Should your deliberations be at an end after responsible consideration of the available arguments?
Anthony Howell: Management constitutes the contemporary aristocracy. It has laid down a whole regimen dictating what can be said and what can’t, avowedly in the name of social hygiene, but in actuality it reinforces the status quo.
Aristotle engages in a philosophic version of “unfriending”: gently, he sets out to correct his readers—a correction necessary in every era, but especially ours.
…the Spirit not only dwells within the world but also surrounds our emerging, struggling, living, dying, and renewing planet of life and the whole universe itself. It illustrates this with Luther’s great image of God in and around a grain; with Augustine’s magnificent image of the whole creation like a finite sponge floating in an infinite sea, necessarily filled in its every pore with water; and with the beautiful image of the pregnant female body…
Rorty had indeed revived pragmatism, but Rorty’s “neo-pragmatism” is, by the Deweyans’ lights, a perverted and emaciated pragmatism, a pragmatism not worth resuscitating.
These disparate elements are beginning to form an entire ecosystem for teaching and crediting human knowledge and skill, one that exists entirely outside the traditional colleges and universities that use their present monopoly on the credentialing franchise to extract increasingly large sums of money from students.
Nicholas Lemann, the distinguished dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, pointed out that in the realm he left to join the academy — the world of metropolitan news media — many newsrooms have lost half their staffs in the last few years. When universities reached that point, he would admit that they faced a real crisis.
NYRB and NYU’s Humanities Initiative are sponsoring a free “half-day” conference on higher education starting at 11:30 am at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, 20 Cooper Square, 7th Floor, in New York City. The event is free and a reception will be held at the conclusion.
When do minuscule acceptance rates stop being something to boast about and start becoming signs of archaic, insulated, overly wealthy institutions that are badly out of step with their times?
Anthony O’Hear: Vain, yet not all in vain… from the lips of the Sea Sybil men shall learn for ages yet to come what is most noble and most fair. So long as we are able to learn this (maybe guided by Ruskin himself), the distinction between Aesthesis and Theoria remains. From Ruskin’s point of view, the distinction is necessarily timeless.
Everywhere we turn, we find an expert declaiming on some future trend, concerning nearly every activity. Should we pay much attention? No…
Even for the academically inclined, the value of college in this economic climate is increasingly subject to question.
France’s decline in the international rankings has focused minds. A book by the Paris-based British academic Peter Gumbel published last year titled On achève bien les écoliers? (They shoot schoolchildren, don’t they?) sharpened attention further. In it he argued that the education system was systematically undermining children’s confidence.
We’ve become too analytical. Our approach is about law: Do good, avoid evil. But the mystic is one who, through prayer, enters into the mystery of God as love. Christian life is first of all a mystery, the mystery that the incredible, incomprehensible love of God is the source of all that we are.
Among the 2011 guests will be Susan Greenfield, Colin Blakemore, Zygmunt Bauman, Bonnie Greer, Ted Honderich, Gideon Rachman, Rana Mitter, Mary Ann Sieghart, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Angie Hobbs, Polly Toynbee, Simon Armitage, Lauren Booth, Leela Ghandi, Tessa Jowell, Mary Midgley, Mary Warnock, Bryan Appleyard, David Aaronovitch and many more.
Alan Wall: The Janus Face of Metaphor. | Clues and Labyrinths. | Ruin, the collector and sad mortality.
