Location: Upper Sayles

Time: 8:30 am

Present Max Bearak, Mihaela Czobor-Lupp, Daniel Groll, Chris Clark, Danette DeMann, Fred Rogers, Sara Hooker, Forrest McKnight, Kristen Vellinger,

Absent Joe Concannon, Ellen Farnham , Fadi Hakim, Iris Wang

Secretary: Claire Milsted

Plans for an educational event

Last year, we had Amy Domini come to give a convocation speech as an educational event.  We agreed earlier that we will plan another educational event for this year.

A good plan would be a discussion about some particular issue that we could invite the whole campus to join. 

A good topic for our discussion would be political contributions, because it’s in the news, and it’s one clearly defined issue that runs through several areas of political discourse (agricultural policy, consumer protection, energy policy, etc).  There are a lot of resolutions dealing with political contributions, and they use basically the same language.

Why do political contributions matter?

We talked about how we could get people interested in our topic.  Maybe we could put up several posters, with different examples of times when corporate political contributions have created a controversial result. 

One issue we could mention is the USDA’s changing nutritional guidelines.  Recently, the USDA has proposed changing its nutrition guidelines to limit the amount of potatoes in school lunches for districts receiving federal funds.  The potato lobby has been working against the USDA and now the USDA’s funding for nutritional education is threatened.  Mihaela will look into this.

Another issue would be the role of mining companies’ political contributions in crafting coal legislation.  Sarah will look into this.

Another possible issue is the recent shut-down of the Minnesota government.   Some observers blamed the lack of accountability that the Minnesota government displayed on the influence of political contributions.  Max will look into this.

Details of the Event

Time: We don’t want the event too close to the end of term, but we don’t want it too soon either.  Seventh week is also international education week.  Tentatively, we will hold our event on Thursday the 20th.

Place: The Athenaeum seems like a good place—it is not too big or too small, and it is often used for such events.  If we cannot reserve the Athenaeum, we will use one of the Leighton lecture halls.  Danette will follow up on this.

Money: We may want to feed people pizza from one of the restaurants in town as an incentive to come to our talk.  We should buy enough pizza to feed about twenty people.  We can also use the CSA “Alternative Beverage” fund, because we will be providing nonalcoholic beverages at a public event.  Fred will look into securing money through normal means; Kristen will look into Alternative Beverage funding.

Publicity: We will try to get nice posters for the event.  We could partner with EthIC to generate more publicity.