Guess Lectures: Introducing part-improv, part-academic talks at Carleton
Guess Lectures are a just-for-fun event series that encouraged professors to recall knowledge outside their own fields of discipline (and strengthen their improv skills).
On Tuesday, April 22, Chair and Professor of Psychology Julia Strand hosted Carleton’s first-ever Guess Lecture. A just-for-fun event that encouraged professors to recall knowledge outside their own fields of discipline (and strengthen their improv skills), the Guess Lecture was highly attended by students and faculty alike, with audience members overflowing into aisles and standing along the walls.
The premise of the event was as follows: a giant wheel of fortune with all of Carleton’s departments written on it was spun, and each professor had to give a seven-minute talk about the topic using the slides of a professor from that discipline. The participating professors for this particular Guess Lecture — because there are plans for more in the future — were Mitchell Campbell (psychology), Jessica Keating (art history), Dan Maxbauer (geology), Sarah Meerts (neuroscience and psychology), Jake Morton (classics), Jay Tasson (physics and astronomy), and Jennifer Ross-Wolff (biology).
First up was Jay Tasson, associate professor of physics and chair of physics and astronomy, doing a classics lecture. The slides were primarily images, occasionally accompanied by text.
Tasson started off strong: “Rome is right there,” he said, gesturing with a laser pointer. The next slide showed statues of two Roman dictators with no other text — “These are some of the people who led it before they were cast as statues.” A detail shot of the statues followed — “This is a closeup.”
On the subject of dignitas, autoritas, gravitas, et potestas (the four core Roman virtues), Tasson paused. “I’ve never taken a classics course before… these are the names of four other people [that led Rome],” he decided.
Things got a little better for Tasson when he could make connections to the physical sciences. “Looks like a mockup of a markup experiment,” he commented on a map depicting war camps. When the slides showed the landscape of these war camps, he brought back the laser pointer for emphasis. “The Romans were also interested in the [sic] geology, so we have the three types of geology here… and after studying the geology over here, they moved over there,” he said.
The timer sounded after this point, and Tasson received tumultuous applause from the audience.
The next professor was Jake Morton, assistant professor of classics, attempting to lecture on BIOL 372: Structural Biology. This presentation had more text than the previous one, so Morton’s approach was more about reacting to the information and images as he saw them. What follows is a brief description of each slide and his comments:
Complex structural model
- “We’ve got some fractals or something, this is awesome. This is actually like Democritus in the fifth century CE, who predicted this.” (Democritus was an ancient Greek philosopher who proposed that all things are composed of the fundamental, indivisible atomos, and constructed an early atomic model)
- “A bomb?? GOOD LORD!”
- “I bought this toy when I was younger,” implying that structural biology models look like toys (obviously).
The main techniques of structural biology
- “We don’t have any!!”
Photo of Rosalind Franklin’s discovery of the DNA double helix shape
- “That is an X-ray of Rosalind Franklin. You gotta put it all together — it all makes sense.”
- “If I remember right, that’s Democritus! An atomic model, you just make it up, sixth century CE.”
Unrelated to any of the slides
- “IF YOU DON’T GO TO THE DENTIST FOR 20 YEARS, DON’T START. THEY FIND MORE PROBLEMS.”
Visible light spectrum and microscopes
- “Oh Roy G Biv, I know that one!”
Protein crystals
- “Who has a favorite crystal?” An audience member answered, “Quartz?” Morton pointed at him, “YOU FAIL.”
- “Let’s not undersell this!! These protein crystals took five years to make! That’s so cool!!”
Morton finished his presentation with biology majors head-in-hands, and the room applauding.
Next was Sarah Meerts, professor of neuroscience and psychology, presenting on geology, using slides from GEOL 130: Geology of National Parks. Meerts started by employing her knowledge of one park she had recently visited, Glacier National Park. She discussed Going-to-the-Sun Road, which winds through Glacier, and glacier formations in general.
“So, there were glaciers and they came across the earth and they scraped a whole bunch of stuff… and there’s hermits! You see this layer right here, that’s where they live,” she said. The “hermits” comment was relating to a standout layer in a rock cliff. Meerts also had some questions — “What is an outcrop? I think it’s maybe over here…”; thoughts on mud cracks — ”This is not that old, this is not geology!”; and comments on rippled rock formations — “Ooh, that’s so pretty!! Does anyone have that thing with the textures?”
She closed with a comment tying her presentation back to her own discipline when the slide talked about geological cross-bedding — “Cross-bedding… well… if you were in my lab… uh…” Audience members were especially fans of this remark.
Jessica Keating, associate professor of art history and chair of art and art history, received a surprise when she started moving through the slides for PSYC 218: Hormones, Brain, and Behavior. She found information (and graphics) on the relationship between rat mating behavior and hormone changes, and spent her seven minutes trying to interpret them in a manner suitable for a semi-professional setting. For the purposes of this article, certain details have been cut for publication.
