Dukakis Center hosts unprecedented student debate on earth shattering current events
“One thing bothers me when I read the news. We use terms like “unprecedented” too much!” So opined ACT Professor Christos Aliprantis, who animated a debate on current events with select ACT and study abroad students in the Constantinidis Hall Conference Room on Wednesday, November 17. The point of departure for the debate was a pair of opinion pieces appearing in mainstream English-language media days earlier, the one by Martin Wolf in the Financial Times, the other by Stephen Walt in Foreign Policy. Both articles foreshadowed fundamental changes to the international order as a result of key events in different parts of the world: the prospect of the reelection of Donald Trump in the United States (Wolf), and the aftermath of the war in Gaza (Walt).
The purpose of the debate was less to discuss the accuracy of these journalists’ predictions than to assess certain media practices, among which to claim that the world would forever be different as a result of this or that current event.
United States Billion-Dollar Disaster Events 1980-2023 (CPI-Adjusted)
(Source: National Centers for Environmental Information)
The pace of decisive change cannot be disputed, and can be illustrated not only in political or military terms, but also in terms of the cost of natural disasters. Lisa Desjardins polled readers of PBS's “Here’s the Deal” newsletter only to find that by popular demand “unprecedented” was their word of the year. (Desjardins reports that the term first gained hitherto unheard of popularity in 17th-century England, following the execution of Charles I.) Yet such is the prevalence of the metaphor of extraordinary or unparalleled happenstances in contemporary life that John Prideaux, writing in The Economist, has claimed, “It is hard to overstate how important the outcome [of the 2024 US Presidential election] will be, for America and the world,” and quipped “Words like ‘uncharted’ and ‘unprecedented’ were worn out by the end of Mr Trump’s first term. America will need new ones for this election.”
ACT’s student body, or a representative sample thereof, are more ambivalent, pointing to a lack of trust in the media generally and a generational shift away from their elders’ (and their professors’) manner of talking about current affairs. Do students even read the newspapers anymore? Yes or no, they acquitted themselves admirably in the debate, sparking admiration among Professors Aliprantis, Gratale, and Wisner, one of whose jaws dropped to the floor momentarily (but was it a yawn?).
There is nothing unprecedented about the aptitude of your typical ACT student, but one never fails to be amazed nonetheless.
