October 4, 2004
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This Tues. I will be holding an event at the bar Blueberry Hill, famous for the Chuck Berry song and for his monthly appearnaces. The event, called London Day, will be from 4 – ? and is a celebration of doing something fun that you don’t normally do. For me, fun means getting together with friends and strangers for a drink on a random day of the week during the afternoon. I’m hoping there’s a decent turn-out, especially of students who have just returned from studying abroad and now probably feel strangled in the system while they were completely alive and engaged by another culture whilst abroad.
Tonight, met some interesting people at the Wash U Co-op, a group of people living together dedicated to promoting and living healthy community values. Every sunday they have a pot-luck dinner. About 25 people showed up, including two professors and a dean who have worked with the student in the Co-op to create a special year-long course for freshman about sustainable living. The class involves students creating their own syllabus, and the professors involved all created it in an attempt to combat student apathy by getting students to think about real world issues, not just academic ones.
My goal now is to find a professor that I can team up w/ possibly in the spring semester to run a class that in some way deals with the issue of apathy in our society. While on the surface, the university is not promoting these types of classes, if presented in an appropriate way, it seems they are likely to help you.
Tom. I’m also being interviewed for the Wash U. student newspaper Student Life, www.studlife.com. I’m pretty excited, although obviously afraid that what I say, and what gets written, won’t be perfect, but over the past few weeks I’ve been developing further my ideas, and I think i’ll be able to get to the main points, and hopefully take this project to the next level, by both letting 1000+ students know about my book and my presence in campus, as well as to let the university know that student apathy is a huge problem that affects students and society long beyond college, and that we all have a large interest in this process that I hope to start of beginning a dialogue about the educational problems students here face, and to start implementing the ideas that begin to surface.
For those of you who have never heard of the school I am at, Washington University in St. Louis, you’ll probably here about us by Friday. John Kerry and George Bush will be here battling it out in debate #2, a town-hall style debate. I’m crossing my fingers that Kerry drops the gloves, because debate #1 really didn’t impress me. I don’t want him to win by points, I think he needs to win by knock-out, and he should be capable of doing it. Unfortunately, what I think doesn’t matter, since everything seems to be about catering to the undecided / unlikely voter. So…all i hope is that Kerry’s advisors know what they’re doing however it is they advise him to debate. If saying “we’re gonna kill the terrorists” and ending with “god bless this great country” are the tricks, than so be it. I’ll give my opinions on policy and philosophy, but the whole campaigning thing is so warped, I don’t really know what to say.
Another interesting thing. Saw an interview w/ the writers of the Daily Show. It was impressive to see the numbers of people watching the Daily Show as a way of getting news. And oddly enough, they say about 75% hold college degrees, while only about 20% of those who watch Bill O’Reilly, the right-wing extremist on Fox News, hold degrees. The number of people who watch Fox News and still believe Saddam was connected to 9/11 is also pretty staggering (stats courtesy of the movie Outfoxed).
All of this just goes back to my initial and grand-sweeping argument. We need innovative education reform in America’s Colleges and Universities, because there’s too many stupid people walking around this country who are the ones responsible for the simple-minded President we find ourselves desperately trying to rally voters against.
-dan
Comments (1)
I admire your determination…keep plugging away at it…