Apropos of nothing, when I interviewed at Syracuse a while ago, they had a neat thing going. They had a campus-wide theme for the year! That year, it was Humor. Engineering students built Rube Goldberg machines, Museum Studies students curated an exhibit from the library's materials, soc students studied humor in communities, med students did humor in medical settings.
It gave everyone on campus, despite their majors, some one thing in common. A symposium kicked it off (with Gary Trudeau, no less!) and Michael Moore among the speakers.
A quote:
Syracuse Symposium is an intellectual festival celebrating
interdisciplinary thinking, imagining, and creating. Our theme this fall is “humor.” Humor is a crucial dimension of our lives, individual and social, but it is not often the subject of academic conversation. We seek to correct that for our campus. Throughout the semester, we will explore topics such as the role of humor in society; the craft of humor; what’s funny and what’s not and why; what are we allowed to poke fun at and what not and why; cross-cultural perspectives on humor; political cartoons; how humor allows us to express things we otherwise cannot; how humor provokes thinking; humor and diversity — the list of possible subjects to discuss is long, as you can imagine.
http://symposium.syr.edu/archives/humor_2004/keynote.html
Other themes included Borders and Imagination, other years. How cool is that! It has to be broad to cover all the fields, but some of the work that came out of it was fantastic!
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