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Page 16 text:
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by Bill Hobbs The Day of Dialogue was a slow, painful beginning. More than anything else, it clearly demonstrated that Lack of Dialogue has been the rule at this school for a long, long time. Because there has been so little dialogue in the past, students and faculty confronted with a whole day of it were unable to get the most out of it . Unused to dialogue, uncomfortable with it, we often adopted false, frozen poses to keep ourselves from the frightening prospect of slipping too far into serious, rewarding encounters with each other. Since it was first and therefore most unfamiliar, the opening session in Lisner produced some of the most outlandish posturing of the day. Dean Linton, for instance, came out posing as a Rotary Club Spellbinder on the luncheon circuit tour of the Iowa State Federation of Garden Clubs. Certainly be could not have been an Academic Dean of a major university at a serious convocation. If that is the role he thought he was playing, he is a lousy actor. He aptly introduced himself as “the latest joke from Washington, 5 and after wowin ' the guys an gals with a few of his best lines, slipped into a stock Paul Harvey style delivery of a mediocre address, perfectly ill-suited for the occasion. President Dixon of Antioch looked visibly ill on the platform, and many of us were groaning inwardly, but Dean Linton seemed to know his audience, Dixon’s provocative, original presentation had received sustained but only polite applause. Rotarian Linton got an almost fervid ovation. I kept thinking of Chicago, waiting for all the senior faculty members to pull out identical printed signs saying “We Love Dean Linton.” Until the first questioners got up. Dean Linton ' s comparison of liberal education to the varieties of canine obedience training had stood unchallenged as the most childish, insulting expression of the morning. One student stepped to the microphone, his face uplifted, his mouth hung slightly open, his eyes fixed in a dream-like stare — an excellent imitation of a cocker spaniel scratching himself - and quickly proved that students can be frozen into roles as mindless and graceless as any Dean’s. The dialogue had begun. Fortunately, it did not stay on this low plane all day. Perhaps because the opening session had been so painful and fruitless, many people in the 11 a.m. discussions of the Lower Columbian curriculum seemed to be actively concerned with talking to each other rather than at each other. Over 40 of the 60 people at the session in Government 3 participated actively students airing gripes and offering cogent suggestions, faculty people responding openly if not always satisfactorily from the student point of view. If the regular classes held in the same room had as much give-and-take as this meeting did, there would have been no need for a Day of Dialogue. One student ended his statement with, “. . .and thank God I didn ' t take biology.” A professor, apparently of biology, popped up and added, “I thank God you didn ' t either.” In the atmosphere of Lisner, it might have been an ugly little confrontation. Here it was a good warm joke, shared by everyone. Reports from other groups indicated that this interacting spirit pervaded much of the campus at mid-morning. Professors who know full well that SDS members were nothing but irrational troublemakers found themselves talking to intelligent, rational beings wh6 later turned out to be SDS members. “Moderate” students found themselves saying things that sounded like SDS. And SDS people discovered it was not always necessary to strike defiant, fist-raised poses to get sympathetic attention from faculty and other students. After a lunch break, the individual department sessions in the aftern oon ranged off in widely different directions. A beer at lunch can make you loud and combative or warm and sympathetic, depending on who you are and what department you are a member of. The sociology meeting in the
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Page 17 text:
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basement of Monroe was one of the warm ones. Dr. Stephens opened the session with the statement that the department was open to — wanted, in fact — a strong role for the undergraduate majors in determining the curriculum. Everybody began as friends and quickly launched into a substantive discussion of individual courses, with a minimum of rancor. The sociology session was an example of the dialogue at its best. The English meeting was another story. Open combat and incoherence were both present. The rancor of the opening session returned, but here it was focused, more specific. Communication seemed to give way again to posturing. A professor: “The reason we don’t teach black authors in the literature survey is that theyTe not in the anthology.” A student: “Sit down and let me finish. I have to listen to you six hours every week. You can just listen to me for a change.” One girl, practically in tears, wondered whether the English faculty really loved literature. But it was a beginning. At the end of the day, many of the members of the GW community had some of the flesh of experience to hang around the skeleton for analysis which President Dixon presented in his opening address. He had said that the university has survived until now with the assistance of strangers. Certainly many of us went through the day like strangers exposing ourselves to each other for the first time. If we are to get to Dixon’s second image - a university getting by with the help of friends — we must have more dialogue. Even more important, we must collectively take it upon ourselves to see that the dialogue results in change. If the faculty and or the administration sees what happened Friday as an end instead of a beginning, their prediction may become self-fulfilling in an ugly way they did not expect. If students see “dialogue” only as a forum for symbolic, pre-determined action, they too will suffer. President Dixon pointed out the frustration which even an institution such as Antioch encounters in attempting to remove or renovate its structure. Our structure is far more calcified than theirs, and our dangers therefore greater. We had better get out of our postures, get ourselves together, get on with it. If you don’t know what “it” is n get into the dialogue.
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