The Lighter Side: A Strategic Plan
Replacing “A Moment With Mumma” will be “The Lighter Side” where an editor or author discussing some of the events that we saw in the news over the past month in a “lighter” way. This section may contain blatant or hidden sarcasm, distasteful jokes, and or other literary devices that should not be read literally. Thank you and enjoy!
On September 17th, President Gast held a townhall meeting discussing the short and long-term goals for the Lehigh community. Were you there? Probably not, considering most people have classes from 1 to 2:30 on a Thursday. Did you hear about it before hand? Again, probably not. The events advertisements consisted of an article on the Lehigh homepage, strategically hidden along other exciting headlines such as “A dose of HPC helps buildings survive earthquakes intact,” and “Arup SenGupta wins new acclaim for improving global health.”
While it really is great that Arup developed technology to remove arsenic from drinking water in poverty-stricken regions of the world, the headline isn’t really something to make you sit up in your chair. Everything aside though, this town hall meeting clearly was not designed for the Lehigh student body to attend. There’s two reasons why this could be the case. First, President Gast and company don’t think students care about the strategic vision or second, they don’t want students to care about the strategic vision.
I felt this was something I should look into, and thus did something no Lehigh student has done yet. I downloaded the 30-page Strategic Plan, and read it. It’s not the most exciting thing in the world, but I did pick up that the strategic plan is big on strategies. In 30 pages, the word ‘Strategic’ appears 44 times. This brought to mind an amusing image of President Gast sitting in her office muttering “Strategery” in her very best George Bush imitation.
But let’s move on to more important things, such as the aforementioned Strategic Plan. It is simple in essence, looking to improve Lehigh, the faculty, students, and the local community. From the wording of the document, it is clearly a long-term strategy. Along with ‘strategy’, the document is peppered with phrases like “intend to build”, “advancing our intellectual footprint”, “position us well for developing further”, and “we aspire to.” As the wording shows, the strategic plan isn’t a strategy for us as students, but rather for the Lehigh of the future.
That’s not a bad thing. Certainly Lehigh needs to look toward the future, and since most of us won’t be active members of the Lehigh community 10 years from now, it makes that we won’t be the ones affected. Even so, a better effort should be made to allow current students to weigh in on the strategic plan, and play a role. Students have a different perspective on Lehigh, and have an entirely different set of experiences. Strategically, hearing student’s opinions and questions will benefit Lehigh and the strategic plan. Hopefully next time Lehigh’s administrators will make a better effort to involve students.
Civil Discourse
As the health care debate rages on, people are starting to lose extremities. Less than a month ago, William Rice was arguing with another protester when a scuffle broke out. In the ensuing melee, the tip of William’s pinkie finger was bitten off.1
The alleged attacker was protesting with a group organized by Moveon.org, a left-leaning web organization. It has yet to be determined if this is now the official strategy of the Democratic Party, since calling protesters names such as “Un-American” seems to have failed to curb their enthusiasm.
Sadly, doctors were unable to reattach the rest of William’s pinkie. Despite the loss of the digit, there was an ironic benefit for William. His trip to the ER was covered by his Government-run Medicare policy.2
1 – http://www.theweek.com/article/index/100164/How_Bill_Rices_finger_was_bitten_off
2 – http://blogs.laweekly.com/ladaily/community/man-bites-off-protesters-finge/
Sing a new song onto the Lord
In an effort to reestablish the totalitarian regimes of Europe during the 1940’s, one New Jersey teacher is attempting to start her own cult of youth for President Obama. Modeled after the Hitler Youth, the teacher had her entire class singing songs of praise for Barack Obama.
With the surfacing of a video of the event on YouTube, the teacher’s movement is in jeopardy as the school district is launching an investigation. Nevertheless, these students will clearly have lyrics such as “He said we must be fair today, equal work means equal pay. Mmm, mmm, mm! Barack Hussein Obama.”3
If this means that politicians are next-in-line behind religious figures for songs of adulation, then my worldview has been turned upside down.
That’s all I’ve got. I’m off to write my ballad of praise for Mark Sanford and John Edwards and their upstanding morals.
3 – http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/09/24/lyrics-songs-president-obama/
Editor’s Note: a form of ‘strategy’ was used 18 times in this article. For over double the strategery visit www.lehigh.edu/2009plan/
