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A License To Print Money!
Since before you were born, the National Association of Colleges and Employers has asked hiring managers what they look for in the people they hire, and the #1 answer year after year is communication skills. In COMM 212: Storytelling and Public Speaking, you’ll get on your feet and get your feet wet, talking about yourself, giving your testimony, telling stories about your family, mastering Powerpoint, and even learning a thing or two about research and persuasion.
You can have the whole world in your hands!
You’ve flashcarded all the vocabulary and sweated out the grammar, so now you know a foreign language and are ready to study or work abroad. But what if you make a mistake? What if you offend somebody? What if you think you’re waving hello, but actually you’re calling someone’s mother an aardvark snuggler? After COMM 220: Intercultural Communication, you’ll be equipped with the tools to analyze different cultures, avoid pitfalls, make friends, win respect, and navigate the globe with nothing to fear.
Road trip!
Have you always wanted to be better at reading expressively, thinking on your feet, or talking in front of people? Want to improve in all those areas without having to stress over the grade? How does taking out of town trips on the university’s dime, making smart friends from other colleges, and enjoy bonding time with your fellow Beacons sound? COMM 322: Forensics earns you upper division credit for being a Speakin’ Beacon, a member of the NCU speech and debate team. You commit to a half-hour team meeting each week, plus a half-hour one-on-one practice session with Doyle, and then you compete in the novice division at no more than two tournaments. Have fun, get smarter, get out of town!
Never be manipulated again!
From politicians to businesses to your own family members, everyone you communicate with has an agenda, and they all try in their own ways to manipulate you. In COMM 340: Rhetorical Criticism and Argumentation, we study the art of persuasion and the framing of good reasons. Learn to spot both the blatant and the subtle attempts to wear down your resistance and sway you into doing someone else’s bidding. You’ll swell up with pride the first time you say, “No sir, these are the droids I’m looking for!”
Decode the secret messages all around you!
You, and everyone else on earth, transmit a raging flood of information at every moment, even when you think you’re being silent and unremarkable. Plenty of people promise you that they can teach you how to read “body language,” but most of their claims are ridiculous hogwash. In COMM 430: Nonverbal Communication, we focus on reliable, sound research into messages of appearance, posture, voice, facial expression, gesture, and much, much more, and we separate the truth from the nonsense that people slap together just to make a buck.
(This is the other thing I did for the latest issue of the Mishpat. They asked for classified ads for all the Spring classes, to give students an idea what they were about.)
I remember being six years old, standing on a riser in an outlandish getup, and singing “All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth.” But that was a vicious lie. For one thing, I didn’t lose my first baby tooth until almost two years later. For another, all I really wanted for Christmas was a Batmobile. A big one.
Early on, I showed promise as a communicator. I could drop hints like the Enola Gay could drop kilotons, and on this occasion I held nothing back. Each afternoon, when “Batman” came on TV, I sat bolt upright and watched for a shot of the Batmobile. Then I’d bounce up and down, stab my finger at the TV, and make a noise like a litter of guinea pigs startled by a gunshot. My mom told me a dozen or more times, “All right, we get it.” Finally, she threatened to change the channel, which shut me up like magic. The appropriate-sized box appeared up under the Christmas tree, and I figured the fix was in.
On Christmas morning, I snatched up my box of joy, but the second I did, my heart sank. Remember how you could tell from the weight that a present wasn’t a toy, but a sweater? I clutched it, unopened, turned my little kid sad eyes on my parents, and clicked on the high-beams. “Honey, that’s your present from Aunt Della,” said my mom. “You’ve got other presents.” She picked one up and handed it to me. It was tiny, but it had heft, so I shucked it in a few quick motions.
They’d gotten me the Hot Wheels Batmobile.
It had about one molecule of cool to it, but it paled next to my dream, the same way a single pizza flavored goldfish cracker just can’t hold its own against a family-sized pizza with everything. How were my Batman and Robin action figures supposed to fit inside it? Didn’t my folks understand that Batman and Robin had places to go?
