News Reporter
CMU event staff raced to provide seating in a packed room Friday night as Stanford professor Dr. Doug McAdam gave a keynote speech on the “Civic Impact of Youth Volunteerism.”
The event was part of a two-day sociology conference hosted by CMU’s Sociology Club.
“Sociology club has put this conference together to allow students to come together to share their research with other sociology students, develop networks and work with the faculty little bit,” Dr. Abigal Richardson, assistant professor of sociology at CMU, said. “We always bring in a headline speaker to present a new point of view, and then we have presentations the next day for students.
Dr. McAdam sought to disprove the notion that engagement in activism leads to prolonged levels of service.
“We have this simple-minded notion that if you do anything with youth service it’ll have this enduring affect,” McAdam said, calling for a more comprehensive study on the work of civic activists.
Displaying a comparison of the controversial Teach For America program and the 1964 Freedom Summer movement, McAdam argued that, “Nothing shapes the meaning more than the historical context in which it takes place.”
McAdam’s comments were met with resounding applause from the audience.
“I still can’t believe people pay me to do research that I really enjoy, so I hope something about the excitement of doing research came across too,” McAdam said. “It’s not something I emphasized explicitly, but I hope some found it fun.”
This is the second year CMU has hosted the conference. The location is rotated between CMU, Adams and Western. However, Sociology Club faced some difficulty in obtaining funds for the event back in October.
After FAC accepted the club’s request for transportation costs to bring Dr. McAdam to CMU, the $1,500 was subsequently denied by ASG on Oct. 23. Senators expressed concern about the lack of response from other schools in attending the event.
“When we went to the ASG meeting, it was deemed we didn’t have enough supporting evidence to show where the money was going, and it was ultimately voted out,” Amanda Schroder, a senior sociology student, said. “They told us they’d have a closed conference committee. We actually received more funding than we had originally asked for.”
The conference committee opted to give the club $2,620, which student body president Ariel Diamond claimed stemmed from the need to accommodate the increasing cost of airfare.
“I think that being clearer about what they want would be really helpful so people won’t be spending lots of time in meetings, Schroder said. “There was a seemingly large amount of guess work we had to wade through.”
cferganc@mavs.coloradomesa.edu
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