Author: Richie DeMaria
Last summer, Alex Wolf (senior) and his friends saw a gaping hole in the Internet and decided to fill it. While YouTube users from universities like Yale and the European Graduate School posted numerous videos of lectures onto their schools’ respective channels – recordings of panel discussions on the economic crisis, of Slavoj Žižek discussing the pleasure principle – Oxy’s channel had only a handful of convocation videos. No lectures, no panels – just President Skotheim in his academic robes.”There’s a pretty vibrant community of YouTube users who are capturing and posting graduate level philosophical content to YouTube – the YouTube community of lectures and such, it’s our bread and butter,” Wolf said. “I became interested in the extent to which it was going on on campus at all and that there was a medium to share it in.”
Cue in Agora, a new student service aimed at recording and preserving Occidental lectures for the world to see. Founded last year as a club high on ambition but short on funds, Wolf and co-founder Santiago Mendez (senior) started out with an eye on something bigger. Taking the idea of the ancient Greek agora – an assembly place for the exchange of goods and ideas, akin to a Roman forum – they envisioned a service that would archive on-campus speech events and post them online. Oxy, they decided, could join the ranks of other academic institutions sharing its ideas with the world – they just needed the funding.
A Service, First and Foremost
Agora had something of a rocky start. Interested faculty found much to like about the idea, but it had no administrative heft behind it – no department, no funds. Additionally, the potential recording and posting of student likenesses on the web posed legal problems for the then-club.
“This was not possible at first, it presented all these legal issues, and the school dropped it at first,” Wolf said. “We do have to get release forms signed. The copyright legislation in California was designed in the 1940’s for Hollywood stars and is prohibitive in the highest sense.” After numerous e-mails and discussions that seemed to go nowhere and added uncertainty as to the organization’s autonomy, Agora finally found support in the newly formed Center for Digital Learning Research [CDLR] and its umbrella department, Information Resources (the department that also covers the library, Information Technology Services [ITS], and Audio Visual [AV]), which mobilized the project and gave it a stamp of legitimacy. Since then, the Admissions, the President’s Office, and other departments, all interested in increasing Oxy’s share in the digital world, have latched on to the idea.
“Agora realizes a number of initiatives that are sort of percolating through the different [administrative] niches of the school, all the way from admissions to the CDLR,” Wolf said.
“I was really excited about the project,” Vice President of Information Resources Pam McQuesten said. “I had been surprised that I hadn’t seen more students clamoring to rent video cameras and do editing and produce videos to YouTube because it seemed like it was going on in all sorts of places, so I was thrilled when he walked in the door and said that this was what he wanted to do.”Agora functions first and foremost as a service for recording resident and visiting lecturers and speakers. Provided the right release forms have been signed, and with advance notice, Oxy’s speakers – and their audiences – could find a second life on the Internet. Currently, the project runs on limited resources and limited staff, though they’re looking to recruit three more production assistants. Dancers hoping to have their number committed to tape, or athletes seeking screen coverage, ought to look elsewhere, Wolf says. Agora records speech events first and foremost, and does so on a slim budget.
“We’re a fledgling organization that has minimal equipment, minimal resources, and minimal time,” he said. “People shouldn’t make requests unless it’s something academically or intellectually pertinent and strictly speech.”
Nonetheless, this still leaves open a wide opportunity for archival footage of campus events, and could even become a part of class curricula.
“If a speaker can’t come again [the next semester], professors could assign a YouTube as part of their course reserves,” Mendez said.
It even opens the door for more interdisciplinary learning. Professors that otherwise might not share a podium could discuss ideas on a panel – there are murmurs of a inter-departmental discussion on torture – and pass the video along to students unable to attend.
“Econ professors rarely talk about politics, and politics professors rarely talk about economics,” Mendez said. “This could change that.”
The Bigger Picture
Besides Agora’s primary function as a service employed to record on-campus speech events, it serves a secondary, idealistic function: to tout Oxy’s niche in the broader intellectual environment, and to make the world listen.
“People will begin to understand what it means to be at Occidental – prospective students, intellectuals, the broader public will have a better idea of what goes on here and I think hopefully people here will begin to take an ownership of that,” Wolf said. “And hopefully […] to dissuade the notion that college is somehow not the real world, that that’s something you enter after college, that Oxy is a world apart. That’s preposterous. We’re part of the world. We occupy a place within it.”
A very radical one, in fact. This is, Wolf adds, the same school that taught Foucault to Obama in the 1980s, the same school that educated Monty Python member Terry Gilliam, the same school that boasts Angela Davis and Michael Eric Dyson as former speakers when other colleges have neuroscientists. “We’re the only school that would throw a Bataille conference in a church,” he said.
A catalogue of Oxy lectures could change the public misconceptions of Oxy, and rectify the image of Oxy sometimes portrayed by major media outlets as an aimless academic playground, the place Obama left. Lectures could clarify to doubters the idea behind courses like Stupidity and The Phallus, could highlight the college’s involvement in New Orleans – could, in short, further legitimize the institution.”I think the theory environment should be cultivated here because, what I gather from Facebook and all these other places where I can orient Oxy’s theoretical community within the larger one, Occidental is actually doing something fairly singular and unique,” Wolf said. “I get the very sneaky suspicion we’re actually something cool and special.”
Prospective Agora members ought to embrace Oxy’s radical side and resist stagnation or conservatism. They are looking for students with a “stubborn refusal to accept Oxy the way it is, a reserved and mature arrogance in pursuit of new things,” Wolf said. They also ought to commit to the long haul; though Wolf and Mendez will graduate this year, they fully intend to make Agora an Oxy mainstay for years to come.The question remains: class assignments aside, how does one attract an audience to potentially complex and radical theoretical lectures? The audience is there, Wolf insists, though not largely on Oxy’s campus – yet. As Oxy’s role on the Internet grows through Agora and the discourse in the classroom spreads outside the confines of the college, the college could entice prospective students with the content of online lectures alone. Now, more than ever, enrolled students can play a role in shaping Oxy’s image.
“Agora is a brand new thing – because it’s student run,” McQuesten said. “Yale may record lectures on classes, Berkeley records lectures of classes – that has generally started at schools that have larger introductory lectures. What Agora has done is have a group of students step forth and say, it is important to capture these academic events with video to make them available not only to the Oxy community, but to the public at large – and tha
t is what I find so remarkable.”
Expect in a few months a bigger, better Oxy YouTube channel; for now, the members of Agora need to get things running. A bigger staff and cooperative clientele matter more than bolstering Oxy’s role in the broader intellectual community. When Agora picks up, though, wider recognition of Oxy could be only a matter of pressing “play.”
Agora postings can be found on Oxy’s YouTube channel or on Oxy Scholar. Students interested in joining should contact Alex Wolf at phaedrus415@gmail.com.
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