In 1960, only 7.7 percent of the US population had a College degree. By 1970, 14 percent of school leavers went to College. Now the proportion of the US population above the age of 25 with a four year degree is about 36 percent.
This has meant a great change in the epistemic status of the University. Sixty years ago, it was where you had to go to find smart people and to become smart yourself. Now it is a place where people who weren't smart enough to do well in the real world earn a little money as glorified child minders. More an more learning and skills acquisition will be done 'on-line' with generative AI.
It is no longer the case that Campus protests can signal a shift in the public mood or a change in the world view of smart people. On the contrary, the thing is seen as puerile.
Agnes Callard takes a different view. She writes in Point magazine-
Beyond Neutrality
Higher Education is meant to have utility. It should not be neutral between stupid nonsense and what is useful and raises productivity.
The university’s responsibility to lead
It has no such responsibility. To teach is not to lead. Aristotle taught Alexander. But only Alexander was a King and leader of men.
Last year, two university presidents lost their jobs because, when testifying before Congress, they failed to project authority and moral seriousness to the general public; a third resigned this summer.That was Baroness Minouche Shafik, who is Egyptian by birth. She bravely stood up to the anti-Semitic bullies on her campus. She sent in the police to arrest 100 'activists' occupying a University building.
This tells us something about what a university president is today.
It tells us that Baroness Shafik is a good leader. Her job was to ensure her students profited from their very expensive education at Columbia.
Being judged a leader by those whom you are not employed to lead is, apparently, part of the job description
Obviously! If you led your team to defeat, everybody is welcome to judge you an abject failure.
—especially at universities such as Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania.
all of which receive federal funds. If they were wholly self-financing, they could do what they liked.
Six months later, Lawrence D. Bobo, dean of Harvard’s Division of Social Science, called for the faculty to stop publicly criticizing the university—or else face sanction.
He was just as evil and tyrannical as my former boss- Ketan Patel- who requested that I stop telling the diners at the restaurant where I worked that all the dishes we served had been lovingly prepared. according in traditional Indian recipes, from fresh dog turds. Believe it or not, Ketan threatened to sack me! Fortunately, his father chanced to drop by and he pointed out that I had never been hired in the first place. He kicked me repeatedly till I left the premises.
Harvard faculty recoiled at the prospect of having their freedom of expression curtailed, but Bobo’s demand for a united front—or at least the appearance of one—testifies to the political significance that Harvard has, and aims to continue to have
Nonsense! Harvard alumni may have 'political significance' iff they become as rich as fuck. Otherwise, we laugh at them.
Campus protests, such as those that erupted across the country this year following Israel’s invasion of Gaza,
You can't invade your own sovereign territory. What America did in Iraq was an invasion.
threaten the university’s desired self-presentation.
Nope. Harvard has a lot of money and the Law School and the Business School and Scientific Laboratories still attract the best and the brightest.
When protesters bait the university into using violence against them, they are trying to expose it to the world as the opposite of the noble leader it purports to be: an ignorant, selfish brute.
Colleges teach. They don't lead. On the other hand it is true that if only Baroness Shafiq, back when she was running the LSE, had changed my degree certificate to affirm that rather than being 'lower second class', I am, actually very smart and rich and handsome, then my life wouldn't suck ass big time.
Even if the conflict is resolved without violence, the university is unlikely to come off well.
Who cares? All that matters is the quality of education it imparts and whether or not this raises the productivity and life chances of the students or, equally, if the Government gets a good return, in terms of higher tax receipts, from providing funds to Colleges.
The president must either bow to the protesters’ demands, or refuse.
Or move on to greener pastures- as I imagine Baroness Shafik will do. It is noteworthy that big tech companies are cracking down on wokeness. Vivek Ramaswamy seems to have done well by focusing on its dangers. Under Trump, DEI is likely to die out.
From an onlooker’s vantage point, the difference between a conciliatory act of restoring peace and a resolute act of enforcing discipline is small: either way, the president is tending to the people who are screaming, not the people they are screaming about.
