LLU School of Dentistry Journal

Journal

Spring 2002

The Editor
In pursuit of trivial trash

Most of us have played the party game called Trivial Pursuit. It is a game that tests your ability to recognize facts that are not necessarily essential to our daily lives—hence they could be called “trivial facts.” Personally, I pride myself in being pretty good at the categories of history and people/places, and I have scored some good points being able to recognize some really useless information. But it is fun and that of course is the purpose of a party game—for it to be fun.

I started thinking about Trivial Pursuit as I was listening to a fellow alumnus telling me on the phone that a number of his classmates had reservations about supporting the School in a financial way. Why? Well, they had heard this rumor and that piece of gossip about faculty members and School administration and they weren’t sure they wanted to do anything for the School.

Once a rumor gets started it spreads like ripples on a pond where a pebble has been dropped. How it gets started is often difficult to determine. Probably someone heard something, or speculated about an event, or listened to someone’s complaint, and then passed his/her interpretation on to someone else.

A good example of how a rumor can get started is what happened to Chris Blake, a faculty member at Union College in Lincoln, Nebraska, and described in an article he wrote in Adventist Review (December 20, 2001, pg. 28). A friend of his had attended a meeting in Washington, DC, and had been told that Chris was no longer in the Church! Tracking down the source of the rumor, Chris discovered that it apparently started when he declined a request for an article for another Adventist publication because he was trying to write more for non-Adventist readers. This was apparently interpreted, as it passed from one individual to another, that Chris had left the Church.

Which brings me to another party game that is called “Telephone.” A number of people sit in a circle and one person whispers a sentence to the next person, who then whispers what he/she heard to the next person and so on. It is always fun to hear what the last person heard! The larger the group, the less resemblance there is between the final sentence and the original.

Party games can be fun and knowing trivial facts, however useless they are, can be very important in a game. But gossip and rumors, which rarely share much connection with real facts, become what I call “trivial trash.” When rumored “facts” are passed on, they serve no other purpose than to hurt a person or an institution. Trivial trash has the ability to harden the bitterness an alumnus may feel toward his/her School, a bitterness which perhaps is based on a slight or an unfair treatment received while being a student, but which with time should be forgotten. No faculty member is perfect (and that is a fact) and not every student is always treated fairly (another fact), but as we grow, personally and professionally, we need to leave those real or perceived slights behind. Pursuing the trivial trash of rumors and gossip doesn’t help that process at all.

The university setting in which the School of Dentistry belongs is an open society. All kinds of information is available to those who wish to obtain accurate facts. The operation of the School is transparent so that facts are readily available. (For instance, the ADA accreditation site visit February 12–14, 2002 is one in which an ADA team looks at everything we do.) Interested in facts? Find out for yourself, but skip the game of Trivial Trash.

Leif K. Bakland, SD’63

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