Starting the Debate
Starting the Debate
By Matt Ledger
Undergraduate/Creative Writing
I love intelligent debate. I don’t want to marry it or anything, that would be moving way too fast. I’m not on a team or in a club, but intelligent debate and I have had an unofficial tryst going on for quite some time now.
For example, recently one of my best friends invited me to New Orleans to attend the Lutheran Church of America Youth Gathering, where 37,000 (roughly) Lutherans headed to New Orleans and pitched in and helped out, because the people there do very much still need a hand. This is all well and good, quite commendable even, but my group of Lutherans accidently brought with them a person who considers himself about 90 percent atheist (that would be me). So my friend and I spent a good third of the bus ride down to the Big Easy debating the existence of God and the moral fiber and worth of that thing we call humanity. Neither of us really changed our minds, but it was good to have the conversation.
It was good to hear the other side.
Increasingly now, people are unwilling or unmotivated to seek out the other side of a conversation. Major example and inciting incident for this rant: the healthcare debate, if you can even call it a debate anymore. There’s a video on YouTube that I would recommend, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljFKK7XvsCs, if you want to be scared out of your mind. My first thought turning away from this video was, “My God, these people are idiots.” But they aren’t; they really are not. They’re simply far too trusting, and as a result of that trust they are lazy and misinformed. Too trusting because those the people have chosen to put in power have lost a sense of the responsibility that power brings with it, and the people haven’t quite figured that out yet, not all of them. That lack of responsibility leads to the spread of misinformation, fear mongering and agendas are represented as facts because it’s easier to provoke an emotional outcry than a rational one. And when a U.S. representative shouts “You lie!!” it still carries force because that office is supposed to mean something, the title carries a honor and weight that lets a man who is showing less decorum than a drunk high-schooler at a pep rally still represent some kind of truth to people.
But it’s not just these people; it’s happening here on campus too, where we should know better. More and more I hear people gripe about how tuition is going up, that UWEC is putting a squeeze play on their wallet for no reason. You can gripe about tuition going up, that’s fine, I’ll do it too. But it definitely is for a reason.
From what I understand, and in basic terms because that is how I understand it, the tuition hike is part of the Blugold Commitment, the part that will hire more professors. These professors will be placed in mostly gen classes, classes that fill up far too quickly and thus stifle many a student’s chances of graduating on time. This could save a student a semester or year, thousands of dollars worth of time, and help kick up the university’s grad rate. For those of us who planned well enough to get out in four years this gradual, and I stress the word gradual, hike in tuition does kinda suck, but you’re still paying less than Stout.
If I’m incorrect or I missed something let me know, send me a letter, because I want to know the facts. I am actively seeking them out, something everyone here is paying thousands of dollars and now more (see, I griped!!) to learn how to do. Hopefully it sticks.