Shafik should have beaten up Netanyahu.
A university that is turned inward during a time of crisis will struggle to project leadership to the world outside it.
Nope. It will be judged by the employability of its students. Colleges have never been in the business of leadership. They are glorified child minders who may, at the margin, help some smart people get even smarter by working with other smart people in some utilitarian field.
Protest exposes a tension between the university’s intellectual mission and its political ambitions.
Very true. Harvard's ambition is to annex Yale and turn it into a disabled toilet.
I want to explain why this tension exists,
It doesn't. Some silly peeps thought they could get Biden to stop arming Israel. Now they are saddled with Trump who will back the 'settlers' in Israel to the hilt.
to offer some constructive criticisms
she is incapable of any such thing
of my own university’s attempts at negotiating it—
there is nothing to 'negotiate'. There was a nuisance but that nuisance will disappear of its own accord.
both in general, and with respect to the recent protests in particular—and, finally, to make a suggestion as to how universities might rethink their position of leadership.
A particular University may take a leadership role in a particular branch of scientific research and this may have great economic benefits for the surrounding areas. That type of leadership will find local backers and is likely to attract generous funding. Any other type of leadership is useless.
Universities were born prematurely.
No. They were born when smart peeps had to club together for mutual protection and to ensure that drunken hooligans didn't wipe their arses on the leaves of precious manuscripts.
Let me explain what I mean by this. A university is a place devoted to the problem of how to make serious use of free time.
That may be true of a gymnasium or an Arts & Crafts studio or a Church Choir. Universities should be devoted to education and research of a useful type.
This problem only arises once your other problems—of how to stay alive, and support the people around you—have been solved.
No. Universities can exist if that problem is solved by running and hiding and then stowing away on a ship till you get to a place where scholars can keep themselves alive and protect their manuscripts from drunken hooligans.
In a university, we ask, “What pursuits would we see as worthy of sustained effort in a world of justice, peace and plenty?”;
No we don't. Plato got his students to study math. Aristotle took an interest in biology. Universities said 'if you come to us, you will be expected to pursue a particular course of studies. Kindly don't knife your professor or wipe your arse on the books in the library.'
Perhaps Callard is thinking of the Church. If this world was perfect, we might want to focus on making sure we'd get to Heaven unless God decides to abolish death. But he shows no sign of doing so any time soon.
our answers are “math”
which is useful
and “philosophy”
which is useless but funny because the shitty people who do it don't know how utterly stupid they really are
and “anthropology”
Fuck off! There may have been a time when the anthropology dept. had the best drugs, but, by the Eighties, it was Finance majors who had quality cocaine.
and so on. But we do not yet inhabit a world of justice, peace and plenty.
In which case, Callard asked a stupid question.
Forced to find a place for itself in a world unfriendly to sheltered gardens,
The world is cool with 'sheltered gardens' provided they are self-financing.
the university employs police, hedge-fund managers, construction companies, a fundraising office and PR teams.
Because they are less shite than Philosophy Professors.
It is ever selling itself to prospective students and their parents as a vehicle for success, ever competing for status with other universities and other institutions, ever struggling to placate its many constituencies—not only students and faculty but also its board of trustees, its present and future donors, the media, the government.
It may do. But then again it may not. Look at Rockefeller University. There are 22 Nobel laureates associated with it. It doesn't have to 'placate' anybody. Its achievements speak for themselves. At one time, back in the early Seventies, it made the mistake of hiring some philosophers. But they wouldn't talk to each other, let alone anyone else. So it got rid of them and has never looked back.
Does it tell all these people that it is a leisured garden? No. Does it confess: We’re just selfishly trying to keep our financial heads above water in a competitive world of scarce resources? Also no. The image the university has chosen for itself is that of moral leader.
People only bother with their image when the reality is very different. I only started to wear a blonde wig and push-up bra after I turned sixty.