I almost missed out on the rest of Christmas that year, because I fell so deeply into a sulk that no one could stand to be around me. And that would’ve been a shame, because it was clear to me that Christmas wasn’t about presents. It was just as much about cookies and pie. It was also about Christmas TV specials that came on only once a year, back before TiVo, DVDs, or even VHS. And it was about snuggling up on the couch with my entire family while my mom read the Christmas story out loud from the Bible.
The longer I live, the more TV-related inventions I can rack up that didn’t exist when I was a kid. Not only that, but I also appreciate more every year how bankrupt is the whole “Get get get” mindset into which so many of us fall every Christmastime. Especially I find that the whole present-buying mission is tangled up with a sizable dose of mind-reading, which is a disaster waiting to happen. One December I took my seven-year-old nephew Christmas shopping for his little sister, and I watched carefully to see what he picked up. Later that night, after he went to bed, I returned to the same toy store and chose the three or four things he’d admired the most. On Christmas morning, I scored several big hits in a row, but as he picked up his last present, I said “I think you’re especially going to like this one!” With one of those high notes of little kid ecstasy in his voice, he said, “It’s a camera?” And my smile froze, and with my voice trailing off, I said, “Ah. I, uh … didn’t know you wanted a camera.” And his whole bubble of inflated expectations suddenly popped, as it does, at the first sign of disappointment. It was the Batmobile letdown all over again, only this time I was the giver who fell short.
But it turned out okay, because we’d done so much more than rip open presents on Christmas morning. We went out and looked at decorations around the neighborhood. At one point, he saw an airplane’s blinking lights, and shouted “Maybe that’s Santa Claus!” We teamed up to bake a mess of Christmas cookies – only chocolate chip cookies I’ve ever made that were slice and bake – most of which went into his parents’ and sister’s stomachs, and only two of which we saved for Santa and the reindeer. (But he spent a lot of time deciding which cookies were ones he wanted to put aside for them!)
And just a few minutes after everyone had opened their last present, I opened the Bible and read the Christmas story aloud, with a nephew snuggled up on one side and a niece on the other, both staring into the distance, lost in the world of the story. They asked questions about Mary and Joseph, the stable, the star, the angels, and I remember easily a dozen questions about Mary’s donkey. For the record, I have no idea what its name was, or whether she petted it when it felt sad. If Dr. Crow or Dr. Heine knows, I hope they’ll do the right thing and speak up.
And I think we do that to our Father far too often. James 4:3 says “You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures.” We do it year-round, but we cheat ourselves even more when we do it at Christmas. Our Father, who chose the weak and humble to throw down the proud and mighty, who delights to do mighty things that we could never see coming, gave His people exactly what He’d promised, and because they expected something different, something in line with their own wrong motives, they rejected the Father’s gift and were disappointed. I pray we’ll make this the year that we don’t fall victim to that mistake.
(The editor of the Northwest Christian University school paper, the Mishpat, asked me a few weeks back to write something about Christmas. This is what I submitted. It ran in the current edition. I'm putting it up here so folks from other locales can see it as well.)
So one of my favorite cheap shots is to say that someone has all the critical acuity of dental floss. But then, this morning, on my walk to work, I got to thinking. (Most years, the quality of my thinking by this point in the term has oozed away in unexpected directions, knocked off center by fatigue. It's not necessarily bad, wrong, or irrational, but it's certainly unpredictable.)So anyway, I said to myself, That's actually a pretty bad metaphor, because dental floss gets into those tight, dark, crevices and works out the debris that rots and corrodes. It's actually sort of a compliment to say that someone's critical thinking skills are like dental floss.I need a vacation.
We have this really pernicious idea, my generation and the ones following it, that I think it's high time we stamped out. That idea is the concept of "free time." I am more and more convinced that there is no such thing as free time.
