General Education

Nominating Forum Speakers

For the university community to nominate speakers, please use the nomination form.  Take into consideration the criteria listed below. You will be contacted should the Forum Committee need further information on the speaker than that supplied by the preliminary nomination form or found through public methods. At that time you may need to give more details about the proposed speaker.

In the meantime, you may want to look at the archives of past speakers to see the wide range of speakers who have addressed us at BYU.

Criteria for Selecting Forum Speakers

Since 2002 the Forum series has been used to enrich University conversations about general education.  Speakers might address issues of broad interest from the perspective of a particular knowledge domain (as organized in our GE curriculum), or they might discuss liberal education itself as a topic, employing tools and perspectives from their discipline.

Speakers should be among the most competent, accomplished, and therefore highly respected leaders in their fields. Those invited should be able to speak in an effective (appealing) manner.

Speakers generally should have published significant material or completed other important creative work on the topics about which they are invited to speak.

The topics that speakers address should be vital and appropriate for a general BYU audience.  Since there are so few University-wide Forum Assemblies (only 2-3 a semester), we are seeking speakers of importance who are capable of presenting ideas of substance.

The schedule of speakers should provide for diversity in ideas and disciplines, and in models from both genders and various intellectual, cultural, and racial backgrounds.

Nominations for Forum speakers may include those who are scheduled for other department or college functions; however, such nominations should be limited to those speakers who would have broad appeal across the University community.  Coordinating a speaker’s visit with other campus functions can maximize the impact of the visit and can be cost effective, but the Committee evaluates nominations based on their appropriateness as Forum speakers without regard to their suitability for other campus activities.

The approval process can take many months. Scheduling the speaker depends upon approval, available Forum dates, and the speaker’s own schedule.

Please send the completed form to kirsten_thompson@byu.edu