It presents itself as a force for positive change, a beacon of useful innovation, a bastion of social responsibility, a bulwark of democracy, a meritocratic temple to equality and freedom and justice.
Why stop there? Why not say 'it presents itself as the son of Kal-El who was born under the Red Sun of Krytpon and who is dedicated to Truth, Justice & the American Way?'
The homepage of my university advertises both its “community impact” and “global impact,” and claims “we advance ideas and humanity.”
I suppose it could claim that it provides 'care in the community' to Agnes Callard.
The university could respond to protesters
Why respond? Rockefeller does not admit stupid students who are bound to end up protesting that Biden isn't undergoing gender reassignment surgery even though he promised Kamala he would do so.
by declaring, “This has nothing to do with us, we’re just an ivory tower.” Or it could put on its worldly hat and admit, “Taking sides does not maximize the value of our investments.”
Universities want to expand their bureaucracies. I suppose they could offer rape counselling to students who have begun to feel unsafe because Biden hasn't chopped off his own dick.
Instead it reacts in a spirit of self-righteousness, waving some competing moral slogan. The University of Chicago, which has for the past decade been rebranding itself as the free-speech university, waves the flag of academic freedom and institutional neutrality.
But it does so in Chicago. It is only if it moves somewhere decent people live that we'd get upset.
After forcibly removing the encampment, UChicago’s president, Paul Alivisatos,
a brilliant chemist.
wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal explaining his action: the protesters wanted him to side against Israel, but he believed that doing so would inhibit the freedom of its students and faculty to declare themselves on the opposite side.
This is irrelevant. The test was whether the encampment 'blocked the learning or expression of others or substantially disrupted the functioning or safety of the university'. This is a justiciable matter. Did Alivisatos act intra vires in making that determination. Prima facie, yes. Suppose he decided to urinate on Callard because he believed that not doing so would inhibit the freedom of students and faculty. His action would have been ultra vires. There is no provision in law which permits the President of a University to piss upon professors. Removing an encampment from College property, however, is a legal course of action.
And yet he did not worry that by declaring the university on the side of institutional neutrality, he would be inhibiting the freedom
My being on one side does not inhibit anybody's freedom to be on another side. It would be foolish to worry that this could be the case.
of those in the university community who wish to call that principle into question
which they could do without 'blocking the learning or expression of others.
—a group that includes, presumably, all of the protesters.
What worried or did not worry him was not germane. Was his action intra vires? Yes. What should be worrying Callard is that she may be inhibiting all and sundry from urinating on her head.
As my colleague, the philosopher Anton Ford, has noted, UChicago’s rebrand as the free-speech university was a top-down operation,
Chicago University had convened a Committee on Freedom of Expression. The aim was to get rid of 'trigger warnings' and 'cancel culture'.
not the product of consultation with students or faculty.
More worryingly, it was not the product of everybody pissing on Professor Callard's head.
The question then is: Why say anything at all?
Because you are stupid and unedumicated peeps like me like laughing at whatever you say.
If the university believes its public position-taking inhibits my freedom,
It doesn't. It would be a different matter if it publicly pissed on Callard's head.
why take any positions?
Why not push back against 'trigger warnings' and 'cancel culture'? Look at Vivek Ramaswamy. He has done very well politically out of his 'anti-woke' screed. History is on his side.
The answer is that the university is not in the business of maximizing my freedom,
It is in the business of strictly limiting your freedom. You can't beat or sodomize your students and have to pretend to teach them and to grade their worthless papers.
it is in the position of maximizing my freedom consistent with presenting itself as a moral leader.
No. It really doesn't give a fuck about you. It charges your students a lot of money and pays you a pittance. Even the University President does not turn up at your house to piss on your head.
It is willing to impose costs on my freedom of expression in order to present itself as something other than a moneymaking leisure garden.
Not the Chemistry Dept. Callard, sadly, only gets to teach retards.
