Talk:Pacific Union College

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Contents

[edit] Comment

CPhilpot, note that Wikipedia rules of conduct do not support removing content that you simply disagree with. No one person or organization owns the PUC Wiki page. Save Rural Angwin is a valid link. Many in the Angwin community believe SRA's actions to be positive. This link has been restored. Apease 18:58, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] SRA vs PUC links

APease, I spent some time working on the links to the Angwin page and it seems to me enhancing the census and demographic info in the Angwin page fits the topic better then placing all the items in the PUC page. And no, I have not removed any thing based on agreement but rather in a search for supported NPOV data. Cphilpot 04:55, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Making a link to Angwin from the PUC article is fine. I'm afraid I don't understand the rest of your comments above. If there's a controversy about the expansion of PUC, it seems logical to put that on the PUC page. I don't know what you are referring to by 'census and demographic info'. EdJohnston 05:19, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Craig, as long as you don't delete the legitimate link to Save Rural Angwin again, this issue is resolved. Indeed, the links I've added to Census data for Angwin should be considered a good thing. However, you also removed some negative comments that were apparently from a PUC student, as follows. "A recent aggressive move by students to open more communication with the administration, which has failed in its entirety. Has led many students to doubt the currents administrations abilities to choose what is best for PUC. This as well as a new move to control more of the students expressive outlets such as concerts and acoustic venues has led to deep-seated resentment among the student body." It seems to me you could request, through this discussion page, some substantiation for the comment, but just deleting it is solely a matter of opinion, and certainly appears to be an attempt by you as a member of the PUC administration to remove anything negative about PUC. This sort of approach doesn't work in the long run. PUC should welcome the negatives, however painful, and try to improve, rather than trying to stifle dissent, whether among their own student body, employees, or neighbors. Apease 07:00, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Craig, I see that you've also altered, without any documentation to support it, the sentence I included about the sale of PUC's agricultural land. Hundreds of acres (specifically, 526 acres outside the Angwin Urban Bubble, which are all zoned agricultural) of agricultural land will be sold to Triad for development. That's not a "small amount". Although PUC doesn't admit that directly in writing, it is easily calculated. At this point, I have to ask for advice from the Wikipedia folks how to address this problem, without simply reverting to my earlier version (which is frowned upon as a matter of procedure). Apease 07:08, 15 February 2007 (UTC)


[edit] I Cantori

An unidentified editor added a segment on PUC's music group I Cantori. This was a good addition - but I thought it was added in the wrong section, and lacked the more objective, encyclpoedic style. I made some changes - but I think it would be great to beef up that section with a more comprehensive description of the music groups at PUC. I do not have this information, but I hope someone who does will supply it. Gogh 21:09, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] List of college presidents?

I suggest that the list of presidents be removed as not notable, since the list takes up a lot of space, unless any of them have their own WP articles. Perhaps this list is available somewhere on the college web site, in which case we could link to it? It would be reasonable to include the current president, and perhaps a sentence or two about him. EdJohnston 04:36, 3 July 2007 (UTC)


No problem. I had seen a section like this under another college page and thought it was typical.Gogh 06:39, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] DAS

