Last Wednesday at 5:30 p.m., the department of Anthropology and Museum Studies hosted John Whittier Treat for a reading and discussion of his new novel, “The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House.”

The book is set in Seattle in the early 1980s, before Amazon and Microsoft billionaires, when Starbucks only sold beans. The book deals with the HIV and AIDS crisis in the Pacific Northwest, which began in the ’80s and makes a familiar city new again in an unfamiliar time.

Dr. Treat, by the way, is esteemed. He has taught at Stanford, Berkeley, the University of Washington and is currently a professor emeritus of literature at Yale. He has been published in the Huffington Post and The New York Times.

Dr. Treat gave his reading from a podium in Dean Hall’s vestibule just outside the Museum of Culture and Environment in front of three sad rows of taupe metal folding chairs and 14 attendants.

A year ago, the department hosted Phillippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg, acclaimed co-producers of the marvelous book “Righteous Dopefiend,” in the same foyer outside the museum at bustling high noon for a presentation and a panel discussion. You can imagine how that went. Four taut PhDs in the middle of trying to say smart stuff about homelessness and inner-city heroin use while a gazillion students poured awkwardly around, over and through as they hurried to classes. Chaos.

Bourgois is a Guggenheim Fellow, by the way, and tenured at U. Penn.

Okay, so credentials shmentials, I get it, but is this not just a little embarrassing?

We could bash the Museum people I suppose. But how can we blame them for a lame venue if only 14 people show up? In a certain English class I’m in, everybody got a Canvas notification about Wednesday’s reading (albeit earlier Wednesday afternoon), but if any of them showed up I didn’t recognize them, nor did I recognize anyone from the English Department faculty.

I know a lot of students are working in the evenings, or doing homework, or trying to score, or getting swole at the gym (I defy you all to spot the SURC gym with only 14 people in it), but what about the faculty?

Central’s Kathy Whitcomb read from her new book of poems “The Daughter’s Almanac” last Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at the SURC bookstore. (She killed it, by the way.) There were a lot of professors there and 150 students easy, but many of those professors are the poet’s friends,  and many of the students no doubt were coaxed or ordered to attend.

So recap: A big-deal literary guy showed up on campus for a book signing, was hosted in a lobby, and from a university of nearly 13,000 free and un-incentivized students, academic staff and administrators, 14 people showed up.

We can do better. The humanities are withering, my professors say, and public discourse is a mess, and Ellensburg is “provincial,” and our university is gradually becoming a really pricey trade school, and “neoliberal capitalism” is atomizing our community, and the students are all obsessed with social media. Fine. Agreed.

But what’s anyone doing to change these things when we, as an academic community, neglect our opportunities to convene and affect them? Do we believe that literature is worth it for its own sake? And why can’t our university overlords furnish more than a sort-ofwide hallway as an auditorium for the guy from Yale? Is it all just a matter of asking, of making a stink?