Baron cancels sleepover; ethically justified maimings dispensed via handheld keypads

Today's 21st century marketing lecture was meant to be devoid of Steve Duke. It wasn't.

Perhaps the thought of skipping the ethics lecture to jet off to one-time guest-speaker Ed Baron's Key West abode struck Duke as a tad too ironic. From the confusion pervading the ensuing PowerPoint slides, ("real truth may not come from juxtaposing extremes; it may come in a gray area in between") we're betting it was just a bad breakup.

Didn't slow down Friday's lecture, though. The keypad clickers employed by ASG for voting and tested on Medill freshmen a few weeks ago were back for an ethics questionnaire culminating in a scintillating ethical dilemma. A bargain-bin video posed freshmen-cum-train-conductors an impossible choice: mow down five immobilized invalids on the tracks or flip a magic switch, derail the train, and avert their deaths but kill another innocent bystander waiting at the platform.

And the students vote to maim! Fully 66% (come to think of it, a suspect portion) of respondents said Fuck the invalids. Apparently the prevailing logic was that these people were on the tracks and should therefore die instead of the poor woman waiting at the platform. It evidently escaped freshmen that the five people on the tracks were undoubtedly unable to move for some reason -- perhaps tied to the tracks or deaf -- and just as innocent as the latte-sipping woman awaiting the next train. And, on that note, why is the train unable to stop if people are waiting for it at a nearby platform? Wouldn't it be stopping? Here's to the hope that Duke posts the video on YouTube for public perusal. Who knows -- it may just turn up on the final.

Dispatch from Medill: Lavine:Price::Duke:Baron?

"The world is our oyster," slick TV suit Hank Price told Intro to 21st Century Marketing students Friday with a twinkle in his glassy eyes.

Price, while reportedly no match for Steve Duke boytoy Ed Baron in bed, had quite a twinkle to his smooth speech. Decked out in head-to-toe black, he seemed to offer a Faustian bargain to his intrepid audience of young journalists: Adapt with the rest of the media and become adept across many platforms or you won't have a job.

Soon thereafter, however, he seemed to veer into the Lavinespeak students have been saturated with for weeks. "In the future," he said, "everyone's going to be a content producer or content seller."

He then proceeded to gush about the "ambitious" plans Lavine has layed out, saying that "Lavine is doing something for Medill that no other journalism school in the country is yet doing."

Price may yet be the Rachel to Lavine's Ross, or, if you will, the Baron to Lavine's Duke.

But reports were that Lavine's interest in Price was solely to ensure that parents, many of whom visited the class due to concurrent scheduling with Family Weekend, were not treated to another love-in between the Duke and the Baron that might jeopardize the Dean's monopoly on the future of journalism (or at least 180 kids' parents' $45k/year.)

The situation underscored the tension between Lavine and Duke for control of the new-fangled class. Though the Dean helmed its development and sees the class of 2010 as his group of highly-educated lab rats, Duke was given the reins while Lavine sat in the back of the Fisk lecture hall. Today, however, marked the first time one of his proxies has directly stepped in to right the ship.

Duke, left listless by the students' captivation with Price, wandered the aisles like a bald Vanna White, handing out mikes to students with questions.

A key indicator of who wins the battle for control of the class may be which guest speaker's words worm their way into the all multiple-choice midterm next week.

Price, whose return remains up in the air, left the freshmen amiably, saying "usually they don't let me talk to undergraduates because you have your whole careers ahead of you."

Anything to avoid another in-class reacharound sesh, we guess.

The Duke and the Baron

Despite the cackles of gleeful freshmen eager to bestow a Medill F on their instructor, Intro to 21st Century Media lecturer Stephen Duke seems uneager to rectify the mistakes in the typo-ridden PowerPoint he forced his 180-strong class to toil through for 45 minutes Friday. The class’ Blackboard homepage, which features a low-res artist’s interpretation of Duke-as-Borg, remains devoid of an edited version of the PowerPoint though last week’s has long since been posted. It remains unclear if Duke is merely being obstinate or is overlooking the glaring errors due to his hapless love for guest speaker Ed Baron, with whom he traded inside jokes and lustful leers throughout the extra-long Q&A session which began Friday’s class. A starry-eyed Duke then tried to pick up where the Baron left off, only to find his poorly paraphrased summaries of the week’s reading so befuddled students that he fell back on the text’s own anecdotes. Unfortunately the Duke’s understanding of the economics of golden geese was no better than Veruca Salt’s, and he abruptly ended his presentation to scattered applause from an audience too tuned out to notice the gesture.