Carnegie Mellon University - Thistle Yearbook (Pittsburgh, PA)

Page 27 text:

Leary, Gregory highlight lectures On September 27, Dr. Timothy Leary spoke to several hundred students in the Ballroom. Prior to the lecture, the attitude of many students waiting in line was a sort of curiosity; most seemed to be anxious to glimpse not a person, but a piece of counter-culture history, in the form of Dr. Leary. There was a bizarre sense of anticipation, as if everyone was waiting to view some sort of freak show. Indeed, that seemed to be the prevalent attitude about Dr. Leary's heyday; the 1960's were regarded as a mixed-up jumble of drugs and protests. Most students seemed to have little knowledge of the facts concerning Dr. Leary. Dr. Leary lectured on a broad range of topics, and it can be said that the lecture wasn't really about any one topic in particular. He spoke about American culture from the nineteen forties through the nineteen eighties, as originally planned and also on The Future, as the revised notices claimed. For two hours, he entertained and sometimes amused the audience injecting o lost perspective into the issues he discussed. He presented himself as a surveyor of the oral tradition of communication, likening himself to the traveling Irish storytellers, the shenachies. Overall, the presentation was nice, and Dr. Leary is certainly a good showman. He knew what strings to pull in order to elicit responses from his audience. He had, in short, good delivery. This was especially surprising in view of the fact that he spoke for more than two hours without the use of any notes. He took two five minute breaks however. The content of the lecture was a little more difficult to evaluate. At times. Dr. Leary presented good, firm arguments for some source of social action, the legalization of marijuana being one case. As part of the Black Week activities at CMU, Dick Gregory and Mark Lane spoke in the Skibo Ballroom last February to an audience of about 500 students. Gregory, a comedian, author, and political activist spoke for the first hour of the joint lecture. Throughout his talk he addressed a wide variety of topics from birth control to Billy Carter, yet his discussion contained one central theme: the deception of the American people at the hands of the U.S. government. Though he mainly played the role of the comedian he was able to interject enough seriousness, and his comedy was bitter enough to put his message ocross rather strongly. Lane is a lawyer who has concentrated most of his energies during the past fifteen years on conspiracy theories in the deaths of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy. He has written a number of books on the subject, his latest, Code Name Zorro , deals with the King assassination and was co-authored by Gregory. During his talk he detailed the events surrounding King's assassination which pointed to discrepancies in the Warren Commission reports and the likelihood of a conspiracy. Lane went on to castigate the media for their handling of the Jonestown massacre in November. He said that the medio portrayed the tragedy in Guyana as a mass suicide when in fact it was mass murder. Lane stated that the victims in Jonestown who refused to drink the poison were either gunned down by Jones' lieutenents or were forcibly injected with the cyanide. Lane has gained a great deal of publicity in recent months for his role with the people's temple.