By KAI HAMMERMEISTER [Chronicle of Higher Education] – Thomas Jefferson attempted a student-driven model for his University of Virginia but quickly abandoned it. And, of course, Italy and Spain themselves have long since replaced student governance with state control. Yet it is [José Ortega y Gasset’s] intention to again place the student at the center of the university and thus to renew this Italo-Spanish contribution to the discourse and practice of higher education.

Ortega derives his student-centered model from the economic principle of scarcity that defines a good. Only because the lifetimes of students are limited is it necessary to make decisions about the content and periodization of education. The starting point for all educational decisions must, therefore, be the capacity of the student to learn, he argues, not the available knowledge at large nor the research specialities of the professoriate.

Continue reading “Noted: Does the professoriate know what students need to know? No.” »

By RON ROSENBAUM [First Things] – Evil has gotten a bad name lately. It always was a name for some sort of badness, yes; but lately the word sounds antiquated, the product of a less-sophisticated age. Evil belongs to an old, superstitious world of black and white, and we all know now that everything is gray, right? It belongs to a world of blame in which the Enlightenment tells us that “to understand all is to forgive all”—no blame, just explanation. There are some who argue it’s an unnecessary word: Having no ontological reality, no necessary use, it’s merely a semantic trap, a dead end.

Continue reading “Noted: Maybe calling evil "bad" is just another example of hate speech.” »

By JAMES K. A. SMITH – [The Immanent Frame] – “Strangely enough,” Foucault mused, “man—the study of whom is supposed by the naïve to be the oldest investigation since Socrates—is probably no more than a kind of rift in the order of things.” He is “only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge” who “will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.”

Foucault’s flippant requiem for “man” reflects a midcentury antihumanism in European thought, which, in the wake of two World Wars in the heart of Europe, had become suspicious of the “anthropotheism” of humanism wherein “Man” replaced the God who had died. And it is this story that is told so brilliantly by Stefanos Geroulanos in An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought. For these antihumanists, humanistic atheism had never really gotten over its theological tendencies; so the result of the death of God was the divinization of Man. Continue reading “Noted: The kind of antihumanist atheism a man can believe in.” »

From PARIS PHOTO 2010 [Lens Culture] – Photography is one of Central Europe’s richest forms of artistic expression. From the very beginning of the 20th century, Bratislava, Budapest, Prague, Ljubljana and Warsaw were home to an intellectual avant-garde promoting a new vision of photography. Many artists from these cities revolutionized the history of photography, from André Kertész and Mohology-Nagy to František Drtikol, Josef Sudek, Brassaï and Robert Capa.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the countries of the former Eastern Bloc have undergone a political, social and cultural revival. Photography remains the preferred language through which Central European artists express a new political and social reality, borrowing from diverse practices ranging from the visual and performing arts to documentary and subjective forms.

Continue reading “Noted: Photos from the center of Europe, looking out.” »

By CHRIS GRAHAM [The Millions] – A few weeks ago I ventured into the English Faculty Library at the University of Oxford to borrow a work of fiction. A friend had recommended the novel Money: A Suicide Note, by Martin Amis, and for a variety of reasons the only library from which I could borrow one of the University’s fifteen copies was the English Faculty. (All but two of the copies were owned by college libraries – none my own, and colleges do not lend to non-members – or by libraries that do not permit borrowing to anyone. The second circulation copy was out.) Although my subject is History and Politics, the English Faculty does permit non-members to borrow from its collection, but with some rather curious reservations.

When I presented the volume to be checked-out, the librarian examined my card (which discloses my subject), pursed her lips, pressed her palms protectively over Martin’s image on the dust jacket, and clearly made herself ready to say something that she regarded as unpleasant:

Continue reading “Noted: Reading a good book just for pain.” »

By SEAN TABB [The Morning News] – There was a time when all one required to be a successful bigamist was a job with frequent travel, a discreet accountant, and a Herculean sex drive. With the advent of the internet and the ubiquity of social networking, those days are over. Now that everyone and their father and his two wives has the ability to share intimate personal information and photos online, it’s gotten a lot harder to carry on two marriages simultaneously without one spouse finding out about the other.

Bigamy in the age of Facebook is tricky, but it’s not impossible. Continue reading “Noted: Adjusting Facebook to keep the wives happy.” »

By AMANDA GAILEY [NINES] – Leaves of Grass, the centerpiece of Whitman’s writing, and one of the most important books in U.S. literary history, is also one of the most difficult texts in literary history to define. Whitman envisioned his magnum opus as a living, growing, organic being, and he saw the book through six significantly different editions in his lifetime, most of which contained many variant issues. Today we are accustomed to a relative homogeneity among copies of a particular edition: modern printing and marketing ensure that, provided we both own either the hardback or paperback issue, your copy of a particular volume will be almost imperceptibly different from mine. But Whitman and his readers worked within a technologically different publishing economy, and most editions of Leaves of Grass would have been available in often strikingly different forms. Continue reading “Noted: How technology created Walt Whitman's very large pile of 'Leaves'.” »