Every other week, The Talon interviews a member of the Oklahoma Christian University community, a “Newsmaker,” to answer questions about their role on campus.
On April 14, The Talon interviewed Shannon Fagen, the student leader of Taking Sides Chapel. Fagen is a biology major with a pre-med emphasis. She graduates this semester and is set to begin medical school in July.
Taking Sides Chapel is held once a week and is led by two student presenters who publicly discuss opposite sides of a religious or social issue. Fagen served three years as the student leader.
What made you want to join Taking Sides?
The thing that drew me to taking sides was the thought behind it and our mission. I am a person who really likes to ask questions. What frustrated me a lot in high school and when I came here was just not feeling like I had the space to ask hard questions about faith or about life. A lot of people around me had strong opinions but couldn’t back them up … That’s kind of what drew me to Taking Sides, was having a group of people around me that were open to doing that and that enjoyed doing that. And just encouraging other people to do the same thing.
What changes have you made during your time as student leader?
People in my grade that I had joined the club with, I knew some of them that didn’t want to come back or felt like their ideas were not listened to as well or they didn’t feel like they were in a safe space to talk. My goal, I don’t remember what president it was, who said that his goal was to create a cabinet where nobody agreed with each other. He wanted people who would have different opinions and give him different perspectives. My goal was to make it more of an open place where anyone would feel comfortable.
What have you learned during your time as student leader?
I definitely learned a lot about leadership throughout my time in Taking Sides … As I was saying earlier, my goal was to create a [diverse] environment, but it took a while to learn how to do that and to learn how to kind of keep my comments to a minimum and try to alleviate any tension in the room. When I could see someone was uncomfortable because it seemed like everyone was agreeing on something that went against them, trying to calm everyone down. I learned how to manage my own reactions to things and my own strong opinions and how to try and encourage the strengths of everyone on my team. If that makes sense.
What was your biggest challenge as student leader?
The same challenge we’re facing today, that everyone’s busy and it’s a hard thing to commit to… One of the biggest issues is that people see it on Wednesday and they don’t know how it gets there… I would have been terrified three years ago if you had told me that you were just gonna throw a topic at me and I had to be ready to debate on into Wednesdays and didn’t know, like who I was debating, did have a relationship with these people, didn’t have anyone to help me prepare. One reason I even started going was because the meetings were so much fun, because all we all have to do is show up to the meetings, and that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to be thrown on stage. You volunteered to go on stage. So everyone that ends up on stage was not just picked to go up there. At the meetings, we picked the topic that we’re going to debate for we try to say two weeks ahead, so for the next Wednesday, and then we just bounce ideas around for the yes side and the no side and just talk over it for 20, 30 minutes, and then after we feel like we have robust arguments and preparation for both sides, then we will ask people to volunteer to debate for either side.
How are topics for Taking Sides selected?
We’ve got a whole list of topics that we’ve just collected by all the ideas. I got a partial list from our last president. We also get topics from the form that’s on [chapel slides]. Every week we’ll just go through and pick one that week… But then we’ll get the feedback, ‘Oh, we really like the deep theology topics,’ so we’ll do more deep theology topics and it’s hard to please everyone, but we try and have a good balance. There are topics we do choose to avoid because they are too controversial. Part of that is just practicality, but the other part of it is we only have ten minutes on stage, and I don’t want to cause anyone too much pain or too much harm from that because we don’t have enough time to do it justice… I don’t even care if you’re criticizing the debate or what we said, because that really just means that you’re joining in the debate.
Why should students join taking sides?
It’s a really great place to have a community that is open to exploring new ideas and asking just hard questions or even just silly or fun questions…I would encourage them to join in the mission, which is to present ideas to other people and to help people grow stronger in their beliefs and in their faith by giving them both of these questions to to struggle with. But also maybe these are questions they’ve already had and we’re giving them a basis for different ideas that they can struggle with about that question or that topic.
For more information about Taking Sides Chapel, email brian.simmons@oc.edu
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