For the past four days, a large group of Hillsdale students have filled Phillips Auditorium, and their CCA requirements, by attending twice-daily lectures about marriage and the family.

Surrounded by faculty, donors and guests of the college, these students have listened to eight different speakers. Whether we as a student body have benefited from this lecture series, however, is questionable, because it is questionable whether the CCA is intended to benefit us as students.

Undoubtedly, the CCA as an organization is intended for a broader audience than those individuals who spend nine months a year in Hillsdale. It is a public relations venue for the College, which can advertise big name speakers to potential students and donors. Moreover, the guests and Imprimis readers that arrive on campus four times a year expect to be reassured that their money is going to the right place. This is the reason for the self-congratulatory and self-consciously counter-cultural elements of the CCA, which can be heard in most speakers' opening remarks about Hillsdale's significance.

A little bit of Hillsdale-praise isn't necessarily wrong. It creates the potential for a problem, however, in that the CCA can transform from a discussion of ideas and values into what borders on a conservative-values propaganda machine.

The best and the worst of this week's CCA, and the CCA as an institution, could be seen in the two female speakers, Midge Decter and Katherine Spaht.

Decter's speech focused almost exclusively on the issue of gay marriage, and her argument against it was mostly based on emotion and anecdotes. She asserted that if homosexuals won the legal right to marry, they would not use it, and that the motive behind the gay marriage movement was to "spit in the eye" of the majority of Americans. The low point came, however, when she repeatedly asserted that the AIDS virus is transmitted in no other way than through homosexual intercourse and injection drug use. Perhaps Decter intended something other than what she said, or perhaps she was being willfully ignorant of 2002 CDC statistics that indicate that, although most AIDS cases in America are men who had homosexual intercourse or used injection drugs, 61 percent of women with AIDS receive the disease through heterosexual sex. At this point, whatever Decter's intentions may have been are irrelevant, and it is unlikely that her comments will be reproduced in Imprimis .

What is relevant, however, is that this is the extreme point to which a CCA can degrade: empty rhetoric, name-calling and emotional assertions of dubious facts. Spaht's lecture, on the other hand, was a refreshing break from the topic of gay marriage.

In discussing the problem of divorce, which is arguably as much of a threat to the American family as gay marriage, she quoted statistics from numerous divorce studies and analyzed the legal and social implications of a "no-fault" divorce. Spaht was clear, reasoned, and while certainly conservative, also balanced in her presentation of facts.

If Decter's speech was the CCA gone wrong, Spaht's speech exemplified what the CCA ought to be. As it stands, however, many students don't think the CCA has much to offer. They sit in the audience and spend their hour in Phillips playing games or surfing the Internet on their laptops, reading for their classes, talking to each other or simply spacing out.

Some of this behavior certainly has nothing to do with the topic of the CCA itself-some students simply don't want to attend a lecture. But when assertions replace evidence, and rhetoric supersedes logic, students stop taking a CCA seriously.

In its quest to sustain and promote Hillsdale's traditional values, the CCA can very easily fall into a numbing repetition of these conservative beliefs.

Hillsdale students are, for the most part, intellectually curious. We want to engage opposing viewpoints, explore evidence, and discuss the practical applications of the ideas presented in the CCA. This week, however, we became rather bogged down in the politics and morals of gay marriage.

We wonder whether this CCA got stifled in the thick political atmosphere of an election year, or whether the lecture series, in its dual role as Hillsdale's image-sustainer and information source for students, is unable to satisfactorily fulfill its somewhat conflicting purposes.