On March 4 at 7p.m., the University Program Council paid $5,700 to have two reality television stars from MTV on campus to speak to students about eating disorders. And while they claimed to have great insight from their personal journeys of recovery, their age, laughing and cynicism used in speaking about victims, the lack of referral to adequate and accessible counseling services and the judgmental sarcasm when discussing South Dakota told a different story. If we want to have MTV here, then let’s, have glow light dances in the Student Union or fraternity team challenges out on the Grove lawn.

Marketing MTV reality personnel as facilitators of such a discussion disguises and belittles the subject matter. Public forum university level discussions should be facilitated by people with the skills and knowledge necessary to correctly inform, encourage and mentor. Hypocritical to our own university expectations, statistics were manufactured, sources were not cited and some of the medical terminology used was incorrect.

Entertainment you say? Is any person’s battle with body image and overwhelming feelings of being less than entertainment? After they brushed over psychological factors like they were a bad commercial, the only thing we were left with was gossip from their show and the bad mouthing of other cast members. Which is the way it should have been advertised and not as a place where students could go for an honest dialog. With so many strong role models in our community, surely we could have thought of a better way to spend our activity money.

The University Counseling Center can be reached at 605-688-6146 (free).

**Actual amount was verified by University Program Council on March 7, 2008.

Shannon M. Lane Ph.D.Department ofRural Sociology