You didn’t know there was one? (June 9th posting).
Posner continues to wonder at the increasing numbers of women in higher ed.
Perhaps there is a fear of education becoming feminized, enough so that young men will pursue their futures elsewhere?
If so, there sure are a lot of politics nvolved.
Ah, we’re so close…
Angier quotes David Sloan Wilson:
“If you do statistics in the context of something you’re interested in and are good at, then it becomes an incremental as opposed to a saltational jump,”
You see that the mechanics are not so hard after all, and once you understand why you’re doing the statistics in the first place, it ends up being simple nuts and bolts stuff, nothing more.”
Not a bad argument…if the imagination is piqued and the interest is there, perhaps a platform for other areas of study, especially the sciences, can be more easily developed.
Perhaps (though isn’t this always the way?) there has been cultural erosion enough to make science a misunderstood field among the public. If this is true, then clearly English departments busy with continental philosophy, cultural relativism, the denial of meaning etc have helped make this state of affairs possible…
So how do you unite the arts and sciences?
To illustrate how the New Humanities approach to scholarship might work, Dr. Heywood cited her own recent investigations into the complex symbolism of the wolf, a topic inspired by a pet of hers that was seven-eighths wolf.
Dear Lord. Apparently in a way that doesn’t do justice to either one. After all, the arts require entering into the creative imagination and genius of great artists like Shakespeare, Milton, and Melville. Science is different.
“Dr. Wilson is determined to avoid romanticizing science or presenting it as the ultimate arbiter of meaning, as other would-be integrationists and ardent Darwinists have done.”
Good luck with that, Dr. Wilson…though some political and social good may come out of your work…
Some good scientists and writers of science who are much better than this Angier’s loyalty to more political and social concerns: Nigel Calder, Carl Zimmer, George Smoot, Richard Feynman…
See Also: The moral thinking both Angier and Sloan Wilson neglect in The Economist On Moral Thinking: David Sloan Wilson’s Research and Natalie Angier In The NY Times: In Most Species, Faithfulness Is A Fantasy
“The University of Colorado is considering a $9 million program to bring high-profile conservatives to teach on the left-leaning Boulder campus.”
Bad idea says Fish. Put scholarship and learning above any political considerations.
He also distinguishes between conservative thought and conservative aesthetics:
A course in conservative thought might run from:
“…Plato and Aristotle and hitting the highlights including Hooker, Hobbes, Adam Smith, Burke, Schmitt, Wyndham Lewis, Oakeshott, Strauss, Kirk, Bork…”
and conservative aesthetics:
“…Plato and Aristotle [sic} including Dante, Puttenham, Swift, Pope, Bergson, Matthew Arnold, Irving Babbitt, Eliot, Pound and Allan Bloom…”
So would liberal aesthetics include the Romantics, Santayana, modern lyrical poetry etc…? What about Nietzsche?
Certainly Plato isn’t merely conservative?
by carpe icthus
The patient is etherised upon a table…or so suggests our author. It’s now time:
“…[to] spur a process whereby not just literature, but the larger field of the humanities recover some of the intellectual momentum and “market share” they have lost to the sciences.”
Copy “science” and regain “market share?”
“So instead of steadily building a body of solid knowledge about literature, culture, and the human condition, the field wanders in continuous circles, bending with fashions and the pronouncements of its charismatic leaders.”
Well, this should come as no surprise. Shakespeare and Melville were artists. Studying them gives pleasure, enhancing linguistic expression and understanding within the scope of their creative imaginations. I suspect most literature students want to be great artists as well.
The scientists are…well…doing science.
As Camille Paglia has pointed out, many literature departments have gone the way of cultural relativism. Too often do they confuse literature with politics and current thinking. As a result, they’re particularly aimless right now…
…with consequences for all of us.
Market-share?
See Also: How To Study Literature: M.H. Abrams In The Chronicle Of Higher Ed… Should You Bother To Get A Liberal Arts Education? Allan Bloom, Camille Paglia and Anthony Kronman.
by kinkazzo Poor Old Harold Bloom
Addition: Andrew Sullivan has more here with a link to Literary Kicks here.
Original Seattle Times article here.
The National Math & Science Initiative (NMSI) will not be giving $13 million to 2 Seattle schools and 7 statewide because:
“We got caught in the middle of the grant requirements and the collective-bargaining laws in the state of Washington that have to be followed.
The teachers would have received money directly and the union didn’t like it.
Surely they kept the students in mind….
