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MY Thoughts on Topics and the Process
I would like for the community to consider a couple of issues
concerning the topic process and I do this just an interested and
concerned member of the community and the topic committee but not in any
official capacity.
1. Should infotech and mass media be on the ballot for topic areas?
2. Should the topic committee attempt to eliminate certain topic areas from
the growing list of possibilities? How should the topic committee handle
the possibility of too many topic areas on the ballot? Some people
believe too many topics result in bad choices, split voting and bad
results. This may or may not be true.
3. How should the community and the topic committee deal with those
potential topic areas where personal advocacy and ideology precedes any
deliberation about the area or specific topic? This seems to be a
potential problem in terms of pre-season thinking, analysis, advoacy
and judging on such topics. The best current example of this is the civil
rights topic. This issue has been discussed already in a somewhat
unfocused way and when the issue has been raised, some members of the
community have seen this as racist, patriarchial, or narrow
minded in terms of a proposed new way of thinking about topics. Forgive
me if I have misunderstood these objections. But it seems that these
arguments have led to silence when these ideas need to be discussed. I
believe that the best response to "bad speech" (if this exists) is more
speech.
4. CEDA MEMBERS NEED TO VOTE ON THE TOPIC AREA CHOICES AND WE NEED TO
ENCOURAGE ALL MEMBER SCHOOLS TO VOTE. Too few people have been voting in
recent elections.
Russ Church
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Archive created by Jonathan Stanton (jonathan@cs.jhu.edu)
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