It is hard to know how many people really accept the university as a moral leader.
None do. Universities may teach well and some may also do good research. What matters is if this adds value of an utilitarian kind.
Even those who donate on the strength of the free-speech branding might do so for strategic reasons—for instance, because they interpret such support, in the current climate, as a coded way of attacking the far left.
Woke nutters.
It is the idealistic protesters who reveal themselves as true believers:
in Hitlerism. Why did that lazy fellow not kill off the other half of the Jewish people? Too busy diddling Eva Braun- innit?
their furious demand to be heard—assembling on campus and protesting in front of the administration building, rather than at the dentist’s office, or at the headquarters of Amazon, or at a government building—is a direct acknowledgment of the administration’s claim to moral and intellectual leadership.
No. It is a direct acknowledgement that some University Departments are shit. Students have no incentive to attend classes which make them stupider and more useless.
Their behavior telegraphs an accusation: “If you were who you claimed to be, you would listen to us.”
Why would one of the world's leading chemists want to listen to ignorant nutters?
Elite universities have been the site of the largest protests.
If they have useless non-STEM departments or recruit 'diverse' nutters.
This fact has been levied
she means levelled
scornfully against the protesters, as if it proved the illegitimacy of their cause.
They prove their own cowardice and stupidity. What they are engaging in is make-believe too fucking retarded to rise to the level of theatre.
But really all it proves is that the leading universities are also the ones that make the greatest claims to lead the world.
No. There is no evidence that 'leading universities' make the 'greatest claims to lead the world.' This is because even my own Institute of Socioproctology claims to lead not just the world but also the Multiverse into a brothel where Being fists Nothingness while having sex with a donkey. No. It isn't a Pakistani donkey. Apparently, the Pakistanis sell all their donkeys to the Chinese.
The university is far from the only institution with moral pretensions. It has no monopoly on weakly substantiated claims to leadership. There is an intense pressure on anyone with any power—no matter how local—to engage in moralistic foot stomping: when you’re classified among the “elite,” the world demands showy displays of the moral knowledge you don’t have,
Which is what Callard has specialized in. To think, she might have qualified as a CPA and done something useful with her life!
and when those world elites are divided among themselves, the demand becomes a requirement to pick a side.
No. There is a demand that Universities curb the nuisance posed by woke nutters on Campus. I suppose federal funding will play a role in which side gets picked.
One strategy for retaining a claim to leadership while holding oneself above the fray is to stomp one’s feet on more abstract ground.
Nonsense! A claim to leadership depends on having followers. No followers means no fucking leadership for you, mate.
The president of the University of Chicago justifies
getting rid of a nuisance by explaining that he had a legal right to do so
withdrawing from one war by claiming that he is busy fighting another, namely, the war to “uphold the university’s principles and resist the forces tearing at the fabric of higher education.”
We believe him because even if woke nutters exist in the Chemistry department, their work product still passes muster.
It is not clear, to me, what forces and principles he is talking about.
Because you are stupid. Everyone else knows he is talking about woke nutters and anti-Semitic gobshites.
The university’s neutrality, for instance, seems more selective than principled: American universities took far less care to avoid siding with Ukraine against Russia than with the Palestinians against Israel.
Americans spent trillions of dollars killing Muslims. True, we lost the war on Terror and so we wouldn't mind seeing Israel suffer a little. Still, America can't afford to desert Israel. Those fuckers will just start trading with other countries and developing newer, cheaper, more deadly platforms. Some Israelis advocate breaking with America on economic and military grounds.
When I think about what could possibly ground any university’s claim to moral leadership—
the answer is religion. Many universities started off as theological seminaries. A Catholic Professor of Theology at a Catholic University may be accorded 'moral leadership' by the Prelates of his Church.
where its supposed moral wisdom might lie—I don’t find the answer in any one of its divisions, departments or programs.
Universities may have a Department of Ethics and Moral Philosophy. Sadly, its denizens are all sociopathic cretins.
