A new Slop University brochure invites the surrounding community into open lectures, where a semester-long seating survey has set a median seat that every theatre now waits on.
A new civic brochure from the School of Emergent Priorities explains why open lectures now wait for the middle of the room before they begin.
Every seat in a Slop University lecture theatre has always been free to take. What the University had not done, until this year, was ask where its audiences chose to sit. A new brochure from the School of Emergent Priorities, Notes on the Back Row, sets out what the answer has become.
A semester of seat choices, recorded across the University’s theatres and reported as distributions of distance from the doorway, has given each room a median seat of its own. Under the Charter that now governs the theatres, a lecture begins once that seat is occupied, whoever is speaking and whoever is late. The brochure presents the arrangement as a civic courtesy, extended to enrolled students and neighbours alike, and draws on six of the University’s published studies to place it among the School’s wider interest in ordinary places.
The people who fill a room are the best account of it we are ever likely to have, and the only one that updates itself.
— Dr Fenna Okoro, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Horizon Register, School of Emergent Priorities
“The Observatory’s part is small,” said Dr Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor of the Review Cadence Observatory. “We keep the time on which the rule comes back round, and we are glad to keep it.”
The release marks a welcome moment in the University’s relationship with the community around it. The brochure is available now, and open lectures continue to seat everyone who comes.
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.5knhsy.