'Profs and Pints' series aims to make academia more accessible

No tuition, no desks, no assignments. Just show up and learn.

This is the formula that Profs & Pints has been using with great success at Triple Crossing Beer in Fulton, which hosts an average of two lectures a month on a variety of topics from local professors.  

Peter Schmidt, the founder and CEO of Profs & Pints, spent nearly 30 years as a journalist covering education.

As a result of his research and writing, Peter said he recognized higher education’s problem of high tuition costs, which has made college unaffordable for many. So, why not bring the lectures out of the classrooms and into public spaces?

Schmidt began in 2017 in Washington, D.C. Success led to other venues, and he reached Richmond after the end of the pandemic in 2021. The group now has 15 venues across 12 cities.

“We are doing something that colleges have not done well,” Schmidt said, adding that he believes colleges struggle to locate the proper informal public spaces appropriate for academic talks – and most don’t know how to effectively get the word out. “We use social media very well and make a lot of the lectures possible by getting the existence of these talks out there.”

Chelsea Baldree, the events manager at Triple Crossing, is thrilled that Profs & Pints has found a home there. The brewery is averaging about two lectures a month.

“Most of these events sell out,” Baldree said. “We schedule talks on Wednesdays so people can decompress by attending the mid-week lectures, and also host lectures on Sundays.” 

In her three years as events planner, she noted how interesting the talks have been to the patrons attending them, including some of her favorites, a lecture on witches and beer brewing, a lecture on the accuracy of the musical "Hamilton," and a lecture on the physics of baseball.

“The lectures draw a variety of clientele, including students, some of whom come to hear their own professors speak, older generations who want to get back into learning, and even families," she said. "The lecture on the baseball physics, for example, drew quite a few children.”

The most recent event, “The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories,” by Brian Sharpless, a licensed clinical psychologist, raised questions about conspiracies throughout history and how to detect and reject those theories.

At the sold-out talk, Sharpless used PowerPoint with a fascinating combination of images (many humorous) and talking points and offered a robust Q&A after the lecture. Past lectures at Triple Crossing have included “Richmond: The Power of Folk Horror,” “Peering Into Volcanoes” and “The Truth About Confessions,” all of which drew sold-out audiences.

This Wednesday, Arryn Robbins, Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Richmond and a cognitive scientist who researches visual attention, will be lecturing on “How Our Brains Blind Us.”

“I love the idea of Profs and Pints," Robbins said. "I can reach and disseminate what I know and what I love to a general audience.”

She will be lecturing on visual attention and awareness, a quality many people lack.

“The lecture is a look at our minds’ ability to skew what we see and why we miss what’s right in front of us,” she said. She noted that while we like to think of vision as a reliable window into the world, much of what we “see” is actually constructed by the brain, and much of our visual experience is filtered out without us even noticing.

Schmidt said the series offers opportunities off-campus for professors to make money and spread the word about their topics, noting that the East Coast cities make a natural speaking circuit.

Robbins, for example, recently lectured on visual attention in a D.C. venue. “It was terrific," she said. “A full audience.”