Reaction to a Speech

On April 1st 2014, the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership presented the Inaugural Sternberg Family Lecture in Public Scholarship. The speech “Do America’s Colleges Have a Future” was bestowed upon Andrew DelBanco to deliver.
In the opening remarks, Vincent Boudreau was introducing DelBanco. He told us the books he had written, the awards he had won and his position. This gave helped me know my speaker much better. Upon accepting the microphone, DelBanco graciously gave us a warm welcome. I felt that he was very humble because he admitted that Boudreau’s opinons were a bit exaggerated. When he began his speech, he mentioned the topic he was going to address the audience. This served as his preview to let us in on what is the uprising issue. He started off with an image in his introduction. The image was “Is College a Lousy Investment?” It was a smart idea because he commented about the issue using a specific visual and brought up many questions like are we getting what we are paying for?   This elevated my interested because he reminds me to hold onto this question. He uses a simile of the green grass in the visual to show that college is like a fair way of a private golf club. He says this to imply that college is wasting the money on the wrong things.
He uses a second image to show how the future of an institution looks like. The picture shows a young man in pajamas writing with his left hand. He then asks if anyone in the audience is left-handed? I raised my hand. He said that we are intellectually and creatively superior to writing. He used this analogy well to envision the future. It was a great strategy because he gave me a concept to understand the bigger issue of America’s institutions. I think that he was very interactive. He asked the audience to guess what percentage of the budget of a university is covered by public fund. He kept us all awake and interested.   His use of statistics supported his speech well. He blew my mind when he...