The presentation opened with an overview on rat reproductive behavior — “The Basics,” the first slide read. Already, the audience was having a great time. “So this is how nature happens,” began Keating. “It begins with the mount. As you can see, this image is mounted on this nice presentation background… there are maybe some art history images that are like this picture…”
The next slide gave more details about female rat sex behavior, and Keating took an art history-esque lens to describe what she saw. “She is looking up and smelling, but when she smells it she whips her tail around… it’s pheromonal,” she offered. Another slide began introducing experiment designs that were helpful for testing rat mating behavior. “This is a female rat in perimenopause, and she doesn’t like that, so she has to do the conventional testing in The Box.”
With each new slide and remark from Keating, the audience responded with loud laughter, cementing the environment of the Guess Lecture as a combination of stand-up/improv comedy and academic talk. Keating deviated from the topic briefly to share her thoughts on a photo of a rat den: “So this is actually my nightmare. I had mice in my attic this winter.” However, she brought it back to the topic momentarily as the slides introduced paced mating behavior, holding back laughter herself. “Okay, everyone pay attention. It’s okay to go slow, it’s okay to be in the gray zone, pace yourself,” she said. On female paced mating behavior specifically, she added, “This is feminism.”
Toward the end of her presentation, Keating’s comments got less pertinent to the slides again, but the audience continued to express their enthusiasm:
- “This is not a dust mite. This is the rat brain on vaping.”
- “Where is the estrogen action??” [slide changes] “Apparently, in the hypothalamus.”
- “What shapes or images do you see in this image?” [image of a rat brain] “This will tell you about your estrogen levels.”
In light of Keating’s own surprised reactions as each slide changed, as well as other unpublishable details and visuals, this lecture was an audience favorite.
Following Keating’s presentation was Mitchell Campbell ’14, lecturer in psychology, doing art history using slides from ARTH 240: Art Since 1945. “Lots of good stuff happened then,” said Campbell.
The first slide depicted a ball-shaped sculpture by Piero Manzoni, which Campbell explained “was inspired directly by the moon.” He also mentioned, “Did someone say they couldn’t read? This is not what this class is for.”
Shapes in general became a theme for Campbell’s presentation. “Here’s more shapes!” he said at one point. “This very smart person made these shapes. These shapes are actually representations of what he said on the last slide.” Everyone in the audience let out a chorus of oooohhhhs after that. The oooohhhhs continued after Campbell said, “This is also untitled… you may be sensing a theme here.”
Dan Maxbauer, assistant professor of geology, presented slides from PSYC 220: Sensation and Perception. “I wanted to start by thinking about brightness perception,” he said. “On the left side, it’s different from the right side. It’s because this goes through your eyeball… There’s all sorts of stuff in your eye.”
Maxbauer also went over a slide about Ewald Hering, “who is a great person,” he said. “He talked about perception of brightness… from the bottom up… #TeamBottomUp.”
When Maxbauer got to a really complicated-looking slide, he said, “Here’s what I wanted to get into.” Then he paused, and looked at it again — “This is pretty cut and dry, so we can just skip it for next time” — and he skipped the slide.
The last presentation was by Jennifer Ross-Wolff — director of the Perlman Center for Learning and Teaching, Humphrey Doermann Professor of Liberal Learning, and professor of biology — doing ENGL 295: Critical Methods. She built off a vignette of a stereotypical and highly figurative English class throughout her presentation, saying things like, “Everything you do from the first day of your life is part of the narrative.”
Ross-Wolff began her mock English class by saying, “If you haven’t turned your homework in yet, you still have a grace period. First, I want to do a meditation before we start, in case your eyes got tired looking at themselves” (in reference to Maxbauer’s previous lecture). “Close your eyes and massage your visual cortex, and get your eyes ready for a less literal activity.” The audience dutifully lowered their heads and closed their eyes for about 30 seconds.
The slides then began with a photo of a cat on the porch of a house. “I need a linguistics major to give me a number,” Ross-Wolff said. An audience member offered 17. “Seventeen is actually the number of chromosomes in this cat,” she replied. “Now, everyone turn to your neighbor and figure out what 17 times 20 is. I’m telling a story.” The audience all spoke in small groups briefly before Ross-Wolff called on one person to give the answer to the mathematical expression — “340!” “This image is actually the discovery of the Pantone color spectrum,” Ross-Wolff explained. “Three hundred and forty is the color you know as green.”
Next, the slides prompted her to change her trajectory to discussing narrative structure, using the nursery rhyme, “This little piggy.” “In the words of the philosopher Democritus, what is going on with the piggy who went to the market? Is he shopping or is he being shopped?” she questioned, to laughter from the audience.
She closed her presentation with a few overarching comments as they related to following slide titles: “Narrative theory is capacious. Its capacity for capaciousness is maximal.” and “Might you be makers of the story? Is there critical theory? I don’t know!”
The Guess Lecture closed with a call for students to nominate professors for the next one, which was held on May 15, and wild, enthusiastic applause.