Last week I was gearing up for all of the orientations for the new job when I noticed on the schedule for Tuesday a keynote speaker who surprised me – George Ritzer. The non-sociologists who read this blog probably won’t recognize the name, so you may want to check him out on Wikipedia. The sociologists, on the other hand, will know who he is. I was excited just to hear him speak, but was even more excited when I was invited by a couple other UT professors to have dinner with him the night before his keynote.
I met him and the other professors at Bernini in Ybor. I was generally impressed with Professor Ritzer. He was very amiable, jovial, and fun to dine with.
How, you ask, did Professor Ritzer end up giving a keynote speech at a faculty workshop at the University of Tampa, which has 3 full-time sociology professors, including me? The business school at UT is substantially bigger than the sociology department and they are big fans of his work. So, they brought him in, and I got to spend time with him. It was very gracious of the business department faculty to invite me to dinner.
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