I really like the addition of the DAS information. However, until someone has the time to give a more comprehensive list of campus clubs, I don't think it should stand as the only entry under the heading of Clubs. Also, the list of productions was incomplete - and a complete list would probably be too long for the PUC entry. I modified this so that it stands under its own heading for now, and also gives just a few illustrative productions, and link to the PUC DAS page that lists more (but not all) of the DAS productions. DAS has been productive and important enough that one could argue that it deserves its own page; if someone had time to work on that we could link to it from here. Gogh 03:40, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Are there any reliable sources that comment on the Dramatic Arts Society? Allowing this type of material could cause a dramatic expansion in all our university articles. We don't list all the courses taught at PUC, and a list of all the plays produced there seems unnecessary as well. It is not a great surprise that colleges have student activities, but it's not notable either, unless an individual activity is famous in some way that can be documented. Winning a national prize of some kind would be evidence. EdJohnston 03:52, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
This is a good point. I actually pruned the previous, longer list of DAS productions, keeping just a few as illustrations, pointing out that a comprehensive list was probably not appropriate here. I am not sure why you seem to be suggesting that we now have a list of all the plays produced at PUC. I did link to an external page that has a more extensive list. I thought that was consistent with wiki practice, but I may be wrong. My suggestion was for someone to work on a separate PUC-DAS page, and perhaps it is this that you are objecting to? I am not sure just how notable an organization has to be to qualify for its own wiki page. My argument in favor of doing so is that, in the context of the kind of college PUC is (SDA, conservative, Christian) the number, type and quality of the productions are all notable. This could be explained, developed and supported on a page of its own, but would probably give too much weight to DAS in an article about PUC. For one example of a reliable source that comments on the quality of PUC DAS, see the review of their current production "Red Books", published on the web page of the San Francisco Public Broadcasting station KQED (the link is on the main PUC page - http://www.kqed.org/arts/performance/index.jsp?id=14543) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Gogh (talk • contribs) 02:05, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Endowment

There is currently a local dispute about land development in Angwin. I think some mention of that is appropriate on this page, but I also think it is important not to allow that dispute to take over this page. If others think it is justified, perhaps a new page devoted just to that dispute can be created, and then linked to from here.

What is relevant here is that the college had made increasing its endowment a high priority, and that this has lead to exploring options for developing its land. I do not see the relevance of what outsiders think about the need to increase the endowment. It may be that what outsiders think about the endowment is relevant to the local dispute about zoning and development, but to the extent that this material is encyclopedic, and deserving of mention on wikipedia, it should be on a page dedicated to that dispute, and not on a page about the college per se. I deleted a recent addition of extended discussion of the endowment issue. The link provided to an analysis of the college endowment by an outside group does not function, but, as noted above, I also do not believe that is relevant to this page.Gogh 19:33, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

