Our Chancellor is Hiltler ( or just fellow user of evil rhetoric)

For this week’s blog I feel that it is appropriate to discuss a situation that occurred recently that relates to ideas discussed in Plato’s Phaedrus. Not too long ago I attended and on-campus “open forum” that was bought together to discuss the issue of plans to build new dormitories but many tress would have to be sacrificed to do so. First I must discuss this idea of an “open forum” as our chancellor and others in administrative roles define it. Basically, you write your question down on a piece of paper and someone reads it and then decides if it is appropriate to be answered by the chancellor. With a system like this one would think that questions like “When are we going to get a football team?” would never get through at a forum about trees, but this wasn’t the case. I think that this “open forum” is a great illustrative example of, as Socrates’ describes it, evil language or rhetoric. It only considers one side of the point of view so listeners must stand there helplessly and be told what to think about a situation. It would have been much more appropriate to hold a meeting where students could freely ask the chancellor questions that they had and be engaged in a dialectical conversation so that we could each play off one another’s ideas and have a conversation that had the greater good in mind. Instead our dictator like school held this “open forum’ and it really seemed like the Q&A session was going around in circles. Students wanted to know why they chose to tear down the forest that had near endangered species such as the pygmy rattlesnake and why they would tear down their real life science labs that students use on an everyday basis. But the only answer administration had is “ You define education as you want to and we will define education the way we want to. We have studies showing that students who live on campus make better grades and we feel it is more important to have on campus housing.” I just can’t believe they can say this when they are starting a new conservation biology program next year and when many science classes and the whole environmental sciences program are held in trailers. I have heard no plans as to where these classrooms will find their permanent home and my question was not answered at the forum either. So much for dialectical, or noble rhetoric.