Why would a community of mathematicians and historians and literature professors add up to something morally special, by contrast with a community with fewer Ph.D.s?
They may have done so in the past when only a very small percentage of the population were sufficiently literate to understand much about the world and its place in the Universe.
Though each of its professors can claim expertise in the discipline she practices, and the people it pays to manage its financial assets or construct its buildings are presumably experts at those things, none of that translates into moral expertise.
Which is why we should defund Departments of Ethics & Moral Philosophy.
If we are to take pride in the wisdom of the university
Why do so? Universities aren't wise though they may be useful. They may catalyse economic development in a region. In that case we may want to subsidize them.
as a whole, that can only be because an intellectual community fosters a morally distinctive kind of interaction.
One where you learn to drink like a gentleman. Sadly, that sort of thing can end with everybody bumming each other.
I propose instead: a university is special to the extent that it is a place where teaching and learning replace fighting and grandstanding.
Every place of employment that I know off bears that description- save perhaps the pro-Wrestling stadium.
Outside the university, elite moralists are given to insisting that this or that must be done,
They also do so within the university. The problem is that, unless they are as rich as fuck, they aren't elite at all.
because claims to certainty serve as a signaling device:
No. Credentials are a signalling device. My claim to have attended Pope Skool which is why I have achieved fallibility don't signal shit. I blame my Mum for throwing away my Diploma signed by His Holiness, St. Peter.
“I know what we should do” means “I deserve to be counted among the leading lights.”
More particularly if your suggestion is that everybody should piss on Callard's head.
Here at the university, we usually try to use the word “know” more literally.
Callard used it Biblically when it came to one of her students
Knowledge entails proof,
No. There was some idea that 'knowledge was justified true belief' but it was fallacious. On the other hand, some types of knowledge may be protocol bound in some manner while remaining defeasible and inaccessible to proof or disproof.
which is to say, being able to demonstrate and teach what you claim to know.
Nonsense! I know English. I can't teach it. Indeed, I can't even demonstrate it when I get very drunk.
If you are stuck fighting people you disagree with, that shows that neither of you has knowledge
Nonsense! I know that my watch is mine. You disagree and try to snatch it from me. I kick you in the bollocks. You punch me in the nose. The police turn up. I am able to show that I own the watch because I have the receipt. The other guy is arrested and carted off to jail.
—at least in the context of an intellectual community, where there is no need to fight, because the ignorant are willing to learn, and the knowers are willing to teach.
Callard says 'if you are stuck fighting where there is no need to fight' you lack knowledge. This is not the case. You may like fighting. So may the other guy. This is 'common knowledge' and so you fight each other.
Sadly, those willing to teach Callard's worthless subjects don't know shit. Still, they can always make ignorant students stupider and more ignorant.
The protesters believe that they are entitled, by the justice of their cause, to ignore and disrupt the university’s normal pursuit of its mission.
They think they will get away with doing so. Indeed, they may be rewarded. But, their calculations may be wrong.
The university believes it is entitled, by its own principles, to resist this disruption.
No. It knows the law is on its side.
Each side uses force to get what it wants, and the details of these disruptions—exactly how much force is permitted, by which party, and when—are hotly disputed by the media as well as on campus.
By useless shitheads. Still, it beats joining Hamas and getting your head blown off by an Israeli soldier.
And yet the real scandal lies in all the ways in which this disgracefully anti-intellectual debacle gets normalized and gilded.
Guys who make discoveries in Chemistry have an actual intellect. Callard has shit for brains. You can't gild shit.
When we use force to manage our disagreements,
Which no University President has done. They have used the law which has an immunity for using reasonable force. This is a justiciable matter.
we are admitting that this place is nowhere special,
just as we admit our bodies are not special if we call the police to get a rapist from beating and sodomizing us.
that the ethos of the classroom cannot be the ethos of the university as a whole.
Because what really matters is being done in laboratories or by dudes writing equations.
