The Chancellor's Open Forum or "We all Have a Role to Play"

How Rebel Girl saw Tuesday afternoon (with apologies to Chunk):

Schoolhouse Rock. All the boys sat on one side of the room and the girls sat on the other and neither seemed ready to ask the other to dance. It's true! You should have been there. Natch, like all those grade school dances there were more girls than boys but dang if the fellas still play shy. There they were, all seven of them, including Chunk, huddled along two sides while the ladies filled out the rest. What's that about? Granted most of the fellas, except for Chunk and S.R., were what Rebel blithely calls "suits," so maybe it wasn't a boy vs. girl thing, cooties and all that, maybe it had more to do with hierarchy and patriarchal privilege in the institution…in other words, a boy-girl thing.

Smokin' in the Boys Room. In the back of the room, having arriving fashionably late, slouched K.S. and Rebel Girl, the two stalwart female profs who close the place down most Thursday nights, Rebel with her writers, K.S. with her cadre of mostly female students wielding scalpels above the prone forms of small, dead animals. The two lobbed a few questions – stipends, reassigned time, the justice of the DRAC model and the possibility or lack thereof of increased justice in the future. They watched as the Chancellor, as is his wont, unspooled his vision, a tapestry of aphorism and narcissism.

The two were inspired by the Chancellor's visiony vision. What we need, he intoned at one point, is a clearinghouse of ideas and goals. The two quickly responded to his challenge and spent the remainder of the meeting building just such clearinghouse of ideas and goals. They used popsicle sticks and Elmer's Glue-All and plan to place it in the parking lot near the mobile home that serves as our bookstore. It can also operate as a birdhouse. It will be a perfect neighbor, quipped one Eng prof, to the beloved marketplace of ideas.

Back in the Day. The Chancellor told a heartwarming story about his days as a teacher. Once he phoned an absent student to let her know of her earned A on an exam. He disabused the poor thing of her own notion of her own mediocrity. Implied moral: if we all could be more like Raghu, student retention would go way up. Start dialing.

Wasted Days and Wasted Nights. The Chancellor made several elliptical comments about how the board, or members of the board, would object to alcohol being served at on-campus events such as the Foundation Dinner and the Summer Jazz picnic. Don't go there, he seemed to be saying. Please. Pretty please. Keep serving that sparkling apple cider at 99 cents a pop from Trader Joe's. Don't violate the sanctity of the college.

They're Making a List and Checkin' it Twice. Sometime during the discussion of ad-hoc student retention strategies, the office of budget management revealed that when students come to them for refund for dropped classes, they ask the students which class it is, the name of the professor and the reason for withdrawal. They put this information on a list and forward it to the Office of Instruction.

In the Still of the Night. Rebel Girl minded her tongue for once and didn't ask about the state of security of campus, especially late at night. She didn't mention the student who recently died in the middle of the night in the parking lot, whose death went unnoticed for over 10 hours and who had to be found by his father the next morning. She thinks about that event often and wonders what went wrong here that night, what other matters were so pressing that no one noticed a car sitting in a well-lit narrow strip of the parking lot with its windows rolled down and a young man inside.

All the World's a Stage. Throughout the meeting, the Chancellor repeatedly told everybody how we each have a role to play.

His role, he said, in response to a pointed question from Chunk, is to put things on the table.

- Rebel Girl