When emails from Dean Jefferson Huang and Jennifer Maraña announcing another “bias-related incident” arrive, students cannot be blamed for ignoring them. They read through them, sometimes frustrated with the perpetrator of the incident, but the takeaway, however, is minimal; this is not because such reports are not appropriate –it is because they are not done well.

It was Sunday morning when I started procrastinating by going through my daily email check. As I weeded through dozens of emails about IM sports, club events, party informs, and e-memo digests, I saw an email about the biggest announcement of the year hitting CMC at midnight.  Naturally, I began speculating with my friends. Maybe it’s the big speaker, maybe it’s about the sixth college, maybe it’s about the construction, we thought. None of these seemed to warrant the title, “the biggest announcement that has hit CMC’s campus in quite some time.”

A student graduating from a U.S. high school will have spent about seven hours a day for 180 days a year over the span of 13 years in a school environment.  This does not include the additional time commitment that sports, music, and any other school-sponsored extracurricular activity demand.  On average you get 18,720 hours of (slightly wavering) attention from each student’s first eighteen years of life. The importance of elementary and secondary schools in forming students’ experiences and providing an increasingly valuable service for communities is never overstated. One can simply ask parents for evidence of how valuable their child’s education is to them.

During this year’s presidential campaign, both candidates agreed that the next U.S. administration needs more multilateral engagement. Sen. John McCain has enthusiastically backed the creation of a league of democracies. He envisioned a multilateral organization functioning as an alternative to the United Nations where like-minded democracies can work together without facing obstruction from non-democratic countries, such as China and Russia who both hold veto power on the UN Security Council. Despite the intuitive appeal of this idea, a league of democracies would emerge as an ineffective organization with minimal legitimacy. It would not advance America’s national interests nor improve global governance.