See Also: Charles Murray In The New Criterion: The Age Of Educational Romanticism. Milton Friedman applies economic libertarianism to education. Trade Unions try and adapt to globalization.
A few key quotes:
“The first strand in explaining educational romanticism is a mythic image of the good old days when teachers brooked no nonsense and all the children learned their three R’s.”
“When I was your age we walked uphill both ways…” Is that going anywhere?
“The second strand in explaining educational romanticism is the periodic discovery of magic bullets for raising classroom performance.
and…
“The third and probably most powerful strand for explaining educational romanticism in the last quarter-century has been Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, introduced in Frames of Mind (1983).”
On the positive side: Charles Murray has stood for the IQ test actually measuring something and reminding us that the black/white achievement gap is statistically valid…He has become an active and important educational reformer, wresting it away from people and ideas who can do more harm than good.
On the negative side: I would question whether or not Murray achieves this criticism by adhering to certain libertarian political principles…sometimes even adhering to current political thinking. As an active reformer, what is the endgame? Politics? Education?
See Also: Race and IQ: Malcolm Gladwell On The Flynn Effect and since when did romanticism become a bad word?: Roger Sandall: Marveling At The Aborigines, But Not Really Helping?
by rsmoffat
It’s really worth listening to:
And here is a bloggingheads response:
These are two of the best discussions about race I’ve heard in a long time. Like you probably do, I loathe the media’s inability to recognize the depth, importance and fragility of these ideas, and their tendency is to place new ideas into the old ideas (and such partisan ideas at that).
Then again, it’s not wise to expect much more than that from major outlets.
Obama has dug deep, taken great risk and been very honest, so honest, in fact, it’s a little unnerving. I may not agree with what policy plans he has put foward, nor even vote for him, but I admire him.
Addition: Ross Douthat at the Atlantic has a piece from the conservative point of view.
Here is the article. Recommended.
I agree with Sommers (wikipedia) that it’s worthwhile to uncover and challenge the arguments being made in favor of gender equality in universities. These arguments seek to gobble up all in their path.
For example, when research by a psychologist is used to argue how science should be taught, then there may be a problem.
It would seem this ambitious psychologist may be seeking to influence all of science without the understanding to do so. The success such an effort has is in lowering the standard of debate, silencing criticism, inciting the passions, and appealing to politics and current sentiment where one’s own thinking fails.
While her work is welcome, it seems Sommers is fighting fire with fire, and I question what will likely be the outcome of her arguments as well. There are limits to her ideas.
As I’ve posted before, others are responding to the current equity idealogues. These responses are refreshing and often useful, but I’m reminded of this quote:
“Choose your enemies carefully, for you will become like them.“
by Been.
Please don’t associate the photo with the quote.
Alas, this is not a dead horse, and I’m not still beating it.
Addition: Of course, I’m not really sure that men are inherently any better than women at mathematics. I’ll leave that to someone wiser. As for some of the arguments driving gender equality…
Full post here.
Many factors come into play when explaining why female students can tend to do better in school. One reason both Becker and Posner raise is that female students are more compliant.
Here’s Becker:
“One line of explanation argues that women are more diligent students, less rebellious, and more docile students.”
and Posner:
“If docility is as I have suggested a factor in academic performance, a decline in discipline is more likely to harm the academic performance of boys than of girls because the former need more discipline to instill docility in them.”
As for me, I haven’t observed a significant difference in base intelligence: an ability to process new concepts, organize content, and understand the underlying aims or purpose of a lesson quickly.
However…it’s reasonable to make some arguments that point out what the gender equality idealogues are missing.
Here are a few ideas that may be useful; summarized from this article:
1. Women value intimate relationships more so than men, and many women will make such choices in their personal and professional lives.
2. Men likely have a deeper evolutionary reason to take risks: it leads to possible reproduction. Baumeister suggests that only 40% percent of men have had this opportunity. Most (biology and nature as the reasons) cultures see men as more expendable, and thus men try to prove themselves in a world of limited resources.
3. Men form a larger network of shallower relationships. This is a key component to culture.
As for number 3, I suspect that for a culture like ours to work, enough males need the opportunity to make those relationships through intellectual pursuits, business, clubs, sports, and fraternities…rather than gangs, militias, rebel armies, standing armies…
How to read Socrates? Well, here’s one take.
I think that the interest classicists have in Socrates will always be hobbled by an important truth of classicism: unchallenged metaphysical ideas in literature are precisely the ideas challenged in philosophy.
Here’s another place to start, though you’re probably not going to find an ideal starting point; which of course, might be reason enough to read and think about Socrates.
