Some Invited Lectures

One of the benefits of academic scholarship is the opportunity to interact with colleagues outside of one’s own university. Such opportunity is always available through the medium of books, professional journals, and correspondence, and regularly available at conferences and meetings in one’s disciplinary area. But invited lectures offer a richer occasion for intellectual and human interchange, since they typically require a longer period of contact with colleagues and the chance to savor the ethos of another university department, which is greater than the sum of its members. I have already (in Chapter 8) described my pleasant time in Oberlin when I delivered the Mead-Swing lectures there in 1965.