I can dream, can't I?
Just want to say hello and thanks Mark for inviting me to the blog. Not sure where it might go but that's what's interesting about the Internets!
One of my hopes for the future of our college is to see a vibrant cross-disciplinary minor or program of study in Conflict Transformation. Everyone I've spoken with who are experts in that sort of thing say it's going to be a whole lot more difficult now. But I have a couple of ideas left in my tiny pea brain, and maybe others do, too. I hope this can be a place where we can share them and build them into something concrete.
3 comments:
Thanks Dave! I want to hear more about your idea, and hope this can be a venue to give it some exposure and get some discussion going. My lemon ideology is that Wednesdays vote puts new urgency into things like this.
And as for the nay-sayers, I think half the reason the proposal passed was because too many people bought the argument that if we didn't approve the guns and orders minor, the kids with the rifles would feel bad. The level of resistance to peace ideas is pretty low, I think; it's the low level of awareness that we have to overcome.
I agree with Mark: half the reason was on behalf of the kids with guns, who many of us know in person, and further, half was the argument that we accept minors from other institutions already, and half was the idea that all we're doing is acknowledging on paper what's happening already in the field.
I know, that's three halfs, for 150%, but I plan to give 150% to this blog.
What discourages me most is that the discussion was cut off. We sat for weeks arguing over changing single words in the job description of Faculty Moderator. Yet on Military Leadership, two thirds voted to call the question after minutes of oversimplification and emotional appeal.
There was much more to say, and there were folks able to say it.
It's the cutting off of debate and rushing approval through that discouraged me so deeply. I felt like i was on Mars and didn't recognize my fellow faculty.
Maybe people just don't think it's that big a deal.
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