On Sunday, sophomore Jack Fischer took the Anderson Center stage as the first TEDxBinghamtonUniversity student speaker. The TEDx organizers took a risk in inviting a student to take the platform among notable, highly successful speakers. It shows that Binghamton students are capable of significant accomplishments in their undergraduate years, and we’d like to see more opportunities for students to share their ideas.
In the past, the only opportunity for students to speak to a large number of their peers is at commencement. Any student can apply to speak at commencement, but a commencement speech is necessarily limited in its scope. Fischer couldn’t have spoken about the harms of internet pornography, the topic of his TEDx talk on Sunday, in the context of a graduation speech. While commencement speeches are a great opportunity to speak about the specifics of one’s experiences at Binghamton, the TEDxBinghamton organizers broke ground in inviting a student to present on Sunday, and we hope to see more such opportunities arise in the future.
TED’s slogan, “Ideas worth spreading,” is necessarily vague. It’s not constricted to “scientific” or “artistic” ideas worth spreading, because TED provides a platform for many types of narratives to be told. Here at Binghamton, there are students with ideas worth spreading. They may be idiosyncratic ideas, but that’s all the better to get the conversation flowing on campus. That’s the point of these talks, to incite new conversations and get the brain juices flowing. Students’ perspectives are equally as likely to elicit this reaction as anyone else’s. And on a more pragmatic note, a student speaker certainly costs less than a professional speaker or any of the academics Binghamton might otherwise invite to speak.
It’s inspiring that so many students tried out to speak at TED. More than 70 students took the time to prepare a speech they felt a large portion of the student body needed to hear. And the TEDx organizers expressed that a number of these finalists could have done a competent job, though only one could take the stage on Sunday. With the TEDx E-Board’s decision to make this student speaker a tradition, we hope that more students apply and that the field becomes more competitive. Speaking before such a large crowd and among such impressive company is an incredible opportunity for students, and we look forward to seeing what ideas they produce in the future.