Irvine : UCI Professors to Give Their ‘Last Lectures’

It won’t really be their last lectures, but three UC Irvine professors will pretend they’re holding court for the final time next week as the featured speakers at “Command Performance: My Last Lecture,” an annual event designed to spotlight campus speakers.

Students select the professors who will participate. Past lectures in the seven-year series include “The Physics of Beer” and “Long Live the Ivory Tower.”

Marilyn Mendenhall, coordinator of university speakers, said the event is intended to honor favorite faculty members, adding that the subjects are usually serious with a humorous angle. “ ‘The Physics of Beer’ was a serious presentation,” she pointed out.

This year’s participants will be Grover Stephens, dean of the School of Biological Sciences; Frederick Sawyer, assistant dean of the School of Engineering, and Linda Georgianna, associate professor of English and comparative literature. They will lecture, respectively, on “Education,” “Gobbledygook and Doublespeak” and “On Relevance: Will It All Be On the Final?”

The university’s seventh annual speech event will be presented Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. in the Science Lecture Hall. Admission is free and the event is open to the public, with a reception to follow. For more information, call the university at (714) 856-6379.