When my mother was a child, she worked in the fields to earn money for her school clothes and other necessities. She began doing this when she was still very young. On a number of occasions, she talked about how hard she worked and the aches and pains she felt at the end of the day, and she always ended by saying that she wanted an easier life for her own children. I think that's a very widespread, and in fact almost universal wish: nearly all parents who have hard work in their backgrounds aspire to provide their children with an easier life. Furthermore, I think a lot of folks identify with that wish, think it's a noble one, and are grateful to parents who worked toward that goal. And I'm not even prepared to say it's a bad goal. But it does tuck one stubborn distortion into its beneficiaries' worldview: the notion of free time.
There is simply no such thing as free time. All leisure time is earned. All discretionary time is the result of work. We have time to relax, to reflect, to take care of our needs, after we have addressed our responsibilities. We do not possess such time as our entitlement.
Misunderstandings about that are one of the big anchors of the time sickness that too many college students have. Yes, you have to have down time and leisure time to stay healthy; I freely admit that. But another requirement of good health is healthy food, made from healthy ingredients, and no one's giving that away either. Try shopping in the produce section, especially the organic half of it, and then just walking out the door, telling the store manager "I need this to be healthy, so I'm entitled to take it for the asking." I doubt that'll go over well.
Many folks my age and younger grew up with a measure of unstructured time that would've dazzled our parents and grandparents when they were young. And because we grew up immersed in that reality, we simply accepted it as a feature, an element of the scene, a constant, just like sunrise and sunset and oxygen. Time to relax was simply part of the world picture. But it wasn't! Through much of this nation's history, and throughout much of the rest of the world, children are expected to pitch in and work to contribute to the household pool of resources. In our culture, today, we've made a collective decision that children are largely exempt from that shared responsibility. But that doesn't mean the leisure time bubbles up from some magic, inexhaustible spring. It just means the parents have to work that much harder. The kids' playtime isn't free time; it's a gift, a provision, from the parents' hard work. And when the children leave the parents' protection, the free time goes with it. But because we're so accustomed to it, that's not immediately evident. And for many kids, college is the first shock, the first wave of struggle with that changed reality.
Responsibilities have to be tackled, carried out, and completed, and then there is earned time, which is not at all the same as free time. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch, and there ain't no such thing as free time, and the "I feel overloaded, I feel stretched, I desperately want time to relax, so I'll simply demand it and claim that I'm owed it" argument is flawed, false-to-fact and childish. It's also, I regret to say, a stubbornly rooted collective belief, not only among college students, but among a whole lot of the young adults of my acquaintance. What would be required to dislodge the belief is unclear to me, but I sure wish I knew.
The Northwest Christian University Forensics Team enjoyed its first taste of success in mid-November, and was left hungry for more. According to sophomore Sam Robison, “It was a great learning experience and overall a great trip.”
The team, nicknamed the “Speakin’ Beacons,” traveled to McMinnville on November 14 to compete at the R. D. Mahaffey Memorial Forensics Tournament, hosted annually by Linfield College since 1930. Sophomore Jed Noles described it as “A lot like a wrestling tournament, only with less athletes and no spandex.” Robison and Noles were joined by senior Jeramy Anderson, junior Jason Bell, and first-years Ryan Vermilyea and Areyell Williams, to make up NCU’s traveling squad.
The competitors entered events in three categories: oral interpretation of literature, including poetry, prose, drama, and a special “mad libs” event invented by the tournament host; platform speaking, both informative and persuasive; and impromptu speaking, in which speakers were given a quote and allowed up to two minutes to prepare a five minute speech to be given immediately. In each event, the students spoke three times, grouped with four or five competitors from other schools, and a judged ranked the presentations from best to worst.
Robison received one first place ranking for his informative speech on infinity, Anderson a first place ranking for his poetry about nightmares, and Noles received a first place ranking for his dramatic monologue about domestic violence. Robison said, “My performance was the best I could do at that time. However, I feel that there is room for improvement and look forward to the next one.” After the three preliminary rounds were complete, the top speakers in the tournament, by lowest total of ranks, advanced to an elimination round to determine final placement. Noles’ rankings in impromptu speaking earned him a spot in the semifinals, where he placed #10 overall in his first attempt at the event. “That’s my favorite event,” said Noles. “I've still got a long ways to go before I get to my potential, though.”
