Opening remarks on behalf of [sort of] proponents of a new graduation requirement articulated [sort of] the urgent needs [sort of] that the overlap might meet [sort of]. The speaker who formally moved the overbite asked whether a Puget Sound education would prepare Puget Sound students for the following situations [I draw from the speaker's own notes]:
- "Upon returning home, encountering an overworked, underpaid Molly Maid"
- "After graduating and buying a house, considering a roofing company staffed by undocumented immigrant laborers, who cannot bargain with the contractor for fear of deportation"
- "Alone in a elevator with three young black men"
- "Learning that the 'beau' of a sibling has undergone sex-change surgery and therapy."
This array of grueling dilemmas must daunt every reader as it did every awake listener last September 23rd. Puget Sound students demand the graduation over/under so that they may handle the problems that await them in their Puget Sound afterlife. Otherwise, what will our students do? Work their maids less and pay them more? Avoid elevators frequented by minorities? Kill their siblings?
Still, how will Puget Sound faculty devise courses to cover the crises listed? One thing is certain: administrators will have to supply swag and bring the booty to induce faculty to craft courses to meet the challenges. We are talking major release-units and maximum marketing. Is there enough blowsy vacuity [Mencken] even in Puget Sound faculty to deliver on the promise of the diversity overreach?
Which faculty possess education and experience commensurate with dealing with domestic help upstairs and down; anticipating and indemnifying home repairs and enhancements; sharing elevators — not to mention escalators at Neiman Marcus or gondolas at Gstaad — with young adult males of perhaps indeterminate ancestry or sexuality; and other problems typical of the lives of alumnae and alumni of the University of Puget Sound?
Forget student loans! Look past post-literacy! We are talking real First-World problems of the one-percent, Puget People!
The First Speaker, great subwoofer that he was and is, not only set the tone for faculty discussion of the overpass requirement; he established as well the epitome of faculty oratory. As my mind drifted, I thought back to a like Demosthenes in 1984.
Several years ago I was given an assignment to write a letter. It was to go into a time capsule and would be read in 100 years when that time capsule was opened. I remember driving down the California coast one day. My mind was full of what I was going to put in that letter about the problems and the issues that confront us in our time and what we did about them, but I couldn’t completely neglect the beauty around me — the Pacific out there on one side of the highway shining in the sunlight, the mountains of the Coast Range rising on the other side, and I found myself wondering what it would be like for someone, wondering if someone 100 years from now would be driving down that highway and if they would see the same thing. And with that thought I realized what a job I had with that letter. I would be writing a letter to people who know everything there is to know about us. We know nothing about them. They would know all about our problems. They would know how we solved them and whether our solution was beneficial to them down through the years or whether it hurt them. They would also know that we lived in a world with terrible weapons, nuclear weapons of terrible destructive power aimed at each other, capable of crossing the ocean in a matter of minutes and destroying civilization as we know it. And then I thought to myself: what are they going to say about us? What are those people 100 years from now whether we used those weapons or not. Well, what they will say about us 100 years from now depends on how we keep our rendezvous with destiny. Will we do the things that we know must be done and know that one day down in history 100 years, or perhaps for those people back in the 1980′s, for preserving our freedom, for saving for us this blessed planet called earth with all its grandeur and its beauty. You know, I am grateful for all of you giving the opportunity to serve you for these four years and I seek re-election because I want more than anything else to try to complete the new beginning that we charted four years ago. George Bush, who I think is one of the finest vice presidents this country has ever had, George Bush and I have crisscrossed the country and we’ve had in these last few months a wonderful experience. We have met young America. We have met your sons and daughters.
I am encouraged that, as Puget Sound's faculty strive to stave off the Scylla and Charybdis of staffing manors and otherwise living large in the 21st century, Puget Sound students will be compelled to learn from faculty educated in such domestic sciences and experienced with the subtle arts of estate and leisure management. More, I marvel that such education and experience pass for "diversity" over the rainbow at the University of Puget Sound.
2 comments:
An alternative is to have departments in the humanities and social sciences cultivate and refine attention given to diversity in their existing curricula and new courses. --To act affirmatively (so to speak: except in terms of curriculum; and *on* their own professional/pedagogical terms. More organic, less top-down.
Anonymous,
I hope colleagues take your advice & pursue your alternative. My point was to alert colleagues to the lack of articulation between the problems with which KNOW proponents regaled the faculty and the original & eventual requirements. When problems & solutions or ends & means are so ill-matched, that students are being forced to take courses to pursue symbolism & marketing becomes so evident that even Puget Sound faculty cannot deny it. I went after the opening blather. The anecdotes & apocrypha that followed & that flowed like tears would make the same point -- the measures proposed & the measures passed have little to do with the sob stories.
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