Quote

I thought as we all begin to examine the final round table report that these words from Elizabeth Cady Stanton might be helpful:

The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.

The Final Report

The final round table report has been issued. Please read it carefully. The A & S Concil will be discussing it next Tuesday. Please either attend the meeting or give your comments to your faculty representative. You may also forward any comments to the Blog. There is a lot in this document. Those of you who may not have cared to lend your attention to the discussion should now do so.

The Petition

I notice there is a petition circulating that wants us to change our name because we are essentially an embarrassment to the College. I notice the petition is anonymous. Quite clever.

Questions for the Dean

I have a few questions for the Dean about the Round Table Report:

1. Will it be published so that all A & S Faculty will have a chance to comment on it?

2, Will this opportunity occur before you take this report to the Board of Trustees?

3. Will approval of core classes remain with A & S Council?

4. Will A & S Council have a chance to approve the Report before the Report goes to the Board of Trustees?

Petition/Open Letter Protecting Your Mind from the Pernicious Influence of this Blog

In two pages, no less....

You should thank Providence that the authors of this document are so willing to do your thinking for you.  

Kill the Messenger!

I have recently read the "open letter" and petition that are circulating on the UT campus that calls for me, among others, to help “shut down” this A&SCF blog. Instead of just pointing out Lo Obvio (that the petition has a “chilling effect” on free speech in our campus community) I will here elaborate a few thoughts on blogs in general, remarking in specific on the rapid emergence of news blogging as an example of a successful new teaching and learning modality on college campuses, including our own college campus.

For example, last week’s Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)includes an article titled “Scooped! Student News Blogs Challenge College Papers for Big Publication on Campuses” by Marc Parry; view the video version of the story, “Penn State Students Build a Blog Empire,” here:

http://chronicle.com/article/Video-Penn-State-Students/63521/

We discover that there is a “brand new style of publication on college campuses” involving “unruly” entrepreneurial blogs. “Upstart” blog owners are described as “taking new media and pushing it to the limits of legitimacy.” Student blog owners claim “transparency is the new objectivity” in their innovative online social media news reporting. Their underground newspapers are global, and run “on passion rather than formal structure.” More profound, the blog owners interviewed by CHE (calling themselves “a blogging fraternity”) viewed their campus information market (before their forced entry into it) a despotic “duopoly” for information dissemination.

Here at UT, there seems also to be a duopoly of news dissemination: The two official producers of information are UTNews (a million-dollar Administration-owned/managed operation) and the Independent Collegian newspaper. Both of these newspapers have their own blogs in addition to their hard-copy newspapers.

A third news blog has been operating successfully “underground” during the past three years, gradually gaining popularity among A&S College faculty, students, staff and alumni, many of whom have posted on its pages. This third blog is now privately owned and called the “Arts and Sciences College Forum” (A&SCF) blog. A disclaimer on its home page makes clear it is not an official University of Toledo Arts and Sciences blog site. There is in fact no official A&S College blog site! The A&SCF blog by default fills an inexplicable information void that exists on the UT campus. Meanwhile, A&SCF bloggers exhibit the same sort of “passion” and commitment to disseminating news in creative ways and for exploring uncharted and unregulated modes of expression in cyberspace that characterize the student bloggers described in the CHE article and video.

This particular part of the CHE article pertains directly to a major argument in the petition that condemns the A&SCF blog: “For image-conscious universities, such popularity raises the question of how officials should react to unofficial student Web sites that take advantage of their brands.” One way would be to purturbate acrimonious peer pressures (student against student/faculty against faculty) in the hopes of exterminating the unruly blogs.

Since the petition seems to manifest a totally naïve “sandbox politics” uncharacteristic of our freedom-loving university faculty, I am more inclined to believe the advent of organized A&SCF blog-hate at this time is a red herring and thus a deliberate distraction contrived by a zealous Round Table Implementation Report strike force attempting to push the Report past those A&S faculty who have not yet read it, nor read the informed critiques of the Round Table process generating the Report as posted in the A&SCF blog over the past three years.

The apparently blog-challenged petitioners do not like easily accessible informed critiques of the Roundtable process and Implementation Report posted on the A&SCF blog. They seem maliciously intent on killing the messenger.

Butting Up Against the Truth