On any given day during the semester, the University plays host to a handful of visitor lecture events, brown-bag lunch discussions or colloquium series.

Despite the energy and planning invested into creating visitor events, owing to the diversity of interest on campus some events are bound to be more popular than others. Last month, when Toni Morrison came to give a reading of her latest work, audience members had to fight for breathing room in the cramped lecture hall. On Oct 30, Leslie Armijo ’78, a visiting professor, gave a lecture about Brazil’s emerging status as a world power and only four students attended.

In times of financial challenges, many may wonder why the University does not concentrate its resources solely on events that attract large audiences. According to Sydney Van Morgan, associate director of the Institute for European Studies, it costs around $10,000 to $15,000 to run a conference for two to three days.

Attendance rates, however, should not serve as the main criterion to evaluate visitor speaker events, according to Prof. Christopher Anderson, government.

“Sometimes, you have a small crowd, but the people attending get a lot out of it substantively,” he said. “I wouldn’t automatically equate a big audience with high quality event.”

Prof. Kathryn March, anthropology, said, “If students get to interact with talents [from outside of the University], how can an event even with a small turnout rate be a failure?” March said she believes in the value of having smaller, more intimate events, where students can approach and engage the speaker. Students often fail to recognize these as opportunities to expand and enrich their social networks, she said.

“We are currently placing more emphasis on speakers who can not only offer a substantive presentation but [speakers] who can also recruit for internships and jobs with their organization or offer a brown bag on career management strategies — multi-functional speakers,” said Thomas O’Toole, executive director for professional development and student programs at the Cornell Institute of Public Affairs. “This maximizes their productivity on campus and our investment in their visit.”

While planning the events, faculty members try to estimate the prospective audience size and adopt the appropriate format to carry out the event. With well-known speakers, organizers expect a huge audience and plan the event as a lecture, accompanied by catered receptions. When the events deal with more specialized topics and less known visitors, they instead tend to take place as brown bag discussions or a seminar.

Choosing the wrong format might create the illusion of events being poorly attended, according to March.

“Organizers have to be realistic about who’s coming and more creative about the formatting of these events,” March said. “Another good way to make sure that we invite the right people to campus is by giving student organizations the money to invite who they think will be interesting.”

Both undergraduate and graduate students are free to give suggestions to faculty members as to whom they would like to see invited onto campus for an event, according to people who regularly organize events.

“It will be really sad, though, to see only general interests covered by these events.” March said. “Cornell is a research institute; it creates a space for [less commonly known subjects] to be important.”

As a result of the economy, various academic programs and departments in the University are receiving less endowment payouts for funding. For example, the Institute for European Studies is experiencing about a 10-percent reduction in endowment payouts this semester.

In the case of the South Asia Program, funding from the endowment payment has been cut back so severely that it is no longer sufficient for their operations.

To cope with financial constraints, Prof. Ross Brann, near eastern studies, said that departments and programs have been maximizing their collaboration with each other in hosting visitor events.

“We try to utilize as many University resources as possible, like visiting professors who are already here on campus," he said.

Besides co-sponsorship within the University, some programs have also sought partnership opportunities with neighboring universities to lower the costs of inviting outside speakers.

“We co-sponsor with Syracuse University, our consortium partner, to cut costs.” Bill Phelan, administrative manager of the South Asia Program, said.

Some programs consider the expansion of collaborative efforts as an opportunity rather than as a limitation.

“Our program has a University-wide appeal, and cutbacks have required us to collaborate with other departments and programs to develop more co-sponsored speaking engagements than in the past,” said O’Toole, of the Cornell Institute of Public Affairs. “This simply means [being] more interdisciplinary and a deepening our common missions of domestic and international public affairs education at Cornell.”