The "New" UChicago

etondad
Thu, 07 Jun 2012 20:51:51 +0000

^^dunbar, you are right about the fact that the universities as becoming more instrumental. I was just at a lunch with Drew Gilpin Faust, herself a Civil War historian before taking on the Harvard presidency, and she spoke about how students wanted to learn things to solve problems in the world (not necessarily for eleemosynary purposes, to be sure). I asked what about the glory of the universities is that they can be places that are not utilitarian or instrumentalist–what about the humanities? She replied that they were critical-- but then segway-ed into how such studies place these problems in a broader context (blah, blah, blah). I followed up by saying to her that I didn’t mean that at all-- I was wondering about the role of the university was the place where the joy of reading Xenophon was not that it would have ANY applicability at all-- but because the reading of Xenophon had an inherent value… She said–oh yes, that too-- but it was clear that such thinking was not where she was thinking Harvard was going-- or should go. I came away disillusioned. And the same can now be said about Chicago.

And of course you are so right JHS–I recall that at the end of my contracts course at HLS the professor said that he wanted to say something to us-- that as we would graduate from HLS we could do ANYTHING we wanted-- that no HLS grad starved unless they wanted too or became ill in someway–yet, yet, he said, that regardless of this fact that almost the entire class would do the same type of law–big firm rather than branching out. I don’t think it was because of economic reasons-- it is more a lemmings sort of thing-- if all of the “top” kids are doing X-Y-Z then to be considered not a failure I have to do the same-- and that it takes a fair amount of courage to say --No --not for me in the face of such peer pressure…–He was very right.