There is no deeper insult to an intellectual community than
shitting on each and every one of them. If this is happening to a Professor near you, you can ask him for yourself.
the suggestion that, when its conversations drift onto a topic that really matters—when, as the saying goes, “push comes to shove”—they have to stop talking and start pushing and shoving.
Also, you have to stop talking when you are beaten, sodomized and everybody takes turns shitting on your tits. I am not saying that's what happened to me when I taught R.E for Common Entrance. Still, my memory of that period in my life is rather hazy because parents kept giving me bottles of Scotch Whiskey under the impression that I could get their kids into Eton. The odd thing was several of the tykes did get into Eton. I was under the impression that I was teaching at a Girls Prep School.
Alivisatos wrote of his conversation with the protesters, “As the depth of this philosophical difference became clearer, I decided to end the dialogue.”
Which he was entitled to do. The Kalven Report upheld ' the obligation of the university to provide a forum for the most searching and candid discussion of public issues'. It didn't say that such discussion should be interminable. Alivisatos ended his participation in the dialogue and took such action as he considered right. This is a justiciable matter. If he acted ultra vires, the proper remedy is legal action against him.
As a philosopher, I find this statement hard to understand:
because you are stupid.
if the ethos of the classroom were the ethos of the university, philosophical conversation would be the only way to resolve a philosophical difference.
Not if it was interminable. Anyway, philosophical differences are resolved when currently 'open' questions in STEM subjects get closed by an empirical finding or superior Structural Causal Model. But those same philosophical differences- e.g. between Platonists and Pragmatists- may reappear in a different guise.
The real dialogue is the one that begins when you reach a deep philosophical difference, and the university is precisely the place for such dialogues.
Only the philosophy department. But it turned to shit because the subject became adversely selective of imbecility.
What could possibly be so important as to justify cutting one off?
Getting on with useful work- something Alivisatos, not Callard, has devoted his life to.
I can think of only one candidate: the dialogue itself.
Not anything useful then.
Sometimes the best way to pursue a disagreement is to postpone it.
At other times the best way to postpone it is to pursue it and piss on its head.
Even Socrates was prepared to walk away from conversations, if they seemed to be devolving into insults or long speeches—but he made it clear that he was walking away for the sake of conversation itself, so as to find a better way to pursue it in the future.
He talked his way into a death sentence. Go thou and do likewise. +
Alivisatos could have had the same attitude—regretful postponement—
if he taught useless shite
in relation to his philosophical disagreement with the protesters over the question of institutional neutrality. Instead, he stomped his feet: “there is no way I would ever compromise on institutional neutrality.”
Because I'm a smart guy doing cutting edge research. What do you want? China to overtake us? What happens when the next 'gain of function' virus is released? They will have us over a barrel if they get to the vaccine first.
Why not? The only argument Alivisatos gives for his position is that “if the university did so [i.e. engaged in advocacy] as an institution, it would no longer be much of a university.”
It would be full of woke nutters who would ban scientific research because Science is totes patriarchal. Did you know many scientists have dicks? Dicks cause RAPE! Ban them immediately.
I imagine that the protesters might be willing to bite this bullet: Then let the university stop being a university! Let it become something better instead! What is Alivisatos’s next move?
Defund non-STEM Departments or just use them as cash-cows. Keep the smelly woke nutters as far away as possible from the Labs and the Medical School.
I am happy to defer to Alivisatos’s judgment that his conversation with the protesters had stalled, and that the time had come to enforce the rules of the university;
You are lying. You aren't happy at all.
I would have been equally ready to defer to the judgment that he ought to try to accommodate some of the protesters’ demands.
By invading Israel and assassinating Netanyahu.
I am not a university president, and unlike many commentators on the protests, I do not moonlight as one either.
Callard is very bitter at her fate. Everybody else is a university president except me. Is it because I don't have a dick? Alivisatos has a dick. That's why he gets to be Pres. Fuck you Alivisatos! Fuck you very much!
