If the Davidson College Student Government Association really wants to make a difference at Davidson, it needs to expend significant effort in the coming year on efforts to (a) increase opportunities for public discourse among students about pressing issues and (b) make students more willing to seize such opportunities.
During a ‘senior dinner’ at Pres. Quillen’s house in November, Quillen asked us what we would change about Davidson. The first thing that came to my mind was an issue with this school that has bothered me for most of my time here: Davidson lacks a vibrant public intellectual culture in which students are willing to take part.
Davidson students are, in a word, incredible. We’re inquisitive, intelligent and driven. Discussions in class are regularly lively and engaging. And yet the moment we cross the threshhold of Chambers at the end of the day, some part of that energy dies. Student inquisitiveness and intellectual engagement, so lively in the classroom, is almost nonexistent beyond Chambers’ halls.
My suspicion is that the cause of this lack of public intellectual culture is twofold. The first is that students are busy (with schoolwork, athletics, jobs, social life, etc.); forced to ration extracurricular time, they choose to prioritize non-intellectual pursuits. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s a fact.
The second cause of lack of public discourse at Davidson is the oppressive culture of politeness. I will say it again: politeness is oppressive. In a place with as strong a cultural norm of politeness as Davidson has, fear of being seen as impolite stifles speech and encourages self-censorship. (I made a similar argument in a Davidsonian article co-authored with Ben Wiley in December.)
Lack of a public intellectual culture manifests itself in a number of ways: low attendance at the many lectures, panels, documentaries, etc. held weekly on campus; repeated failure of students to systematically address issues of concern to the community, whether with our peers, our professors or the administration; and lack of engagement with the world beyond “the bubble” (I hate this term, but you all know what I mean when I say it so I’m forced to go with it).
It is also manifested in the low level of engagement in student government we see, and which appears to have reached an all-time low (at least for the four years I’ve been at Davidson) in today’s Cat. II elections. Of ten positions up for election, only two were contested; one had only three candidates contesting four seats. Sunday’s presidential debate was sad – and in saying that, I’m not afraid to call out Pablo Zevallos and Wade Leach for giving safe, lackluster answers, and the Davidsonian staff for throwing out softball questions. As a political scientist, I’d be remiss at this point if I didn’t point out that uncontested elections produce lower-quality candidates, leading to poorer governance (here’s one study that demonstrates this, but there’s plenty more out there for those interested).
For the sake of our school; our students’ competitiveness post-graduation; our ability as a community to address pressing issues facing our campus; and for its very own legitimacy, the Student Government Association needs to take action to cultivate public intellectual discourse at Davidson. To do this, they need to work to (a) increase opportunities for public discourse among students about pressing issues and (b) make students more willing to seize such opportunities.
Here are some concrete proposals, some of which are already being considered and worked on by different constituencies around campus:
Improve existing public lectures
We currently have too many public lectures, which contributes to low attendance and engagement by the student body. The school should reduce the number and increase the quality of lectures. This involves bringing in both higher quality speakers and enhancing the quality and length of their visits to campus to enable more students an opportunity to engage in deliberate, face-to-face discussions with speakers. The public lectures calendar should be published well in advance so faculty can better incorporate lectures into curricula (in place of other coursework, not on top of it). Academic departments, the public lectures committee and other organizations that have the funds to bring lecturers to campus should expand coordination to find speakers who serve the interests of multiple campus constituencies (multiple organizations, departments, courses, etc.)
Intellectual “labs”
Biology, chemistry and physics courses have lab time, and language departments have AT sessions, but most academic departments do not have any kind of classroom-external intellectual engagement between students as part of their coursework. Academic departments should work to develop regular gatherings (weekly or biweekly) between small groups of students for a fixed period of time (say, an hour) to discuss some topic that has been brought up in class more deeply and closely. This could be formal (everyone meets at the same time/place, in the style of a lab or AT session), or it could be informal (students are honor-bound to discuss an issue from class for a certain amount of time with another student). Potentially, these could even be led by a facilitator (as AT sessions are) who would be an upperclass student who had taken the course before. This should not be enacted addition to existing course assignments, but rather as a supplement, recognizing the high value of intellectual engagement and discourse between students (a value that, in my mind, is on par with additional reading and writing assignments).
Informal intellectual discussions
Good examples of this already exist on campus. The Dean Rusk program has been holding biweekly “tea-time chats” at Dr. Alexander’s house for years; facilitated by a student, these informal discussions have covered all sorts of international topics and have led to very fruitful discussions among students. The Math department holds a weekly “math coffee” discussion with a similar purpose in mind. Several departments (bio and most language departments, and there may be others I’m unaware of) have weekly tables at Commons, with faculty, majors/minors and interested students in attendance. Last spring Political Science started a series of informal biweekly discussions held on Friday afternoons at the campus Summit, examining a different timely issue in politics/political science each week. The SGA should encourage similar programming among other academic departments.
These are a few simple ideas. I look forward to engaging with peers and SGA members in the coming months to identify other efforts that can be made to enhance Davidson’s public intellectual culture.
dvdsn dvdsn 