” course?

The answer is that you can’t -- or at least that we couldn’t, not back in 1998 when TIF began. Students had to be coerced to come by their instructors. And this is how we built attendance. Early on, the TIF executive committee (initially composed of “friends of Herb’s,” but since diversified to include representation from a wide array of schools and colleges serving undergraduates) decided to stage forum events so as to coincide with classes, and to select topics and times with foreknowledge of which faculty teaching at which hours would be most likely to bring their classes. Events were advertised by way of flyers and posters and some people came because they wanted to come, but faculty-mediated coercion was TIF’s trick. Still, students’ ratings were consistently high. They enjoyed not just the controversy but the break from routines, and especially the sense of community -- of classes coming together for deliberations on an issue. Thus, at that fateful first panel discussion back in Spring, 1998, I recall a Journalism class, a Composition class, a class in Social Administration, and a couple of Studies in Race classes. Only years later were we able to pull in purely voluntary audiences of fifty or more.