Talk list causes debate

Almost five weeks ago, a message posted on a faculty Talk List Web site sparked a campus-wide faculty debate about the Women’s Resource Center, which has since focused on the three R’s: reason, respect and responsibility.

“Can someone tell me the location of the Men’s Resource Center?” Dr. William (Bill) Richards sarcastically wrote in response to the Love Your Body Day event sponsored by the Women’s Resource Center. Then he more controversially added, “Since I believe (hope?) the Love Your Body Day event announced below is intended for both women and men, why isn’t there a session on prostate cancer?”

The first response to Richards’ message was posted the next day. “Geez,” Professor Wayne Glowka wrote, “you’ve got guts.”

Richards’s words opened the proverbial Pandora’s Box. Over the last five weeks, GC&SU faculty and staff have written more than 90 corresponding messages across the campus’s LAN lines raising a whole slew of political issues, ranging in topic from women’s rights and gender equality to premarital sex and UN statistics on developing countries.

The interaction is thanks to an internet forum known as the Talk List, a Web site exclusively for employees of GC&SU that is intended, according to the Web site, to promote open discussion and debate about “issues pertaining to GC&SU which are not necessarily official in nature but involve the GC&SU community as a whole.”

Issues such as the war in Iraq, evolution and even the controversial GC&SU play Mexotica have received unbelievable amounts of scrutiny and debate among faculty and staff in the past. Those issues have drawn controversial comments that critics fear fosters a disrespectful environment by leaving the door open to verbal jabs, usually intended as jokes, by professors.

“So much of racism is not overt,” said Sunita Manian, an economics professor. Manian said she has been offended by comments posted on Talk List in the past.

“(Users of Talk List) say things in a way they wouldn’t dream of in person,” said Richards, whose comments on the Woman’s Resource Center’s event have been under fire for almost a month now.

Richards pointed to a posting by Professor of Management Steve Payne that said he was concerned “that our institutional or faculty culture occasionally does not show high levels of respect and associated reasoning toward those with certain values, positions or priorities.”

“If we’re really fostering open discussion, it shouldn’t require guts,” Richards said. According to Richards, faculty should have a tougher skin to this style of open discussion, but he added that faculty should be mindful of the three R’s that everyone associated with GC&SU has to uphold.

Students are not allowed to view Talk List postings because it is a place where professors’ personal, political and social opinions are often aired.

When asked whether or not he would change the things he writes on Talk List if students could read his postings, Richards said, “Oh, absolutely. Faculty are supposed to be modeling a certain type of behavior.”

This behavior is intended to keeps a professors’ personal opinions out of the classroom. “I would set higher standards for myself,” Richards said.

In contrast, Manian, who experienced an open forum involving students during her years at Wesleyan College, said she wouldn’t change a thing about the way she posts messages if students had access to them.

“It’s a myth to say that any of us are neutral (about political issues),” Manian said. Senior Milissa Medlin, a mass communications major, said she would enjoy reading what teachers really think.

“I think it would be interesting to do something like that with your professors,” Medlin said.

In her classroom discussions, Manian said that unintentionally her opinions are often reflected in the literature she assigns her students, but she added that faculty usually “try our hardest to bring in many views into the classroom” objectively.

Medlin said she can tell what her professors’ opinions are on certain political issues, not by what they teach, but from comments they make when getting off on a tangent during a class discussion.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Dec 2 2005. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry