Just like Mom's Subaru

Intersections, the first in a new series of panel discussions, begins Tuesday with a focus on Religion.

Reverend Rick Chrisman the Director of Religious and Spiritual Life, Rabbi Linda Motzkin the Jewish Chaplain, Marla Segol an Assistant Professor of Religion, and a guest Imam from Schenectady will head the panel and participate in a mostly informal discussion with the audience. The event begins at 6:30pm in the Case Center Commons.

“The series is designed to interrogate and illuminate our understandings of religion, gender, race, sexuality, nation and class—with separate panel discussions focusing on each topic. Dr. Cornel West, noted Princeton scholar and public intellectual, will provide the capstone lecture for the series on April 7.”

thefacebook group for the event, sponsored by The Committee on InterGlobal Understanding and Bias Response Group, repeatedly assures us that the discussion will be “open ended,” that “no question is off-limits,” and many of the provided sample questions seem promising. What I worry about is the possibility of any actual discussion emerging here. Anyone who has ever tried to start any serious discussion even tangentially related to these broad topics in class knows how exasperating it can be. We cannot expect any sort of meaningful dialogue to emerge on campus if we continue to immediately dismiss differing opinions and so rabidly police political correctness. These panels are an ambitious undertaking and have an enormous potential to be both an amazing success and a terrible liberally self-congratulating failure.

An unchallenged political ideology is not something I want to graduate college with yaddaimean?