Colloquium
This popped in my head, so let me make this post short. I am anti-colloquium. I never remember the content of the non-geometry/topology colloquia. Not even general guiding principles. The only exception is I remember that a lot of people care about modular forms, whatever those are. Plenty of colloquium talks are poorly executed by the speaker, but many I actually enjoy and understand some amount of until I fall asleep. But then it's immediately gone when I leave the room. I personally don't think colloquium enhances my research or teaching; I don't think it helps my mentees either, unless it's in geometry/topology or maybe demonstrating how to give a good (or bad) talk.
I recognize that there's other value to the colloquium. As one example, there aren't many departmental events that bring together all students and faculty, especially if tea is tied entirely to the colloquium. It is important to keep the department from being too siloed. I do think a departmental colloquium on teaching or DEI would probably be more productive; same with talks explaining problems / ideas from math needed in other disciplines, industry, etc. I would also be in favor of replacing colloquium with an activity that involves students, staff, and faculty. If colloquium/tea is the only event in a department that brings students and faculty together, then that means there may not be many events that include staff. I think this is especially relevant with a lot of staff feeling isolated due to hybrid working schedules. There are other purposes, like job talks, which could be mentioned. (I would rather see our job candidates teach a class; I am neither broad nor cocky enough to think that I can assess the research of most candidates from their job talk.) But, I'm more curious to see what people think about colloquium in the comments. Do you get something useful long term out of going to a colloquium? Do you have alternate suggestions?
I agree with what I view as your most important point: department staff deserve more space in community gatherings, because they're also part of our community (and indispensable to boot).
ReplyDeleteI disagree with your feelings about colloquia, but I also think there are quite a lot of bad talks. For me, the main joy of doing mathematics is being able to talk to other people about what they're thinking about, and I like having a sufficiently broad (but probably not very deep) knowledge base to keep up basic conversations with most other people in my department. To me, a good colloquium talk is in a similar spirit. No, it will not help me do better research, because usually these things aren't ever going to come up in my research; no, it probably won't help me become a better teacher, except by virtue of learning what not to do. (You've said all of this.)
But it does give me a sense of what other mathematicians are thinking about, and the best colloquia do give me a (rudimentary!) sense of the ideas involved. For me, that's just *fun*, and to a large degree why I do math!
In a recent post you talked about wanting to see potential hires be good departmental citizens, and I think my view of the ideal colloquium as in this spirit; the goal is to serve the mathematical community by allowing people to communicate with potentially distant colleagues. If realized, that's a great goal, I think.
Little needs to be said about how infrequently this goal is realized in practice.