Beautiful thread stuck to a dull tip

While I can agree with Dacia Charlesworth's general theme of contributing to a society of learned citizens, I have to say I do not like the techniques she uses to make her point. She poses a question to her audience, asking whether they will be voters or non-voters, volunteers or non-volunteers. She quotes statistics to dehumanize the members of her audience, assuming that peoples' merits and potential can be stripped down to numbers. The students' options are a simple "yes" or "no", good or bad, right or wrong. Never mind that 50,999,897 of the 106 million voters chose Gore, that 50,456,002 selected Bush, or the fact that almost 1,000,000 people voted "none of the above." 106 million people voted and the rest were bad people. What of the 100 million who chose to not vote? How many of them knew the superficial issues, crappy candidates, in addition to the futility of voting for a third-party individual who reflected their personal views? Charlesworth ultimately fails to accomplish her goal of empowering students when she starts with belittling their individuality.
Her discussion of the importance of a liberal arts education and the evolution of education is somewhat effective. It demonstrates her personal of the subject matter, thus qualifying her to speak about it. However, she doesn’t elaborate on her link between education and civil rights. She attempts to appeal to emotions by conjuring images of escorted students, but then quickly moves on to her personal frustration.
Personally, I wanted to strangle somebody throughout the last third of this piece. The length of the statements associated with her acronym destroys any possibility of remembering the whole message. On top of that, she manages to quote a principle figure in history for each of the four tenets. Here, I can only think she’s trying to use their words as endorsement for her own. Again, she makes an emotional appeal with Anna Howard Shaw with little explanation. She throws in a biblical quote (it seems just because she could). Finally, she throws in the opening factoids to bring every full (however misshapen) circle.
Dr. Charlesworth status as an expert on communications puzzles me, given her inability to relay her ideas in a coherent, relevant fashion. As a reader who sees her point, it’s frustrating to see it made in such a poor way.