But I am a philosopher, and when it comes to the “deep philosophical difference” that, by his own description, divides Alivisatos from the protesters, I believe that he was mistaken.
Chemists shouldn't claim to know about 'philosophical differences'. They are taking the food out of our mouths!
He characterized neutrality as the “foundational value” of the university, but neutrality is not a value at all.
Yes it is. So is partisanship.
Neutrality may be an improvement over capitulating to the pressure to make moral proclamations in the absence of the corresponding moral knowledge, but that is a low bar.
It is nonsense. A neutral ceases to be neutral the moment it 'capitulates'.
Neutrality describes how you act when you are ignorant on a matter that you, as a leader, really ought to have knowledge about,
Nope. That is ignorance, not neutrality. Suppose the President of Switzerland had been asked by Churchill whether his country was neutral or whether it supported the Axis. If he answered, 'fuck you on about, Churchy? What is an Axis? Who is this Hitler bloke you keep mentioning. What is 'I-taly'? Is it something you eat?' In this case, Churchill would have been bound to report to the British Parliament that Switzerland was not a neutral power. It was too fucking ignorant and stupid to be anything at all.
and you acknowledge this rather than pretending otherwise.
Why won't Alivisatos admit that he is stooooopid and that 'Nanomaterials' are a con? All these so called 'Scientists' just make up words like 'quantum gravity' and pretend to be smart.
Neutrality is not acceptable as a response to injustice, except temporarily.
No. It is perfectly acceptable. The Swiss president was welcome to say 'I think Hitler is a maniac. What he is doing is unjust. But my country will remain neutral.'
We remain neutral when we do not know what to do,
No. We may be engaged on one side or the other of a War without knowing what to do. Indeed, this was the position of Britain and France during the 'phoney war'. Neither had an offensive military doctrine and France paid the price.
and while we work out how to become the people who do.
Britain did not not how to fight a total war in 1914 but it soon got the hang of things. What was surprising was that it was less prepared in 1939. Still, this did not prevent the Brits from prevailing in both Wars.
I would classify neutrality in the way that Aristotle classifies shame: the half-virtue of the learner.
This woman is a stranger to shame. Switzerland has been neutral for many centuries now. Its people need feel no shame. They gave the world the Red Cross.
It makes no more sense to pride oneself on being neutral than to pride oneself on feeling ashamed.
Unless you are Swiss. Also, one is perfectly entitled to feel shame, as I do, for not having proved the Reimann hypothesis because I was too busy making love to super-models. No. None of those super-models were male. Also they didn't say 'is it in yet?'
One day, I hope to see a confrontation between a university that understands that its neutrality is meant to be broken,
and that it should declare war on Israel after raping and decapitating all the Jewish students and faculty members
that it is neutral so that it can listen,
Nonsense! The Swiss don't have to listen to stupid shitheads.
and protesters who understand that the way forward lies in the education of their opponents,
We should teach Netanyahu about the evils of Patriarchy. He will order all Israeli men to get gender reassignment surgery. Hamas will laugh its collective head off.
and that no one can be educated by coercion.
Everybody- when young- can be educated pretty well by coercion. Even at my advanced age, I can be taught, by gentle admonition and the use of an electric cattle prod, not to pee in the sink.
I have focused so many of my criticisms on my own university administration because it seems to me to have a grasp—however twisted and deformed—of the one form of leadership that would not undermine its intellectual mission.
Its President is a first class scientist. In a world ruled by Musk and Ramaswamy, that means more federal funding for Chicago's STEM subject research.
“Neutrality” is a bad way of getting at a good idea, which is that the university leads by learning.
No. It leads by teaching and researching useful stuff which enables the entire region to move up the value chain.
If the university must be a leader, let it pioneer inquisitive leadership
Very true. Kittens are very inquisitive. We should put them in charge of Universities.
