FAIRMONT – Samantha Godbey directs Fairmont State University’s Civics Institute and also advises the school’s championship debate team.
The two efforts are intertwined, as far as she’s concerned.
Last Halloween, the debate team publicly debated the existence of Mothman and other marquee cryptids known to be spotted within the confines of the Mountain State.
Just for fun, she said.
This past spring, though, the same team got serious, she said.
That was when it stirred the echoes of Mother Jones and other celebrated rabble-rousers in a new discussion of West Virginia’s mostly contentious labor history – from the mine wars of the early 1920s to the current arguments, for and against, collective bargaining.
Fairmont State this spring received some dollars for discourse.
Said dollars came in the form of a $2,300 grant from the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, a privately funded effort based at Princeton University.
The institute encourages community discourse – especially, its administrators said, among young people, during this year’s 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Godbey used the grant to front a campus survey gauging student thought on collaboration, outreach and organizing for causes beyond themselves, she said.
“We are excited about his initiative,” she said.
“We hope the survey will give us clear, data-driven insight into our students’ civic learning, media literacy and ability to work collaboratively.”
The survey went out in March, and Godbey said its results will set the tone for courses, programming and other directions in dialogue and learning initiatives.
In February, meanwhile, the institute announced a new mission: calling for the civic empowerment of 20 million people, between the ages of 14-24 to take some sort of “public-spirited action” over the next three years, Rajiv Vinnakota said.
Vinnakota serves as president of the institute.
Such actions can include a public forum, he said, such as what Fairmont State’s debate team did in its discussion of labor history, as example.
For him, the big-picture initiative is akin to taking baby steps with your new membership to the health club.
“You’re not going to immediately go to a gym and try to bench press 325 pounds,” Vinnakota said. “You’re gonna start easy, simple. Something you can do, both to affirm – and to start to build your muscle.”
