On a Wednesday in February, Mr. Tourre dutifully fulfilled his teaching-assistant role, staying after a professor's lecture to work one-on-one with a student, hunched over notebooks and gesticulating energetically.

WSJ: From 'Fabulous Fab' to Grad Student

Now in its tenth year, the Lecture Series features distinguished speakers whose work has influenced and advanced awareness of U.S.-Africa relations.

WHITEHOUSE: Blog Posts Related to the African American Community

She would work on their imagination so that the lecture room became a stage in the temple and she was Artemis, the goddess of hunting.

ECONOMIST: Bluma Trell

One of the invited speakers was to be Joachim Rotkopf, who was to lecture on the origins of European surrealism to be found in Poe's work, precisely the topic that had provoked the controversy with Professor Xavier Urquiza from Mendoza, and that had kept me so amused in the pages of The Gold-Bug, the Society journal.

NPR: Excerpt: 'Borges and the Eternal Orangutans'

The star of the lecture circuit at the time was Sir Humphry Davy, who plucked Faraday from obscurity to work as his laboratory assistant.

ECONOMIST: Science

And before he died, he took the time to work with a writer, Jeffrey Zaslow, to create a book, The Last Lecture, which has become a national bestseller and a personal favorite of mine.

FORBES: What Matters Most In Life -- What We Can Learn From Randy Pausch