Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

I went to my first commission on higher education mediation meeting today.

It wasn't as bad as I had feared it would be, although it wasn't all good either.

It's certainly an experience I never thought would be on the plate when I applied for coordinator of student affairs at the start of the school year.

And afterwards I wanted to forget the whole thing, but I couldn't because the driver of the car the school has assigned to me was listening to the congressional hearings on the fertilizer scam.

The whole memory of unreasonable questions and evasive answers was therefore allowed to stay fresh in my memory for the entire trip back to the school, although I now wish we also had a live audience.

That, I believe, would definitely have changed the dynamic of the proceeding.

But what surprises me is that even with the fact that there are thousands if not millions of people listening or watching the investigations, that these witnesses still don't know how to act properly.

Properly in the sense that we're talking about audiences inured to decades of simplistic black-is-bad/white-is-good programming.

Therefore a person's guilt or innocence is already measured by how easily or confidently he or she answers the questions.

There's also the tone of desperation that is either the mark of someone faultless and pleading against all the overwhelming but somehow planted evidence damning them, or of someone running out of credible lies and backed into a corner.

Smugness equals guilt, and feeling safe that they are untouchable.

Hmmm, now I'm thinking I should have written this for the student accessible version.

Session 2465 thinks I might copy and paste except for the first part, but maybe not; that would be cheating on the overall number of pages. Class dismissed.