Next Friday sees the opening of the three-day international conference on George Moore, Literature and the Arts at UCC, preceded that afternoon by Bernard O'Donoghue's lecture on Yeats the Love Poet.
Since 2003, Vice-president Áine Hyland has chaired the committee established by president Gerry Wrixon to build up awareness and enthusiasm among UCC staff for the Capital of Culture year.
Events bridging the gap between scholarly and popular combine with the provision of venues from the Honan Chapel to the Glucksman Gallery - itself in a kind of inaugural over-drive mode.
This will be the location of all the coffee concerts of the European Quartet Week (which the university is subsidising in its entirety) at Easter, as well as mounting the joint exhibition of the collections of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Irish Arts Council in May.
As most of the events included in UCC's impressive 2005 Calendar have not benefited from funding from Cork 2005, other sources and internal university budgets were mined, as for the international conference on visual literacy organised by Jim Elkins, Professor of Art History, in April, or the year-long Last Lecture series.
This provocative opportunity was fully exploited in the recent contribution by Dr Edward Walsh, and on Wednesday next Professor David McConnell of Trinity College Dublin will discuss Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Evolution from Cosmos to Culture.
However splintered the college may be within itself, its contribution to this year has a whole-hearted spirit which places it as a dynamic centre of enablement, facilities and inspiration for the city: its many venues from the Granary Theatre to the Music Department buildings at Sundays Well, the student centres, the Honan Chapel and the splendidly refurbished Aula Maxima, along with the suites of lecture halls, all are available, and are matched by the good will of practitioners or administrators.
Thursday evening's White Quadrangle presentation from half/angel in the main campus should be additional testimony to the power of creative originality in an academic setting.
