CNU Intelligencer Conversation on Women's Pay Equity

On February 1st, 2017, at Christopher Newport University’s Center for Community Engagement the Intelligencer Institute, along with CNU Engage, hosted our second event. It was a Pecha Kucha style presentation: “Gender Pay Equity: how bad is it really?” The presenters were Rich Goll, founder of Alternatives Incorporated and Hampton, VA, native, and Emma Brown, who previously worked with Rich while he was the executive director of Hampton Roads Center for Civic Engagement and current International Student Service Coordinator at CNU. Immediately following the presentation, the group broke out into different discussion circles and the facilitators explained the civil discourse activity, which focused on restating one’s peers’ opinions to their satisfaction as well agreement on the introduction of new facts or figures. Since some statistics about women pay equity are different around the country, the presenters wanted to emphasize the Hampton Roads region’s statistics in their presentation. After the discussion, the group came back together as a whole for closing remarks and participants were asked to fill out a survey based on their experience at the event.

The reasoning behind having this event came from current events and ongoing conversations about gender pay inequity. CNU recently had a speaker present on this topic and the Women’s March occurred the previous weekend only three hours away from CNU. Given this context, we structured this event in order for people to have a civil conversation with those who may have contrasting views. The groups efficiently communicated their emotions towards the presentation with some of the most interesting responses deriving from personal experiences of gender pay discrimination. Given this opportunity, the participants truly examined the topic thoroughly. Unfortunately there wasn’t enough time to get through all of their points, but this event underlined that our society's lack of civil discourse is a real issue and participants, whether they were aware of it or not when coming to the event, realized it afterwards.

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CNU Intelligencer presents: Snowden: Hero or Villain?

On March 1st, 2017 at Christopher Newport University’s Center for Community Engagement the Intelligencer Institute, along with CNU Engage hosted our third event.The event started out with a welcoming introduction and an explanation of the event’s purpose: civil discourse and a short background on Edward Snowden in case people hadn’t heard of him. This was followed by the TedTalk “How free is our freedom of press?” and the video “Edward Snowden Latest: NSA Whistleblower’s Newest Mission is Protecting Journalist from Spies”. The point of showing two videos was to show the audience the two opposing views on Snowden so they would have things to discuss. After the two videos the audience was chose a number. One was “I think what snowden did was heroic”, two was “I’m currently undecided”, and three was “Snowden is a villain”. They were then asked to pair up with someone with a different number and put into groups that way. When they were in groups the facilitators discussed the importance of restating someone else’s opinion before responding and then started the conversation.  The discussion lasted about thirty minutes. Lastly everyone came back together for any last remarks as a big group on the subject and were asked to fill out a survey about their experience at the event.

The purpose of this event came from the growing topic of security in society and getting people to ask themselves what they valued more, security or freedom of press. Freedom of the press is a big debate in today’s society. Given these issues we decided to structure an event that allowed people to have a discussion with other people who may have a different opinion on what’s more important, security or freedom of speech. We extended the time so people would have more time to say what they think. That seemed to work very well and everyone had something to say on the topic. The goal of civil discourse was achieved and everyone got good at restating opinions to people's liking.