Inquisitive leadership is the kind of leadership a teacher practices in a classroom,
if saddled with teaching drooling retards.
and also the kind of leadership a student practices, in the same classroom, when she raises her voice to ask or answer a question.
a stupid question if it is asked in Callard's class room.
In that context, you might argue for a side, but you don’t “take a side,” in the sense of “standing up for” your “principles” or avowing any “commitments” or “fighting” any “forces.”
No. A philosopher who talks about 'neutrality' is bound to mention Kuhn's 'no neutral algorithm' or Watanabe's 'ugly duckling' theorem. There will always be some bias. In the case of Chicago, what has been clarified is that 'neutrality' means telling woke nutters and crazy anti-Semites to fuck the fuck off. That's a good outcome.
All of these modes of speech proclaim some matter settled when there are people out there who disagree.
A mode of speech which isn't a proclamation doesn't proclaim shit. As for proclamations, if they are backed up by sanctions, then 'those who disagree' may find themselves in hot water.
Inquisitive people are alert to the danger of overclaiming knowledge,
No. Such people may be like kittens. What they are alert to is the danger of being bitten by a dog or suffering some other such hazard.
and inquisitive contexts are precisely those in which there is no need to do so
No. There is a need to have a hypothesis which may well 'overclaim' knowledge and then to see how that hypothesis stacks up with the evidence or whether it is consistent with other hypotheses we currently find useful. Physicists and Mathematicians are very inquisitive. They are aware that what they currently work with is probably too sweeping. It is an 'over-claim'. It will have to be modified as more becomes known.
—neither for the teacher, nor for the student. Declaring yourself ready to fight on a given side is how you project leadership outside the classroom,
No. That isn't enough. I declare my willingness to fight the baby. But I have no followers. Everybody just ignores me. That's why I resigned from the Institute of Socioproctology's 'Fight Club'. Also, baby beat me up very badly while chortling with delight. Neither his Mother nor the Secretary General of the United Nations lifted a finger to help me.
but inside the classroom leadership works differently: we don’t need to fight, because all of us are ready both to teach and learn.
Inside any classroom where useful knowledge or skills are imparted, the teacher takes a leadership role in deciding what is taught, when it is taught and how it is taught. Sometimes if the kids are really bright, you can delegate some of these functions. It's what I used to do when I taught R.E for Common Entrance. Apparently there's this book called 'the Holey Bibble'. I would ask the kids to tell me what it was trying to get at. True, I'd fall asleep quite soon but the kids appreciated the chance to look stuff up in Strong's Concordance. I suppose that's why so many of them got into Eton and Winchester.
Even inside a university, one cannot assume that everyone is willing to be inquisitive about every topic all of the time—much less so outside it. But where we are not willing to be inquisitive, we have no right to lead.
Leaders provide Schelling focal solutions to coordination and discoordination games and thus play an important role in promoting better correlated equilibria, more particularly where there are collective action problems. A leader may keep a couple of 'inquisitive' guys around to do 'discovery'. But leadership isn't about being inquisitive or talking and listening to endless bollocks. It is about getting and retaining followers by providing a useful service. Universities can certainly do this and in so doing they can help the communities they are embedded in become more productive and to rise higher in the value chain. The German and the American University- including humble 'land grant' Public Universities- played a great role in raising productivity. True, the German Universities, at a certain period, turned into hotbeds of partisan politics. But the Americans were always more sensible. People of immigrant background- guys like Musk or Ramaswamy- want American Universities to go back to being engines of economic growth. There is no point pretending campus protests today bear any resemblance to the anti-Vietnam War protests of the late Sixties. There is also no point pretending Philosophy didn't turn to shit by about 1970. Even smart dudes like Hilary Putnam and David Lewis lost the plot thereafter.
What is important for the future of Higher Education is that people like me are screened out by the age of 17 and sent off to some sort of vocational college. Once we start earning money, we will have a sense of self-worth. The urge to shit higher than one's arsehole will disappear.
