Loading…
10
Vent: our student gov spent $12k on a speaker nobody had heard of and the Q&A got shut down in 9 minutes
So back in March our student activities board at a mid-size school in Ohio dropped $12,000 to bring in a writer who mostly does podcasts about media and politics. Flyers went up around the union, people were actually kinda excited because the guy has a decent following. Day of the talk, about 200 of us packed into a lecture hall built for 150, people sitting on the floor and standing in the back. He talked for maybe 30 minutes, then the moderator opened Q&A. Nine minutes in, a kid asked about a law in Florida and the moderator cut him off, said we were moving on, and a staffer came down the aisle toward his row. Nobody got dragged out or anything dramatic, but the room went cold. Half the people walked out during the last 20 minutes and I heard three different versions of what happened in the hallway after. Here is what bugs me: the $12k came from our student fees and we got 9 minutes of actual back and forth. Has anyone else seen a school kill a Q&A that fast, and did your board ever explain why?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
joseph_sanchez19d ago
Nine minutes is brutal. Reminds me of my cousin's school where they paid some guy five grand to talk about "digital wellness" and he just read slides off his laptop the whole time, then took like four questions before wrapping up early. At least your guy had people standing in the back, ours couldn't fill half the room.
6