I went to talk today held by the University Bookstore (although, as I would experience first-hand, not physically at the Toronto Bookstore, rather at the wonderfully cozy Hart House library) with James E. Cote and Anton Allahar who co-wrote “Ivory Tower Blues, a University System in Crisis”, and Jeff Rybak, a friend and author of “What’s wrong with university, and how to make it work for you anyway”. Since I have an unnatural interest in what goes on in higher education, I had been looking forward to the event, and it was nice hearing what the Ivory Tower Blues gentlemen had to say - I’ll definitively have to pick up the book and try to fit it into my schedule (I already finished Rybak’s book, and I can definitively recommend it to any Canadian highschooler or incoming freshman, indeed it should be a standard feature of any frosh-kit!).
I am not going to go into their arguments in detail, but I wanted to comment on the arrangement of the whole thing. It was a great setup for a meaningful debate - a cozy, more or less intimate old library with about 30-40 quite knowledgeable and very interested participants - and yet exactly an hour after the event started with the three authors giving brief introductions, we are told that the party is over and we will have to stop the session, to make some time for booksigning. To me it was strange, in this discussion about reviving old values of scholarship, reflection and debate, that we were not 
allotted more time. Indeed the moderator thanked us for our patience! Presumably for sitting still for all of an hour, without making too much noise, or playing with our Gameboys? One of the authors, to his credit, asked that at least the last few questions be allowed to be asked, although they would not be answered. I had held my hand up for a while, however I didn’t have a question - I had a point to make - and I didn’t want to use the old debating trick of making a five minute speech, and then tacking an obligatory question on at the end. I wish they had organized it more as a conversation - with introductions by the authors, and them facilitating a discussion between all the participants in the room. In a big public argument, where you inevitably have random people go on for fifteen minutes about irrelevant things I can appreciate that the organizers want to keep it very structured, but in this case I can’t help but think that bringing these three authors, two of whom were from out of town, into our fine institution to speak to us was a bit of a wasted opportunity.
Stian
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