On Thursday night, before departing for the tournament, the Speakin’ Beacons staged a showcase for the NCU campus, attended by twenty NCU students, faculty and staff. Williams and Noles presented impromptu speeches, Robison his informative speech, Vermilyea his poetry, and Noles and Bell their dramatic monologues. Robison commented, “Jason gave an excellent dramatic interpretation. His performance sucked me into his piece and made me laugh and tear up, which is the kind of piece it is supposed to be. When he gave his piece, I saw the nine-year old boy he was in the piece, not Jason Bell.” Noles agreed: “I enjoyed Jason's monologue very much. It just proves that he's a kid at heart, I guess.”
The Speakin’ Beacons travel to two tournaments each semester, and the tournaments are no more than a two hour drive from Eugene. Students can receive academic credit for participating on the team by registering for COMM 322. The class obligates its enrollees to attend a half-hour team meeting each week, whose time is negotiated to fit everyone’s schedule, and also to schedule a half-hour one-on-one coaching session each week with Doyle Srader, the director of forensics at NCU. Students are also free to compete without registering for the class if they choose.
Says Noles, “Our school is training pastors, teachers, people in many other professions in which they will be representing Christ in a world that needs to experience His love. Having this kind of experience in public and impromptu speaking makes us ready for the situations that will arise in life where we will need to proclaim the message of the cross.”
Check out the following verses. Read enough around them to get the context. You'll see what's been on my mind for the past couple of weeks.
My child, you too can grow up to be president!
So long as you graduate from Harvard, and not from Howard.
So long as your birthplace was somewhere comforting, all-American, and instantly recognizable.
So long as when you speak, you sound more like John Edwards and less like Martin Luther King, Jr.
So long as you refrain from ever showing anger, unless you’re white.
So long as you are definitely, definitely not a Muslim, Article VI of the Constitution be damned.
Don’t get me wrong; it’s progress, but it’s not the finish line. Don’t be fooled.
In 2010, I genuinely want to see Republicans turn the tide and start winning again. But there's a catch: they have to do it the right way.
The "right way" doesn't mean they have to abandon what they believe in and move to the left. It doesn't mean they have to repeat that terrible experiment of the Clinton years, "triangulation." Wrong-footing your opponents by adopting a watered-down version of what they're pitching, just enough to temporarily placate voters in the middle, is no way to run a government. There's a reason so many of Clinton's voters had to hold their noses and vote for him, and the biggest part of it has nothing to do with the percentage of time he kept his fly closed. The impression he gave folks, that he operated on zero principle and a hundred percent expediency, came directly from the way he governed, and we're well rid of it.
So what do I mean?
I swung, politically, from the far right to the far left almost twenty years ago, which is another story for another time. But even after I did, one of my favorite members of the Senate was Nancy Kassebaum. (I was a debater back then, and we had no choice but to keep up with current events if we wanted to win, which is why I had a "favorite member of the Senate.") She was smart, she was principled, she solved problems, and she was a Kansas Republican. Another Kansas Republican was Robert Dole, and even though I had identified politically with the far left for a number of years by then, I nevertheless voted for him for president in 1996, because Clinton's behavior had so disgusted me, and I thought Dole was far better endowed with integrity and judgment.
Bear with me. I'm getting there.
I've also lived in Texas an awful lot, including my entire childhood and almost a decade of my adult life. If I had a hard time getting along with Republicans, I would've had fewer friends than George W. Bush currently has. Instead, I was blessed to know a whole lot of very lovable, very far-right people who were accepting, patient, and open-minded with me. And I've known a few who were so devastatingly intelligent that they could stick a stiletto in my political positions and force me to rack my brains as hard as I could to defend them.
