“His Saccharine World. Your Calling.”
I’m sitting in the library attempting to form a coherent response about this post by Josiah Roe. Apparently Covenant College’s admissions department has tasked a freshman admissions work-study student with creating a blog to help promote the college by airing the thoughts of a freshman admissions work-study student. This has generated some controversy (though it might be only Josiah Roe who generated the controversy). I spent the good part of two years opposing, at least verbally, a lot of the school’s new plans for expansion. Towards the end of my senior year, when my leaving Covenant became clearer and clearer, my anger subsided and I essentially left the matter alone. When I heard about this from a fellow alum, I went back and read what Josiah had to say and then back to Phil’s blog.
But I find it hard to really say something about the issue. The whole idea of using a blog to advertise for the school by paying a student to write it strikes me as false and just feels wrong. But I can’t really say why and any attempt to force the feelings into a linear, logical train of thought simply fails. The blog itself seems to be, since I couldn’t make myself read much of it, an insipid collection of mediocre admonitions and thoughts about what it means to be a freshman at Covenant College. It’s boring.(not that this blog is interesting) It’s full of Christian lingo. It comes across as censored. Wallace Anderson insults its maker by saying “It is very controlled because of the person we hired.” These are Phil Coddington’s thoughts? Or are they just Phil Coddington’s Admissions department acceptable (different than accepted) thoughts? I hope the latter! As a friend of mine said upon reading the blog “makes me wonder what he’s like.”
It’s really a smart idea for the admissions department for the reasons Josiah mentions. Maybe they ought also to put up a link to covblogs.com.;)
Wow, gotta say thanks. I think that’s the first time I’ve ever been quoted as the title of a blog post.
When I first read the blog, I didn’t really think a whole bunch about the content (and naturally, the author). Really, it was just the lack of disclosure that bugged me.
My company on occasion recommends blogs to our clients, and has implemented quite a few (heck, one might even consider the “blog” on my company’s website to be, uh, a “blog” even though it’s little more than a repository for press releases). So I didn’t want to bag on the idea of the blog in general, because it would be hypocritical and well, I don’t have a problem with it in principle.
So, it was the disclosure thing that bugged me.
But there is that entire “saccharine” issue, that the more I (and many, many others) have interacted with the author, I’ve become convinced that the choice of the author was a downright travesty, for a whole host of reasons.
Many have to do simply with the idea of getting a freshman, of all people, to speak for the student body as a whole. Wallace seems to think Phil represents 95% of the peeps at Covenant. I doubt anyone giving that much thought think such an assessment is all that accurate.
But then, of course, there’s been my interaction with the kid. What I can’t shake is he seems to be that wonderful, unique, and tragically flawed marriage of self-interest and sanctimony. He recently stated that he will not discuss anything controversial on his blog. Despite the fact that anything, really, can be controversial, it’s that marriage of covering his own behind + easy moralism that terrifies me in having him as a spokesperson for my alma mater.
But that’s just an example, and I realize, a nit-picky one at that.
Alright, done rambling.
You’ve got a great blog.
I have to say. . .I read through it some yesterday, and I was like. . .I don’t think I ever really knew anyone quite like that at Covenant. I have to say that he is not really representative of any of the people I hung out with. Of course, I hung out with people like you. . .so maybe that’s why.
What Covenant needs to do is endorse a blog of someone who actually has struggles and sometimes gets annoyed at the retardedness of some of the crap that goes on. But they won’t.