‘Live and Let Dialogue, Part II,’ the followup to the hotly debated (haha!) op-ed piece that critiques the narrative-centric culture of conflict resolution at Skidmore, was released late last night. Quite simply, if you’ve read ‘Part I’, you must read ‘Part II’.

The op-ed was split into two parts due to some combination of (a) it had to be released near enough to the event it was responding to, (b) the EIC is – gasp – a student and has other work to do, (c) the EIC gets a kick out of controversy, and giving the whole argument away at once doesn’t allow for such tensions to build. So think of it that way, and consider the pause he took between ‘I’ and ‘II’ to be a giant gathering of breath. Let him finish, clarify, then go for it.

Equally exciting is that Rick Chrisman is also getting in on the game. Read Rick’s latest op-ed, also released yesterday. In addition to being a great writer, he makes the case that perhaps the big bad Brendan and everyone he mortally offended the other evening are actually on the same page. My favorite part:

For whatever reason, the Editor values the experience of public discussion of issues over the sharing which occurs in dialogues. That is his preference. By the same token, for their personal reasons, the students prefer the dialogue as a setting for airing their grievances.  But people shouldn’t expect the private setting to meet the goals of a public event, or vice versa. The Editor makes a mistake when expecting dialogues to be other than—well, dialogues. And the students are mistaken when they haven’t recognized that the next step after dialogue is to bring their grievances to the level of a community arena where they can be deliberated upon publicly. Each has an indispensable place in the process, but they are not at all the same thing.

The comments should be interesting on this one. I’ll leave it at that.