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By Phil Williams
pwilliam@franklin.uga.edu
Bradley Taylor, from the Georgia Wilderness Society in Macon, was so pleased with a  presentation by UGA anthropology professor Peter Brosius that he sat down and wrote a letter.
“Last month, you afforded me and the Georgia Wilderness Society the luxury of hearing one of your faculty speak on threatened rainforests,” wrote Taylor. “Dr. Peter Brosius came down on short notice and did an excellent job. . . . I was enthralled with both his studies and his passion. . . . This is truly a public service, and I hope it continues. Honestly, how often can I request a speaker without wearing out my welcome?”
Roger Thomas gets a kick out of letters like that. A professor and former head of UGA’s department of psychology, Thomas is in charge of the Franklin College Outreach Program, which provides speakers on numerous topics to Georgia schools, civic clubs and other groups free of charge.
“We have every reason to believe that the program is creating a lot of goodwill for the university,” says Thomas. “People are pleasantly surprised when they find out that the university will send a speaker to their communities.”
Now in its seventh year, the program was the brainchild of UGA administrators Tom Dyer and Eugene Younts, who presented it to Dean Wyatt Anderson of the Franklin College. Younts, then vice president for public service and outreach, felt it was a natural service component for the Franklin College.
Each tenured or tenure-track faculty member who joins the program has his or her expenses paid to and from speech sites and is given a $300 stipend per presentation that must be used in the faculty member’s academic teaching or research programs.
The result has been a huge list of topics and faculty members who are now available for almost any group of citizens within the state of Georgia. In this academic year, 130 faculty members are available to speak on 459 topics. In the preceding year, faculty members made more than 200 presentations in 37 counties, serving more than 10,000 people.
Growth in the program has been dramatic. In its first year, 1993-94, 25 presentations were made, but only four years later, that number has increased tenfold.
“We’ve been able to meet more than 95 percent of the requests from the four corners of the state since the program began,” says Thomas. “The preponderance of the requests, as one might expect, are within about 100 miles of Athens.”
Still, others come from as far away as the Georgia coast. Cary Knapp of the Brunswick-Glynn Public Library in Glynn County had these words of praise for Lioba Moshi of the department of comparative literature:
“Another excellent speaker! Moshi is very personable, and the audience really enjoyed her (they stayed for two and a half hours!). She brought slides of Tanzania, which was a nice touch. Boy, does UGA have great teachers!”
The program currently offers speakers from virtually the entire array of disciplines in the Franklin College, from anthropology and art to speech communication and statistics. Some speakers can shape their presentations for different age groups as well. For instance, ecologist Whit Gibbons of the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory is available to speak to groups from age six and older.
The list of topics available through the program is extremely varied and includes:
• “The Age of the Vikings,” Peter Jorgensen of Germanic and Slavic Languages;
• “What Oceanographers Do,” Deborah Bronk, marine sciences;
• “Recent Results from the Hubble Space Telescope,” Jean-Pierre Caillaut, physics and astronomy;
• “Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity in Children,” Dorothy Fragaszy, psychology;
• “Latinos in the U.S.: History, Culture, Language,” Jose B. Alvarez IV, Romance languages;
• “History of African Americans in Films,” Freda Scott Giles, drama; and
• “What Causes Cancer?” Michael Pierce, biochemistry and molecular biology.
While many speakers in the outreach program go to the sites of their lectures, some are available on a closed-circuit television system called GSAMS. In this way, the speakers can remain in Athens but be presented interactively to groups all over the state.
“I can say I’ve had a good time making these presentations, and I’ve gone to places such as Sandersville and also done them on the two-way television set-up,” says history’s
Thomas Whigham. “It’s a really good way for people in the state to see what university professors do. They are a very good audience.”
MORE INFO
Requests for a list of speakers, artists and musicians available from the Franklin College Outreach Program should be made by mail to Roger Thomas (FCOP, Psychology Building, campus mail 3101) or by e-mail (fcop@uga.edu). Thomas can also provide the form on which speakers must be requested; requests are filled on a first-come, first-served and speaker-availability basis. The list is revised annually, and the list for next year should be available by July 1.
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