What I Wish Penn State Would Do

Today Penn State, where I did some of my graduate studies, announced that they would begin making settlement offers to the victims of Jerry Sandusky's sexual assaults against children.

Years ago I read a story in one of the Toronto newspapers - I have not been able to track it down again - wherein a catholic diocese in Canada was being sued by First Nations people who had suffered from abusive policies when they were students in diocesan schools.

The newspaper asked the bishop whether he was concerned about the cost of settling the lawsuits. He replied that if the diocese had to sell all of its property to bring healing to the victims, that was not too high a price to pay. He added "the church isn't buildings but people. In the end, all we need is a table, a cup, and some books - and we really don't even need those."

His attitude is the one I wish my alma mater would adopt. The cost of settling lawsuits may seem high, but when you know you are in the wrong and you know your sins have caused great harm to children, is any price too high to pay?

Because a university similarly shouldn't think of itself as buildings but as a college, a group of people who come together to read and study. And for that all we need are some tables, some books, and maybe a few cups. Not much more. Everything else should be things with which we would gladly part if, in so doing, we can bring healing to those we have harmed, and better become the people we ought to be.

Newspapers in 1854

"[The reading and thinking] class has immensely increased. Owing to the silent revolution which the newspaper has wrought, this class has come in this country to take in all classes. Look into the morning trains...with them, enters the car the humble priest of politics, finance, philosophy, and religion in the shape of the newsboy....Two pence a head his bread of knowledge costs, and instantly the entire rectangular assembly, fresh from their breakfast, are bending as one man to their second breakfast."

R.W. Emerson, 1854.

Co-authorship in the Humanities

My friend and co-author John Kaag has just published this piece in today's New York Times.

I think John is right on the money: there aren't firm rules about this, but many times we've both been warned that co-authorship in the humanities will be regarded as a sign of weakness, of not being able to carry one's own weight.

Maybe it's true.  John and I both find that co-authorship make us better writers, so we must have been weak in some ways.  But I don't see why we shouldn't therefore do even more writing with others. 

Spring Lilacs

I'm posting these photos in preparation for a summer course I'll be teaching abroad, testing how easily I can make posts through my phone.

Friends With Benefits: On Collaboration In The Humanities

John Kaag and I wrote this article together.  Which is what the article is about: collaboration in the humanities.  A brief excerpt:

"Collaboration in the sciences makes good sense: Two of us can see more, and more clearly, than one of us can. Together we can correct one another's work, share our experience, and if all goes well, advance human knowledge. But ask a tenure-and-promotion committee just about anywhere in the United States, and you'll learn that admitting to collaboration in the humanities is like admitting to doping in the Tour de France. Everyone does it, but woe to the one who is caught."

Read it all here.

Popper On The Gift Of Wonder

“My first thesis is that every philosophy, and especially every philosophical ‘school,’ is liable to degenerate in such a way that its problems become practically indistinguishable from pseudo-problems, and its cant, accordingly, practically indistinguishable from meaningless babble. This, I shall try to show, is a consequence of philosophical inbreeding. The degeneration of philosophical schools in its turn is the consequence of the mistaken belief that one can philosophize without having been compelled to philosophize by problems outside philosophy—in mathematics, for example, or in cosmology, or in politics or in religion, or in social life. In other words my first thesis is this: Genuine philosophical problems are always rooted in urgent problems outside philosophy and they die if these roots decay.  In their efforts to solve them, philosophers are liable to pursue what looks like a philosophical method or technique or an unfailing key to philosophical success.  But no such methods or techniques exist, in philosophy methods are unimportant, any method is legitimate if it leads to results capable of being rationally discussed.  What matters is not methods or techniques but a sensitivity to problems, and a consuming passion for them, or, as the Greeks said, the gift of wonder.”  

-- Karl Popper, “The Nature of Philosophical Problems,” in Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. (Routledge, 2002) 95. (Boldface emphasis mine.)

Free Stone

One spring after heavy rains had come and gone, my father and I walked the banks of the Sawkill Creek.  It was newly scrubbed by floodwaters that had gouged its banks, sweeping away trees, glacial deposit boulders, and even a few buildings as the Catskills shed the rainfall and shot it down to the Hudson.

The memory of that short walk remains one of the strongest from my childhood.  The river had cut new banks, and had changed its own course.  We walked along the round gravel banks and gazed up at the undercut roots of massive oaks and pines.  We saw the bones of the earth laid bare by the river's irresistible blade.  The river had cut itself a new bed.  Everything in its path was destroyed; everything in its path was made new.

Polished by the river.

Since then I have walked hundreds of miles along - and often in - deep, clear waters over cobbled riverbeds.  The sound of the water is the music of my soul, high sprinkled notes of splashing water and bass tones of massive stones rocking back and forth in the current.  Walking in freestone streams makes me forget my worries, forget time itself.

Mersenne, Education, and Intellectual "Property"

French cleric Marin Mersenne was the academic journal of his day.  I have heard it said that in the seventeenth century the saying was "If you want to tell Europe, tell Mersenne." 

Hobbes mentions Mersenne several times in his verse autobiography - high praise for a Roman Catholic cleric from someone whose antipathy for the Roman church and its philosophy was both deep and wide.  But when Hobbes needed friends during his exile in France, Mersenne was glad to be one of those friends.  Mersenne was a friend to all who were engaged in research.  He was a living example of that idea of Justin Martyr's that Christians need not fear any books at all, since all the truth they contain belongs to the God who made and sustains it.

He was a friend to Galileo, and he passed Galileo's research on the regular oscillation of pendula along to Huygens in Holland, since he knew Huygens was trying to invent a more regular way of keeping time, leading to the invention of the pendulum clock.  He corresponded with Pascal, Gassendi, and Descartes, and what he learned from one he shared with others who could use it.

In his Carnage and Culture, Victor Davis Hanson claims that one of the reasons for technological flourishing in the west is that western cultures treat knowledge as property that can be sold in the marketplace.  I can't say whether Hanson's causal inference is correct, but his observation about intellectual "property" is acute.

But alongside it we should add another observation, namely that universities have long been places where ideas are exchanged freely.  Yes, students pay tuition, but we also give free public lectures, allow free or inexpensive auditing, etc.  What is being sold in the university is not the information but the cost of maintaining a place of intentional colloquy and pedagogy.  We aren't selling ideas to students; we are allowing them to join us in the maintenance of a vital institution, and as members of that institution they participate in its life and share in its learning.

Mersenne was not a merchant of ideas but their curator, a steward ushering them to the places they were most needed.  He was a gardener who made very few original contributions but who shared the best cultivars he could find with others in whose gardens they could flourish.  His approach to knowledge was like that of the church in its earliest years, where "no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common" and goods were "distributed to each as they had need."

Mersenne's model is relevant to our contemporary conversations about the meaning and cost of an education, the value of universities, and the publication of scientific journals.  Some money will be needed to maintain these institutions, but we should resist reducing them to market-based enterprises, or valuing their contributions in terms of revenues.  There is also the shared work of curiosity, and of desiring to see our neighbors, and their ideas, flourish.