2008 Woodie Awards
Rising tuition, Samatar, elitism: Macalester isn't all it should be
By: Michael Galvin
Issue date: 9/28/07 Section: Opinion
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In his article in The Mac Weekly last week, Josh Jorgensen presented an argument that could have been written by the Macalester administration itself. Not only does he muster the nerve to defend his Institute for Global Citizenship, Macalester's financial structure, and the necessity of American involvement in the world, but he tops it off by deriding the school's "activist tradition."
To start, I should remind everyone that we are in the midst of a disastrous war in Iraq that has gone on for 4.5 years, and in which almost 170,000 American troops are still directly involved; this is a war that even Richard Holbrooke argued is "worse than Vietnam." Thus, Jorgensen's statement, "American involvement is indeed necessary in the world today, for conflict prevention and resolution, for the solution of all transnational ills," is beyond poorly timed.
Simultaneously, there exist worrying ties between the politics of this war, and the leaders and purported purposes of this Institute for Global Citizenship. This has been clear ever since pro-war demagogue Thomas Friedman was invited at a rumored - yet undisclosed - cost of $70,000, to give the Institute's inaugural address.
The Institute not only aims to create a group of elite "global citizen-leaders," trained in the United States to spread their "expertise" elsewhere, but it is also headed by two of the most conservative faculty members at Macalester, and with negligible student input. The "student advisory committee" description, at the bottom of the Institute's web page on organizational structure, officially delegates this committee's role as "a vehicle for the development of student leadership." And yet I assume one only fully completes this training after taking director Ahmed Samatar's course on becoming a global leader.
For me though, full realization that this student committee serves only a puppet role came about in the initial months of its formation, Fall 2006, when Samatar finally attended a student meeting and monologued on eliminating "tribalisms" at Macalester in order to achieve unity and actually "get things done."
To start, I should remind everyone that we are in the midst of a disastrous war in Iraq that has gone on for 4.5 years, and in which almost 170,000 American troops are still directly involved; this is a war that even Richard Holbrooke argued is "worse than Vietnam." Thus, Jorgensen's statement, "American involvement is indeed necessary in the world today, for conflict prevention and resolution, for the solution of all transnational ills," is beyond poorly timed.
Simultaneously, there exist worrying ties between the politics of this war, and the leaders and purported purposes of this Institute for Global Citizenship. This has been clear ever since pro-war demagogue Thomas Friedman was invited at a rumored - yet undisclosed - cost of $70,000, to give the Institute's inaugural address.
The Institute not only aims to create a group of elite "global citizen-leaders," trained in the United States to spread their "expertise" elsewhere, but it is also headed by two of the most conservative faculty members at Macalester, and with negligible student input. The "student advisory committee" description, at the bottom of the Institute's web page on organizational structure, officially delegates this committee's role as "a vehicle for the development of student leadership." And yet I assume one only fully completes this training after taking director Ahmed Samatar's course on becoming a global leader.
For me though, full realization that this student committee serves only a puppet role came about in the initial months of its formation, Fall 2006, when Samatar finally attended a student meeting and monologued on eliminating "tribalisms" at Macalester in order to achieve unity and actually "get things done."
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Josh Jorgensen
posted 10/16/07 @ 11:56 AM CST
I'd like to follow up Michael Galvin's piece with some comments here, since I didn't think I'd waste space in the Weekly with a response.
The article would be a good rebuttal to my own piece, if only it didn?t contain so many errors of fact, exaggerations, and irrelevant passages. (Continued…)
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