Last Tuesday, the Association of Women and Men in Communication (AWMC), and Lambda Pi Eta, Canisius’s Communication Honor Society, held a debate night at Lyons Hall room 313, with the main theme of the debate being social media.
The event began at 4 p.m., and unfortunately for Mylan Hawkins, the president of AWMC, and Julia Barth, treasurer of AWMC as well as Editor in Chief of The Griffin, and champion of the near unanimous majority, few students attended the event, but those that were present enjoyed their time, taking part in the jokes and conversations.
Despite such an unfavorable outcome, Hawkins and Barth continued through with their event, engaging students in conversation about whether print or digital journalism was better. Hawkins and Barth agreed with each other that they preferred print journalism, but Patrick Healy, Managing Editor of The Griffin, and self-styled devil’s advocate, disagreed with them, advocating for digital journalism instead. When proceeding to prove his point, Healy stood up from his seat, walked to the front of the room, stared at everyone else and said “Everyone, print journalism is irrelevant.” He then proceeded to grab a piece of chalk and draw a graph on the board with two rising lines reading “The Griffin Existing” and “World Problems”, and then explained how this helped his argument by enthusiastically yelling at Barth “Correlation equals causation!” Barth immediately rebutted his claims by disagreeing with the idea that correlation equals causation, and began to draw her own graph with two equal rising lines that read “World Problems” and “Pat Healy’s Existence” that took a steep drop when it reached 2027, ominously implying that world problems would no longer exist once Healy no longer exists.
Afterwards, the students ate sandwiches and relaxed, writing more comedic messages on the chalkboard. They had to quickly clean up their event since there was a class right after it ended, but everyone who attended left with smiles on their faces. When reflecting on the debate night, Hawkins said “Not all debates have to be contentious, some can be fun.”