Class Blog

Question One:

I was talking with a friend once and she asked my opinion on what she should wear to a formal interview. I told her that she should definitely wear either a suit or a skirt with a blouse and jacket and she protested, claiming that her job wasn't professional enough to need such a nice outfit for an interview. I replied that since it was the final interview, she should dress as professionally as possible because the position she was applying for was competitive. Also, if she arrived to the interview under-dressed, she would probably be passed over immediately because appearance is important in interviews. She eventually agreed with me, and because we were giving decisive weight to different evidence (my friend on the regular job expectations and me to the final interview) this was a Level Three conflict because we both had different ideas of what constituted a good outfit for a final interview.

Question Two:

Savio's overall claim is that the university bureaucrats are violating student rights not only by discouraging free speech, but also by refusing to listen to their protests over being censured. He uses the analogy “Sproul Hall is to student rights as Mississippi is to civil rights” and melds it with the allusion "that impersonal bureaucracy is the efficient enemy in a 'Brave New World'" (Savio). He brings in a real conflicts in the United States, the civil rights movement in Mississippi, and combines it with a dystopia novel where the population is so constructed and regulated that people cannot handle individuality or breaking away from society. In both situations, there is a common enemy: the government and the society the government upholds. The government views racism and the 'separate but equal' laws as the status norm and the idea of giving African Americans equal rights is unthinkable. In the "Brave New World" every person is psychologically and chemically altered to permanently be part of a social class (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_new_world). These back up Savio's claims where the university bureaucrats are wanting to mold their students to a certain job, that "it is a factory that turns out a certain product needed by industry or government" (Savio) and is unconcerned with individual freedoms and discourages them. These strong value claims make Savio's speech at conflict level 5, which is the argument of global values, because he is arguing for human rights, but he also specifies it for student rights, which brings the conflict level down from 5 to 4, making it open to argument.

Question Four:

By arguing in the stasis of cause, Bullard avoids accusations of his motives by not appearing to be skewed, but just by letting the facts speak for themselves. He does manipulate the facts to achieve his goal, but he doesn't let his opinions override his speech. He lists the different government responses from the anthrax scare in the Senate and the Brentwood Post Office and says that the time delay on the directly exposed postal workers allowed two employees to die while the immediate action in the Senate was very efficient and no one died. Bullard does not conjecture, does not specifically talk about rights or values, he simply says what happened and that it should be changed. Wells-Barnett uses the same strategy. She does not argue that it ius wrong to lynch specifically, but she explains that African Americans are being lynched for weak or no reason and gives the statistics of how many African Americans per year and by state are lynched. Like Bullard, she let's the facts speak for themselves and does not overtly state her opinion and is very objective. Savio is a little more opinionated, but he too uses the cause stasis and reiterates what happened when he tried to speak with the Dean of Students and, while he is much more subjective, he is also trying to rally the people to him. By combining causal stasis with his opinion, he is much more able to connect with his listener's passion and rally their support. Bullard, Wells-Barnett, and Savio all use the causal stasis in their ethos to achieve their listeners/readers trust in that they are passionate, and yet not biased in their speeches and their use of actual facts and evidence gets this across very well.