GCPL Newsletter, November 2025
The GCPL’s fall seminar, held on October 28 and titled “Nuclear Options,” featured John Lauder '68—a Hiram alum and career U.S. intelligence officer and arms control negotiator—as our guest speaker. The seminar had high attendance and engagement, thanks to effective promotion, an interview-style format, and John Lauder’s exceptional presentation. The post-seminar dinner also marked a new standard for us here in the GCPL for lively discussion and thoughtful organization. Overall, this seminar represented a new benchmark for GCPL events and will serve as a model for future programming.
GCPL Fall Seminar
Furthermore,this was one of the most effective seminars we have held to date. This positive assessment is not simply my own, or that of other GCPL personnel, but was expressed by many people, from various backgrounds, who attended the event. Obviously, a key to a successful seminar is to have a great guest speaker, and John Lauder did a superb job, combining expertise with understandability, seriousness with humor, and communicativeness with concision.
A second key factor was the audience, which filled the room. This high attendance resulted from several factors, but key among them were no doubt the social media promotion and the seminar poster-posting engaged in by the GCPL team.
This audience managed to ask – without exception – highly intelligent questions. Another key factor was the format of the seminar. Contrary to our traditional approach – of having a speaker give a prepared talk, followed by moderated Q-and-A – John Lauder recommend that we take the approach we used for a previous seminar, which involved me and the guest sitting in chairs on the stage, partially facing each other and partially facing the audience, with me asking a series of questions to which the guest could then respond. This approach has now worked really well and we plan to replicate it at future events.
The dinner event – following the seminar – was also notably superior to previous instances. Several upgrades to our approach contributed to this outcome, in terms of enhanced logistics, as well as the level of thoughtfulness to make it an engaging dinner. It was very clear to us in the GCPL – which has now hosted over 20 of these post-seminar dinners in Koritansky Hall – that the conversation was more engaged – and for the full dinner time – than during any previous seminar dinner.
We thank all who attended and helped to make this a wonderful and informative event, and we look forward to seeing you again next semester.
James Thompson, Ph.D.
Department of Political Science
ThompsonJA@Hiram.edu
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