the best thing about business school is the speakers
Kellogg commands a great deal of clout in the world of distinguished lecturers. I'd read about this phenomenon on school websites, and in Philip Delves Broughton's book, *Ahead of the Curve.* But only recently have I come to appreciate the number of thought leaders that come through our doors to lecture in an auditorium that resembles nothing short of a bomb shelter. (You can kind of see it in the photo to the left.)
I'm not sure how they make it happen, but Paul Krugmans and Robert Muellers occasionally drop in to tell us about the state of the world through the lens of say, a Nobel-winning economist, or a current FBI Director. I guess the only difference is that the latter had a bomb-sniffing canine detail team.
Krugman was making his first public appearance since the announcement of his Nobel Prize, and the auditorium was packed with lots of grownup and undergraduate faces that I did not recognize. (Sidenote: This caused a huge uproar in the Kellogg community as graduate students were displaced by Ugg-clad young economists. Apparently events like this in the future will be ticketed. This is also a good example of the kind of thing we get uproarious about in business school.)
Anyway, he was extremely off-the-cuff, soft-spoken and his outlook on the state of the world was, well, grim. He confessed that he did not see a global collapse of such immense proportions, and he talked about a new book.
I liked him. In general, I have found that I sort of like economists. They don't have a lot of positive things to say right now (true also of my microeconomics professor), but at least they have a small sense of humor about it.
But then, there was question time. People asked really sort of annoying esoteric questions of him, using a lot of acronyms. In general, I hate question time. I have very strong, irrational feelings about people who speak to hear themselves speak, or make grandiose assertions and don't end up asking an intelligible question, or who ask questions that only apply to their individual situation, or who are deeply intellectually insecure and feel the need to ask things in code to prove their intelligence to everyone else in the audience. There are so many more things wrong with question time. I think question time should be eliminated from distinguished speaker events, another of which is happening tonight.
Jon Meacham of Newsweek! Hurrah! Journalists at b-school! World saved!
