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We can learn a lot about what to expect in the coming year by looking back on the previous one. The 2005-06 school year was chock full of controversy, petulant whining and insufferable posturing -- an inchoate, muddled mass of Sturm und Drang.
The year started with one man's quixotic fight against Department of Defense funding of University projects. Brian Bogart was the man, and many would call him a hero. These people would be wrong. Bogart started his Strike for Peace movement with much ballyhoo in the Eugene Weekly. "The Army used to make its own tuna sandwiches, but today Bumble Bee has a lucrative Pentagon contract, and therefore a stake in conflict and a good reason not to speak out against war,"? wrote Bogart in the Eugene Weekly. In an earlier Eugene Weekly column, Bogart used a cunning rhetorical tactic - lulling his audience into lassitude with mixed metaphors and redundancy.
"America was built for a people-based engine with people at the wheel investing in people," states the University's only graduate student in Peace Studies (one imagines with a minor in Prolix Incomprehensibility). Yes, Bogart, "people power" was once a hallmark of America. Then the states ratified the 13th Amendment.
Bogart's much-touted Strike for Peace was a bit of a let down; it consisted of him sitting under a tent handing out fliers to disinterested passersby and stating that he couldn't attend class because the University was engaging in immoral activities. Never mind that the University was not taking money for weapons research, and that the research it was conducting was open and peer-reviewed. Bogart's Strike for Peace lasted about as long as the sunny weather would hold.
Bogart's strange journey from mild-mannered graduate student to mildly inarticulate leader of a nascent on-campus political movement is typical for this campus, where unconvincing and often wrongheaded movements pop up with the consistency of ground nutria in Carson Hall dishes (I'm kidding, naturally; we all know that University Housing can only afford nutria substitute). These movements help only one person: the de facto leader of the movement.
In terms of wrongheadedness, it's hard to outdo the University's administration. Last year administrators thrust two poorly reasoned new policies our way: First, the long-gestating "Diversity Plan" was finalized, after years of hand-wringing, chin wagging, and eye winking - not to mention a number of closed-door meetings between the types of campus leaders whose departments will benefit financially from such a plan.
Nobody knows what the Diversity Plan will do. It has undergone two drafts. The first came in 2005; the second came in 2006, after many faculty member raised a ruckus after the first draft's publication. The second draft, which finally passed through the University Senate, didn't fare much better among its detractors, who accused it of abusing statistical data, pandering, and blatant condescension.
"All programs of this great University provide courses, opportunities for advanced study, and scholarly work of interest to students and faculty from underrepresented groups. These students (and all other students) don't like to be pigeonholed," wrote the detractors, primarily economics and math professors, in a second open letter to President Frohnmayer.
The University's approach to diversity may seem noble (everyone is in favor of the diversity) but the Diversity Plan's narrow definition and lack of specifics make it impracticable - nothing more than a piece of writing.
Then, in late 2006, as the school year wound down, the campus' own anarchist/Marxist publication, The Insurgent, created the year's most lasting controversy: Jesus Bonergate. In its second-to-last issue, The Insurgent published a number of childish, thoroughly unfunny depictions of Jesus doing things that Jesus ought not do. Truly comedy gold. This provoked the ire of campus Christians, Catholic League President (and shrill talking head) Bill Donohue, and most important Bill O'Reilly. You really know you've arrived as a University when Bill O'Reilly starts calling for the culling of your administrative staff. Nobody who complained, it seemed, had ever even heard of The Insurgent, which is a silly little publication with the journalistic weight of bathroom graffiti. Expect this controversy to rear its head again this year, when The Insurgent goes before the Programs Finance Committee to suckle at the teat of the Incidental Fee, so it can put out some more of its trenchant commentary.
Incoming freshmen and returning students alike can expect a healthy dose of University craziness this year, as the usual suspects (annoying activists, smelly hippies, and incoherently angry conservatives) once again converge upon this campus to engage in their tomfoolery, if last year was any indication of the shenanigans in store this coming year, then color me excited.
And finally, allow me to apologize for my use of the term Sturm und Drang. One thing that you learn, after being on this campus for too long, is that it's full of faux intellectuals. Apparently, I am one.
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