If the Pacific Union College is defending the environmental impact of its development project based on financial stringency, then this information becomes germane. If they had said nothing about finances when proposing that development, I would have agreed with you. I believe this stuff is now on the table. I think that the pointer to GuideStar is OK, and pointers to any newspaper articles are OK. I'm not sure that directly pointing to the PDF on an activist site is quite so justified; that could be discussed. EdJohnston 19:52, 21 October 2007 (UTC)
I think you are missing the point. An extended treatment of the very vigorous debate about Angwin land use is not appropriate to this article about the college. You may well be correct that a discussion about the college finances is relevant to a discussion about the proposed development project, but that belongs on a separate wikipedia page (if in fact such a discussion belongs on an encyclopedia at all). If you think the comments on the current page that relate to the proposed land development are loaded too much in favor of the College's position on their proposed land development, then I think we should discuss that at some length here, with an eye not towards a more extensive treatment, but towards cutting down what is there now to make it more descriptive and less polemical (if that is how you see it now). I think that something that simply states that the college is in the process of trying to develop its land in order to increase its endowment is appropriate and descriptive, and does not require getting bogged down in the pros and cons. Linking to other pages that make the arguments on both sides is probably sufficient - but if you want to make the argument that a separate wikipedia page devoted solely to the land deal is needed, I am open to being convinced, and would be willing to work on it with you if convinced it was appropriate. What I do believe, strongly, is that a page devoted to PUC should not be consumed by the debate over the land deal, since the college is much more than this proposal, and its wikipedia entry should not be hijacked (even unintentionally) by a political debate. Gogh 01:52, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
Editors who patrol for Conflict of Interest issues are very sensitive to apparent removal of criticism from articles. Even if a separate article is created on the land deal, a balanced summary of the situation should remain in this article. Wikipedia's interest in currently-happening topics should roughly follow what the mainstream press finds interesting. If a large percent of all press mentions of PUC are in connection with the land deal, then our information on current events at PUC should not differ widely from that ratio, in my opinion. Third-party commentary is what establishes notability. The Endowment section now contains about 2,800 bytes and I don't believe that is too large, given the importance of the land development issue. EdJohnston 02:29, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
Well, PUC is one of the oldest existing colleges in California - I do not disagree with you that the current land proposal deserve mention here, but I don't think you can really justify that it should take up a major portion of the article. Are you suggesting that we do a comprehensive search of all media mentions of Pacific Union College and determine what fraction refers to the recent controversy over land use? I suspect that the vast majority of those mentions would relate to the thousands of PUC alumni over the years and their various accomplishments. Many college pages do have large sections on Alumni - maybe we should add that here. Note that I am not suggesting at all the removal of critical material in this article about PUC - just that we not get into an extended treatment of the rather arcane issues under debate (are we going to have 2800 bytes on the various interpretations of an "Urban Bubble" in Napa County as well?). Looking this section over, it seems to me that the problematic passage is in the opening sentence - and maybe the section title. Here is how it currently reads:
"Endowment
Like other small private colleges of its type, PUC has come under increasing financial pressure. In the summer of 2006 the PUC board and administration embarked on an aggressive campaign to enlarge the college endowment, and reduce dependence on student tuition, through the development and sale of a significant portion of its large land."
What if we simply changed the section heading to "Proposed Land Development" and removed the first sentence in this paragraph entirely? If you want to add more links to sources that summarize pro and con arguments (although there are already several of these at the end of the article) we could do that too. It seems this would remove what may seem something of a presumption that the land development is necessary, and retains a mention of both the pro and con position. I will wait a few days, and if you do not object I will try an edit like this in the text and see how it works.Gogh 03:55, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
Changing the heading to 'Proposed Land Development' is reasonable. Indicating that the college's financial needs are involved is surely appropriate, though the first sentence in this paragraph (the one you want to remove) can certainly go. Lengthy chit-chat is not necessary, but if the mainstream press reports negative comments about the college's plans, that fact should not be ignored or glossed over.
From your comments above, I am still uncertain whether you consider 2800 bytes to be too much for the issue being discussed. The present section seems OK to me, fairly neutral and not too long, so I'm not sure why you argued at such length above that there could be a need for a separate article on the dispute. The recent edit history does not show anyone trying to insert material of excessive length, unless I didn't go far enough back. EdJohnston 05:15, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for this response - I will take a stab at a revision along these lines, and then see what you think. My point has not been that what we currently have (or even the sentence or two that you proposed adding) was too much. My point has been that to take the section in the direction that you suggest would almost certainly result in much more elaborate and lengthy detailing of the various positions. For example instead of responding as I have, I could have just added a couple of sentences after yours summarizing arguments, reported in mainstream press reports, that were in opposition to yours. You (or someone else) could have done something similar in response to a slightly different point I may have alluded to. I am not sure where such a tit for tat could have stopped, or who would have been authorized to blow the whistle. It seems more reasonable to limit the material here to what is relevant to PUC, and try to avoid getting too far off topic. Note in other parts of this discussion page where the advice has been to give less details about related tangents (past presidents of PUC; list of plays produced by the colleges' Dramatic Art Society).Gogh 07:01, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
Your new edit looks OK to me. EdJohnston 17:51, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Fair use rationale for Image:PUC-med.jpg

Image:PUC-med.jpg is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

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BetacommandBot (talk) 20:22, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Article is collecting less-relevant material

Wikipedia should not serve as an extension of the college's own web site. Some things that I believe should not be included here:

  • 1. Hours of operation of Elmshaven
  • 2. Name of the current organist
  • 3. Long list of recent productions by the drama society

We should be focusing on important encyclopedic facts that can be referenced to reliable sources. Also, the testimonial to the quality of the organ (top ten in the world, or something) lacks a reference. (Ref. 9 says nothing about that claim). There is also still some text that sounds like advertising language: The decision to remain a college was based on the institution's deep commitment to high quality liberal arts undergraduate teaching. EdJohnston (talk)