Recently, Paul LePage spoke at Colby College, where I am a student. This, alone, I can accept. We were told that we could ask questions of the governor, but in truth, audience members were instructed to write their questions on paper, which were handed to LePage’s staffers and heavily vetted. Only those questions most palatable to him were ever asked.

The event’s advertising described “an open conversation with Colby students and central Maine residents,” and we saw the exact opposite.

I think the Goldfarb Center should be embarrassed to have hosted this event.

Instead of promoting dialogue, it actively participated in the reduction of political discourse to bite-sized, pre-approved position statements.

Sandy Maisel opened the event with commentary about the importance of listening to those who disagree with us; this, however, is meaningful only if those who disagree with us will say anything we have not heard a hundred times.

LePage said nothing in his monologue — and I call it a monologue, because fielding “audience questions” selected specifically for his talking points does not a dialogue create — that I could not learn from a quick glance over his campaign website.

Civic engagement implies that we should all be willing to take on hard questions; for the Goldfarb Center to pander to a politician’s avoidance of hard questions is directly counter to that principle, and for it to mislead its audience about the nature of the event is doubly disgraceful.

Eli Dupree

Waterville