Monthly Archives: May 2021

Robert Woodson: inspirational

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In April 2021 Hillsdale College, in its Christ Chapel Drummond Lecture Series, hosted a talk by Robert L. Woodson.

I am resolving to stop apologising for covering so many speeches from Hillsdale College. The habit began when they seemed, during the pandemic nonsense, about the only online source of live speeches to live audiences. The habit was somewhat reinforced when I found that, regardless of the standard of delivery or content preparation (which I could and did discuss), the messages these people were conveying were so wise. Even on rare occasions that I disagreed with them I found their arguments respectable – and that is refreshing these days.

U-oh! Larry Arnn is doing the introduction. We know him in particular from his speech that we covered only a couple of weeks ago. Timothy Caspar, politics lecturer, seems usually to do the honours for these Hillsdale talks, but when the college President gets up we know from experience that he regards this speaker as extra-special and that he will say so in terms that will be seriously moving for the speaker himself.

Yep! I was right.

This is really very good. Woodson shoots everything from the hip like a proper speaker, and it is very powerful. Those who don’t share my passion for the power of speaking without notes (which is actually quite easy when you know how) might gleefully point to small errors like when at 14:50, quoting a date, he says “2025” when he clearly means “1925”. The mistake is obvious and all the manifest sincerity pouring out of Woodson completely swamps the tiny slip.

Woodson’s philosophy, driving his work and this speech, is that when it comes to the deprived a hand-up is infinitely better than a hand-out, love is stronger than hate, and allowing your mentality to be ruled by resentment or self-pity robs you of your ability to lift yourself by your own bootstraps.

It is wonderful stuff, wonderfully conveyed, and full of astonishing inspirational stories that underpin his philosophy. He begins at 3:45, speaks through to the end of the video at 43:00 and it is worth every second.

William Happer and a tiny sentence

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Continuing with my mining the rich seam of live speeches under the banner of Hillsdale College, I find a speech delivered at the National Leadership Symposium in Phoenix, Arizona, on 19 February 2021. The speaker is Dr William Happer, and his talk is entitled How to Think about Climate Change, though the video has been given a different title.

The introduction is by Timothy Caspar. We’ve heard many introductions from him, and as usual he tends to read most of it, because he is listing the academic and professional credentials of the speaker, and the list is huge and impressive. The brightest spots, from the speaking perspective however, are those when Caspar lifts his face and utters a personal aside. I am so hoping for a speech from him one day.

Happer begins at 2:10, and hands over to Questions at 45:47.

When I began blogging, speeches for and against “Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming” were all the rage, and I quickly noticed one crucial detail that distinguished them. Alarmists limited themselves to frightening assertions (the earth is going to fry), while sceptics gave you data (no it isn’t, and here’s why). When the earth stubbornly failed to fry, alarmists changed from “Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming” which can be measured and therefore falsified to “Climate Change” which has always happened, always will, and therefore can’t.

Alarmists slyly claimed to represent The Science, while those who had closely studied their campaign and how it contradicted source data, knew it really represented The Politics. It was politics that enabled them to gain the argument, even though it was all clearly hogwash. Today climate alarmism has spawned industries worth trillions of dollars so the smart money is forced to join the fiction. Buoyed up by this they have again changed the name, this time to “Climate Emergency”. Governments around the world (for reasons best known to themselves or their organ-grinders) fall over each other to announce ever more bonkers policies to tackle an imaginary problem while endangering real economies, cultures and environments. When the whole pack of cards collapses, as being built on lies it eventually will, I shall probably be long gone.

Back to this speech which throws up something significant about public speaking.

In three quarters of an hour there is a 21-second passage, between 3:50 and 4:11, that says all that needs to be heard. That small window includes a tiny but golden sentence –

There is no climate emergency.

Virtually all the rest of the time is devoted to streams of data which, though ably supporting that sentence are actually rather tedious. Had I been advising him I’d have pruned the whole thing down to less than ten minutes. Scientists in the audience already know those data, lay people scarcely care.

I repeatedly tell my trainees to keep their brushstrokes broad. It is just too easy to get bogged down in detail. There’s a quotation attributed to J.S.Bach, “It is not hard to compose, but it is wonderfully hard to let the superfluous notes fall under the table”. When you listen to his music, and its sublime economy, you really understand that quotation. One of the most important, and elusive, public speaking skills is judging how little detail you actually need. As I say in a speaking tip on my website,

Dumb is making sure your presentation dots every i and crosses every t:  Smart is making sure your audience understands and remembers the message.

Adam Andrzejewski needs to be heard

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In March 2020 Hillsdale College held a National Leadership Seminar in Naples, Florida. One of the speakers was Adam Andrzejewski delivering a talk entitled “The Depth of the Swamp“. It’s an appropriate title for a speech from someone who has published a book called Operation Drain the Swamp.

Pretty well everywhere you look for information about this man, you find a pronunciation guide to his name. They vary, but “And-G-F-ski” seems to be one of the leading candidates. It reminds me of decades ago when I was preparing a radio interview with the conductor, Gennady Rozhdestvensky and telephoned a friend for pronunciation guidance. He said, “Roger-Svensky, but everyone calls him Noddy”. We Western Europeans are useless when it comes to pronouncing names originating east of Vienna.

Once again the introduction is by politics lecturer, Timothy Caspar, and Andrzejewski arrives at the lectern at 1:50.

