Accent has a fantastic history of bringing good speakers to UF. A look through past speakers on Accent’s website has names of historic figures who have shaped history and taken their time (and UF’s money) to speak in this middle-of-nowhere place of Gainesville. The self-stated goal of Accent is to bring “prominent, controversial and influential speakers” to UF. Since I have been here, the likes of Jack Kevorkian, John Kerry (see tazing incident in school history), the Mythbusters, Bill Nye the Science Guy, Mike Rowe and John Legend have all made appearances. I can tell people I’ve heard Dr. Jack speak his crazy-ass mind after he got out of jail for euthanizing all those people or that I was there when that Meyer kid made a national storm by being a fool.
This year the two main speakers were Penn and Teller and Daniel Tosh.
Eh.
Is this the best we can do? A speaker who gets “nervous” in front of larger crowds and one person in a two-person group who doesn’t talk?
I walked around the day of Tosh’s performance and heard a girl on her cellphone saying, “Yeah, I’m gonna go see this Tosh.O guy.”
That’s not even his name. But that girl was heading to get in line at 1 p.m. while I was, you know, heading off to class.
Accent should save the money from having two speakers to have one of great substantial quality if that’s what it takes. I want to talk about what these people had to say, not complain that I couldn’t get in because I came too late or that the speaker suddenly got shy.
They also should never have anyone speak in the Phillips Center if the speaker is the type of person who would fill it up. We should be maxing out capacity at the O’Dome, or hell, even having these people talk at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium if that’s what it takes. It should be every student’s right to see these speakers that I’m sure we the students somehow end up paying for anyway. Also, $66,000 for 4,900 people equals $13.46 per person. I don’t need school to tell me that is probably not as good a deal as other speaker-to-audience proportions.
So, Accent, please save up your advertising, money, excitement and my time for someone who I’ll talk about weeks for beforehand and weeks afterward and maybe the rest of my life, like Dr. Death.
Not this Tosh.O guy.
