If I had to choose, I would say we are her blunder. This follows from my own assumption that it is a fool’s errand to try to dispossess people of their faiths. In other words, believing in God is no blunder. I have my own “gods.” i don’t mean higher powers or anything, I just mean idealized values that act as lodestones. So I guess I am a humanist as much as an atheist. I just find sometimes non-atheists want to try and force agnosticism on me.

No. I am quite sure of my BELIEF that there is no metaphysical reality. But, it is still a belief. I don’t think there is any final test of my position or someone else’s. SO maybe libertarian atheist humanist!? LOL.

What is meaning of title, I wonder?

I would also say that superstitious delusions have their uses, or more accurately, there is no human existence or culture without some collective delusions. So I am personally an atheist, but I don’t get bothered by religion except when it is used as the basis for governing.

Just a little word I made up…

As to the blocking, i had also thought it could be something like “management, chemistry, math, classics” on one day, other departments on another. That way, someone could go to our department one day and related departments other days. I should have written it that way but chickened out.

I realize it couldn’t be “mandatory.” If “great opportunity A” was only possible on your department’s off-day, then do it then.

I am proposing a kind of enhanced “honor system” here. Part of it would involve making public the ideal of the block system. There would need to be all kinds of “tipping points” to reinforce it. Like, including the blocks on webpages and in other places where people make scheduling decisions. Maybe a “scheduling audit” group who could check on consistency and if there are egregious offenders call them out. Part of this is asking for everyone to put into practice a more communitarian ethos about time.

I like your idea of studying this in terms fo capacity and absorption rate. I would love to have really good, deep time logs or other qualitative studies of how people spend time, actually. Not only surveys. I am skeptical of surveys asking people who they think they spent their time.

If the “average” student is going to 2 sports events, 2 life of the mind events, and 2 student events a week, would I think of that as a success? Probably. Are they now? I think your question raises the point that we don’t know well.

I also have a different definition of “the problem”. At capacity, the student sections of Sojika hold ~1000 students. Trout holds ~300. The Forum holds ~250. Harvey Powers holds ~250. Weis holds 2,000. Making reasonable space for some community members in each of these (besides basketball where they’re already counted), we still fill all of these before we run out of students, faculty, and administrative staff. If we take a “bad” conflict night, as we had the other week, where two good speakers were up against each other and a game, even at absolute capacity, the MAJORITY of students, faculty, and administrative staff were doing something else with their evenings.
These conflicting events only conflict in the sense that, for the highly involved people, they have to make a choice. But really, it is completely theoretically possible for our community to support three simultaneous evening activities. But they weren’t sold out, not all of them, I don’t think they even got close. Last night’s basketball game might have had 100 students who were *not* on the team, in the band, cheerleaders, dancers, or working. I think this is about how people end up choosing to allot their time much more than it is about worthy events being in conflict.