People with those gifts and that temperament are not currently leading the Republican party. I have no idea why.
Right now, the Republican leadership is oriented toward seeking out fights, picking them, and landing enough punches to put on a good show. It captures the attention of their base, because it's human nature to pay attention to conflict. It harnesses their outrage that people dare to disagree with them, and that outrage becomes energy and motivation that drives them to write checks and cast their votes. But it's a corrosive, poisonous, self-extinguishing strategy. A rule of politics that is ageless wisdom, that you can carve into granite and count on, is that people who disagree with you do not stop being your neighbors. When Republicans work up the outrage over and over again that other people dare to disagree with them, eventually they alienate so many of their neighbors that government loses the critical mass of pooled effort that it requires. That outrage and hostility is, at that point, easily identifiable as the source of the breakdown, and as a target for those neighbors to smother with an electoral defeat.
Campaigning on enmity and hatred is a shortcut, and a terribly sloppy one. It amazes me now that Karl Rove actually spoke, in 2004, of the Republican majority being "permanent." He may as well have fogged the nearest window with his breath and written majority with his finger.
So what would a Republican win in the next election look like?
First thing Republicans have to do is grab the nettle and tell themselves, "Yes, it takes unusual intelligence and competence to govern." There is no shame in saying to someone else, "You're better at this than I am," or "You understand this better than I do," and agreeing to comply with their instructions for that very reason. And there is no virtue in saying "I like you, so you're in charge." Not a scrap. None. Zero. In fact, it's a boneheaded way to pick a leader. Time to dump it on the trashheap of history.
Having done that, they need to search out their brilliant members and listen to them. They need to learn to approach politics not as distributive bargaining, where there's a finite pot of goods to be split, and the object of the game is to beat back your opponent and grab as much as you can, but rather as integrative bargaining, where if both sides will agree to contribute all their talents to making the enterprise run at maximum efficiency, then everyone will get more from the pot, because the pot itself will grow larger.
How will we know this is happening? One big sign: the word "liberal" will never come out of their mouths. If the best a candidate can do is fling "liberal" as a perjorative term, then they've got nothing. They aren't bringing ideas, they're bringing leftovers.
This is not my wish or my request: this is my diagnosis and my prediction. Republicans can either make a clean, radical break with the tactics of the past, or they can muddle through, half-and-half, still contaminating their platform and their argument for people's votes with the old, polarizing tactics that make the negotiation distributive instead of integrative. If the Democrats had nominated Hillary, the primary candidate who had all the institutional advantages and knew how to play the game, I have no idea who would be president this morning. Instead, the Democrats nominated the unsafe choice, the departure, the one who didn't play the game the old way, who broke old rules and pulled new ones out of thin air, and the results speak for themselves: an electoral outcome that wasn't inches from stalemate, but was the most dramatic in a generation. Sure, economic conditions and Bush's mistakes gave Obama a cushion of voter discontent, but I'm convinced that the layer of votes traceable to those two forces is thinner than most folks seem to think, although historians may not be able to make that case this side of the next century.
For the Republicans, a clean break will harness the incredible minds that wait in their ranks, and will pipe new fuel, new ideas, new proposals into this country's engines of creativity. A cautious, muddled, indecisive housecleaning will not do. And if Republicans turn out for the 2010 elections still framing politics as a war against enemy liberals who must be defeated, then they're in for another thrashing, another piledriving, another wipe-out, to rival the one we just witnessed. And the painful lesson can be administered as often as necessary until it is learned.
I am prepared to wake up the day after the 2010 elections to find that Republicans pulled off a smashing wave of victories, and to smile and be glad about it, if they do it the right way. This country works best when everyone, from all political perspectives, chips in their very best efforts. This is a moment where a big national stumbling block has acquired an enormous crack. The Republicans can fill it in with cement and keep it in place, so we all can keep tripping over it, or they can stick in their chisel and finish the job. I pray they will, and I pray the 2010 fight will be an even match that brings out the best in everyone.
