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Please be seated.
As many of you know, I have spoken often throughout my years at Macalester
about my distress at the level of our national public discourse.
So it will come as no surprise to many of you to find that in today's American Town Square,
I note relatively few models of Ciceronian eloquence, Cartesian logic
or Lincolnesque compassion for one's fellow human beings.
This afternoon I want to return to this topic in a somewhat different way
and through the lens of personal experience.
Despite the fact that I love to write
and am more or less perpetually convinced that I have something worthwhile to say,
I have until recently avoided blogging like the plague.
The way I figure it, there are already enough channels
through which people can very considerately let me know that I am wrong, ill informed, malicious or incompetent.
Email is, of course, still the channel of choice,
but there is also the telephone, the personal meeting, the public forum and that old standby:
the anonymous note under the door.
Low-tech, but highly effective.
Why add another opportunity?
The world of blogs is not my world.
It is an alien place, where people with elegant nom de plume like "Hypnotode53" and "Yankees suck"
launch diatribes against the United Nations and Derek Jeter.
And yet, when I was invited by the editor of the Huffington Post, Education section to blog for those electronic pages,
I was smitten.
Arianna Huffington. The woman is on Real Time with Bill Maher like, every other week.
AOL just paid more than $300 million for the Huffington Post, and we all know that AOL never gets it wrong.
How could i Resist?
I did not resist. I blogged.
An elegant little piece, I think, on the macroeconomic forces that have contributed to the rapid escalation of college prices:
well-researched, pithy, forceful but not overly-defensive.
At the very least, it would add some useful information to an important discussion.
What could be bad?
And then the comments started appearing, and I was reminded why I don't blog.
The first one opened with a deft turn of phrase: "hogwash."
Now really, who outside the confines of Masterpiece Theatre actually uses the word "hogwash"?
Blog readers, apparently.
Mr. Hogwash proceeded to blame the rise in college costs on the lavish spending of the federal government,
demanding parents and avaricious administrators.
To which I was tempted to reply "balderdash,"
and perhaps challenge him to a duel, 30 paces with a brace of pistols.
Other comments followed in a similarly jaunty vain:
"Mr. Rosenberg, you cannot be serious."
Now to give this correspondent the benefit of the doubt, perhaps his was a deliberate and deft illusion
to early-period John McEnroe, say circa 1983.
At the time that I wrote the blog I thought I was serious, but who knows, I suppose? I could've been joking.
Though this particular comment was filled with colossal factual errors -
for example, all private colleges cost almost exactly the same -
they were stated in such a heartfelt way that one could hardly object.
And so it went.
"Hilarious" - I don't think this was meant as a compliment.
Gross misstatements about budgets and student-faculty ratios, voiced with absolute certainty.
A comparison between American college students and the unemployed youth of the Middle East.
One comment referencing teeth and the working class was just coherent enough to be creepy.
Let's be honest, who among us would not at least be tempted - tempted - to post a response to some of these synonymous pundits?
"Dear Elite (underline) Academics (underline) Know (underline) Nothing (smiley face),
Warm thanks for taking the time to reply to my piece on college costs. You are, unfortunately, an idiot.
LOL."
Cathartic, it's true, but well beneath the dignity of a college president.
Besides, responding directly to angry commenters on one's blog is generally considered
the equivalent of tossing a large piece of red meat into the midst of a pack of Horatius predators.
They will work themselves into a frenzy, tearing it to shreds and come back for more,
generally by repeating their earlier misstatements in all caps and with many exclamation points.
All of this does leave me wondering about the effect of the new virtual universe of bloggers
and tweeters and facebookies - I made up that word, I just like the word - on our public discourse.
One hears a lot about the democratization of culture brought about by new technologies,
and about the breaking down of long-standing barriers to communication.
Fair enough.
But maybe some of those barriers were there for a reason,
and maybe not all of them are better off in ruins.
Do we seem, as a society, more informed and productive as a consequence of the explosion
of unfettered, virtual communication?
Are we making wiser decisions?
Have you ever taken a look at the comments that follow any online opinion piece
published even by an outfit as mainstream as CNN?
I admit that I find rather comforting the notion of an editor who will say,
"check the accuracy of factual claims before they appear in whatever we call the online equivalent of print."
These days, that sentiment makes me feel rather like Mr. Darcy of Pride and Prejudice, without the humongous estate.
So my council to our graduating seniors is to aspire to a higher standard.
Text and tweet and Twitter away,
but remember what your time at Macalester has taught you about such things as the use of evidence,
the virtue of a beautifully-turned sentence
and civility in one's interactions with others, whether real or virtual.
Aspire in your own actions to a higher standard and you might, by example, inspire others to follow.
There is, of course, no going backward.
No retreating from the current forms of communication
and certainly no predicting what forms lurk around the corner.
So what can come of this desire to present an alternative to the hogwash and missed information and personal attacks
that seem to be overwhelming our ability to tune it all out?
What, I ask myself as an erstwhile scholar of Victorian literature, would Charles Dickens do?
The answer, alas, is stark and unavoidable: he would, I have no doubt, start a blog.
Best wishes to all of you in your future endeavors, and remember to tweet responsibly.
Thank you.