Skyping with Rousseau

Normally I try to keep in mind that one’s dreams are almost always boring to other people, but this one I think may be an exception. Not your average teaching stress/anxiety dream.

In my dream last night, the latest technological innovation was the capacity to skype with deceased persons from the afterlife. This valuable innovation comes at a very high cost; a single skype session costs a huge amount of money. Despite this cost, I petition and ultimately persuade my employer to cover the costs of a skype session with one of the canonical figures whose work I teach in my history of political theory class. I leave the choice up to students, using single transferable votes, but Rousseau is the clear winner. As I begin the process of the paperwork to arrange for the skype session, I learn from the Dean’s office that the funding has been pulled. There was evidently some concern that bring in a man who so willingly and callously discarded his own children, and spent his life prevaricating and offering various excuses and justifications, was perhaps not fully in line with our Catholic and Marianist values. I was mildly annoyed, but my students were well and truly outraged. In response to what they understood to be an affront to their academic freedom, they organized a series of in person and on-line protests, making “Dayton bans Rousseau” the viral outrage of the moment. At the moment that I woke up, I was preparing to be a guest on Morning Joe to discuss the controversy, a prospect I was really dreading. Once I was over the initial confusion of waking up mid-dream, I was mostly just relieved I wouldn’t have to go on Morning Joe.