His speech is truly, and deliberately, shocking. He firehoses at the audience a stream of data that amounts to horrendous financial corruption in several layers of the US government, a gold-plated gravy-train. If I were an American I’d go straight out to buy his book to learn more, but …

There is something that bothers me about Andrzejewski’s delivery, particularly during the early part of the speech, and it’s quite difficult to explain. He delivers hard and fast, but then he gives the impression of being one who drives himself hard and fast. He is obviously highly intelligent, and the facts, figures and sundry data pour out of him in a torrent. So far – you may think – so good.

Except the audience isn’t quite responding in the way it is evidently intended to. There are punchlines in abundance, some humorous most not but all of them worthy of serious note, yet his pause for reaction is each time a disappointment. My rule for trainees is never to pause on a punchline until and unless the audience forces a pause on you. He would do well to observe that rule.

Also there are ‘seizure points’, moments of brief silence when there shouldn’t be. These are not pauses for dramatic effect: they are random, sometimes mid-sentence. If he were reading a script (which he isn’t) they would be times when he lost his place. That is how they sound.

Briefly I wondered whether he had learnt this entire speech as a script, and those seizure points were momentary lapses of memory, but various signs caused me to abandon that theory.

I now have another theory, on which I could easily be way off the mark, but I’ll float it anyway.

Having written his book, and I’m prepared to bet that it is even punchier than this speech, he decided to go out and speak the same messages. The way to do that, he reasoned, was simply to broadcast his written material orally. To adjust for the different medium he would inject the speaking with bags of personality and vocal modulation. He would strive to avoid things that most public speaking coaches (though not this one) criticise, like “um” and “er” – and thereby all that would surely work.

It’s a logical assumption, and I don’t blame him if he made it, but a relationship with an audience is more nuanced and takes subtler building.

I suspect that he gets plenty of invitations to speak because his message is dynamite, so he could find his public voice and its optimum style by trial and error. That can be a painful apprenticeship, but he doesn’t strike me as a quitter. By the end of this speech his audience relationship had improved markedly, but it still wasn’t ideal.

At any rate I wish him well because people need to hear him.

Larry Arnn teaches

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On 19 February this year in Phoenix, Arizona, there was a National Leadership Seminar held by Hillsdale College.

Regular readers might roll their eyes and moan “Hillsdale again?” to which my reply is that if anyone would be so kind as to show me other places where live people were delivering live speeches in the flesh to live audiences these days, I’d be glad to explore those also. In the meantime I shall continue to mine this seam.

Today’s subject is one I have been craving to examine, because he comes as close as anyone to personifying Hillsdale College. He would probably deny that because he seems to be a Primus Inter Pares character, but as President of Hillsdale College he appears to have imprinted it with his own personality. He is Larry P. Arnn.

In several recent postings on this blog he has introduced speakers with a brilliance which kindled my interest, and then recently that kindling was inflamed when I happened upon this interview with him from about four years ago. I commend it.

But for now I am looking at this speech…

I’ve seen Timothy Caspar introducing before, because he is a Hillsdale lecturer of politics, and on the other occasions he read his introduction. Introductions are often read, not just because they are full of important biographical data but because it is a wise policy to ask speakers to write their own introduction. That way the speaker sets his own starting blocks as he wants them, is responsible for accuracy and relevance, and the introducer is saved an invidious task. On this occasion however Caspar is introducing a long-standing colleague and friend, is mostly shooting his own reminiscences from the hip, and doing it well. Why, you may ask, is he then periodically looking down at the lectern? My considered answer is that this is mainly comfort-habit.

Arnn kicks off with a photograph of his grand-daughter. Don’t you hate people who do that? I am skilled at oh-so-subtly flashing the wallpaper picture on my phone, showing surprise that anyone spotted it and then basking in the doting chorus of “aah!”.

This speech was delivered three days before I published this post, and Arnn begins with recalling his friendship with the same deceased subject. You may assume that to be a self-indulgent, mawkish diversion from what he is there to say. If so, you haven’t heard it yet. In that segment he teaches us more about the ethos of Hillsdale College and its approach to education than a brochure could ever tell you.

[At 14:54 he unwittingly sent a personal message to me. I had been surprised and a little disappointed that he had looked down at his lectern quite often, especially in the early part of the talk. Was he regularly and unnecessarily consulting his notes, or was this also a habit? At 14:54 he gave me the answer: it was habit. I knew that because now when he consulted his notes to see if he had missed anything he looked down through his spectacles – which he hadn’t done before.]

At 18:25 he turns to what he calls ‘the bad stuff’, and so begins an analysis of the way the USA was designed to be governed and how that design has become corrupted. With a few minor adjustments he could be talking about the UK, and even when the technicalities are US-specific it’s still interesting, so the lesson is absorbing even for this Brit. I summarise what I learnt in the fault stemming from ignorance. Unscrupulous people have got away with crimes because those who could have stopped them were ignorant of their power to do so. Therefore everything goes back to education and its failings (or deliberate infantilisation of students), and we all see that happening on this side of the Atlantic also.

In his introduction Timothy Caspar described Arnn as “always teaching”. Ain’t that the truth! – this speech is evidence. Part of ‘always teaching’ is always learning, constantly seeking out more to study. Caspar also told us that Arnn was a student of the life and work of Winston Churchill, and for the final section of this speech Arnn turns to him. Suddenly I, an Englishman, am being told by an American a story about Churchill that I didn’t know.

What a magnificent closing!