Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Post-Secondary World Systems

Chief Interlocutors:

CUSANUS, University student and president of the Student's Association

TESSOUAT, College student and partisan

SIMPLICIO, A buffoon with only a High School education

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Audience Member: Hello, I've come for the dialogue?

Usher: Of course sir, we have an excellent pair of seats in front. Right this way Madam.

Audience Member: I hear it's a good one, eh? Might even get Platonic?

Mrs Audience Member: Oh dear, I hope it doesn't come to that.

Usher: Not to worry madam, we provide all of our customers with specialty goggles in case of unexpected hypostasis. Now here we are.

Audience Member: Bless you, lad.

Mrs Audience Member: La! She starts!

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A DIALOGUE CONCERNING THE TWO CHIEF POST-SECONDARY WORLD SYSTEMS, or, The Story of the Double Edged Swordfish. This dialogue is presented WITHOUT FRENCH SUBTITLES for de 'earing h'impaired.

CUSA. Yesterday we agreed to come together to split a pitcher -

SIMP. To splitcher?

CUSA. Yes, splitcher, we agreed to splitcher, and moreover so did she, but it's been so many years since she took gymnastics that we might as well continue what we were doing until she's done stretching. Now if you remember, mongomaniacs, we agreed to get together in this dialogue in order to discuss the merits and faults of the two chief systems of post-secondary education, those of the University (or "College" in America) and the College (or "Farmyard" in America), thereby to determine the which of which is the superior..Er, with which the superior...Er, carry the one and...

TESS. Which's better?

CUSA. Concisely put, browbeater. Now, it has long been agreed upon that these bodies, while dedicated to the education and information of the world public, are almost always constituted as communities. Not all bodies are constituted this way. Some have more upper-thigh fat, which contributes to a more congested thoroughfare (and trust me, it is thorough).

At any rate, just like cities, there is a great deal of variation between constitutions, culture, and between the happiness of its citizens. Remember that the Divine Plato, in his chief dialogue The Republic, chiefly builds from divine excellencies of nature and the human soul a puppet play of the ideal city as could be constituted in the ideal form divinely, chiefly, and without an overabundance of squash. I hereby propose this very method as the start of our investigation - which of the two compares most closely to the ideal city?

SIMP. How do you talk like that, anyway?

CUSA. If you are referring to the rhetorical complexity of my personal mandarin, I'll have you know that my grandfather was at Eton, dog!

SIMP. Well maybe he shouldn't have been eatin' dog.

TESS. Now listen Custy, I like where you are going with this. The basic idea is that universities and colleges are like two different types of countries. Ok, fair enough. I guess we're trying to figure out which one is the "first world" country, right?

CUSA. Aptly put, my sans-cullottic chum. And it's exactly on this point that the University comes on top...

I said, comes on top...

SIMP. *sips his drink*

CUSA. No? Nothing? Alright then. On top.

Remember that it is we who are the intellectuals, the researchers, the golden philosopher kings of the Platonic Republic. We pump the world engine with the fuel of our thought; we send out the armies of Enlightenment, critical thinking, and engaged dialogue into the world to conquer the nebulous terrorism of bias; it is we who, in an ever faster and manic age of information and digitization, act as stewards for the knowledge of the present and future....

TESS. Ok, I hear what you are saying, but I think you might be veering off-track a little. The point of this exercise was to figure out which community was the best. Well, tell me, from a practical stand-point, how much does a burger cost on campus?

CUSA. A burger? They are fairly expensive actually. 7-8$? I don't know. I never get them.

TESS. Oh?

CUS. They are kind of gross. You know, iffy. Unbalanced. Most of the food on campus is distributed through a pretty sketchy food corporation.

TESS. Interesting - Socrates can't cook his own meals? Very different from what we have. I had a delicious lunch today on my college campus actually - a beautiful organic salad and leek soup. For four bucks!

SIMP. What kind of salad was it?

TESS. Quinoa!

SIMP. Oh, I've heard of that. It's that food that sounds differently than it's spelled and tastes even worse.

CUSA. It sounds delicious and healthy to me. How do they sell it so cheaply?

TESS. It's made by the culinary students - as part of their curriculum. They sell the food they cook on campus at reduced rates, they get to practice, we get to eat well crafted, home-cooked meals - everybody benefits!

CUSA. What a charming idea! Wish we could do that...We have to run bake-sales on the sly for fear of getting shut down by the administration. And even in those, the cupcakes are as half-baked as the causes they support. 

SIMP. Buy a baked good! Save the bare-back black squirrel from extinction!

TESS. I didn't know there was such a thing as a bare-back black squirrel.

SIMP. Well there's only one, but he's getting on, you know.

CUSA. Do you see what we have to deal with? Er...With what we have to deal?

TESS. Well compared to that, we're kind of a communist paradise - on college campuses so many of the programs offer real goods and services. We've got cheap haircuts, tailors, carpenters, mechanics - and everybody working for the love and challenge of the labour itself. A walk through campus is like a stroll through a real town.

CUSA. And so cheap...

TESS. Is there really nothing like that on University campuses?

CUSA. Are you kidding? Take a walk from the University Centre to the library. You won't find anything of value there you couldn't pick up somewhere cheaper, faster, and with a better general odour. And I mean the same thing for the goods and services as well as the ideologies and STDs on display or being hollered in your ear or shoved into your hands with a wink and a scowl.

No,  where you guys are Copernican, we are still Ptolemaic. For us, the stars revolve around our own egos. No mentality for sharing. But what could we even offer one another? Books, articles, reading material... Certainly no preserves or haircuts or anything like that.

TESS. Sounds kind of top-heavy to me.

SIMP. And not in the good way!

TESS. What way is that?

SIMP. The bad way.

CUSA. And how. Look, you realize we can't even govern ourselves? You'd think a place so infatuated with learning would be governed mainly by well educated students and professors, right? Well, somehow a wily eunuch class of administrators have wedged their way in between them. Real shysters. They are basically an MBA fund-driven conglomerate who run the place like a third-world slum lord, squeezing money out of tenants and cramming 20 families to a single toilet...

TESS. Third world? You'd think "liberal education" would involve a little self-reliance.

SIMP. They are pretty good at the breakfast buffet...

CUSA. Brains and buttocks alike are heavy things to cultivate. But the one thing we do have over you colleges is the single most important of all.

TESS. What's that?

CUSA. We have good libraries. Presumably, once in a while, someone gets around to reading some of them.

SIMP. Reading in a library? What are you, a satanist? Libraries are for three things, and three things only - oggling, toggling, and googling.

CUSA. So long as we have books...

SIMP. Ma se io vi concluderò, in virtú delle medesime proposizioni concedute ad Aristotile, che i corpi celesti sieno essi ancora, non meno che gli elementari, generabili e corruttibili, che cosa direte voi?

CUSA. Come again?

SIMP. Not without a quart of gin, friend.

TESS. You all have book-dependency. It seems to me like we embody the popular spirit of a classical city-state much more effectively than you guys do. You're like monks.

CUSA. Maybe. But we shave less. I'm calling it in for the day, shall we splitcher again?

SIMP. Ladies and Gentlemen, while our two antagonists walk off hand-in-hand to the bar, I present a little song entitled:

Ode to the Dialogue as a Forgotten Vehicle for Social Change -

From the dramas of the Grecian

To the works of Galilei

Nothing has been so efficient

To get from point A to B.

Why d'you brag about your Euclid?

Why'd you ramble like Descartes?

Why'd you make a documentary?

Why d'you map it on a chart?

Nothing naturaller, nothing simpler

Than a conversa-ti-on

Between friends had of an evening

Where is heard everyichone.

Let us plunge in information
Let us let free the bits and bytes

For to help its liberation
Is the steward's sole delight.