idad
August 3, 2008, 3:03pm
11
<p>Reading uchicagoalum’s post reminded me of James Chandler’s convocation address. It applies, I believe, to Hopkins as well as to Chicago and speaks to the scholarship versus leadership false dichotomy.</p>
<p>[Education</a> in the Interrogative Mode](<a href=“University of Chicago News ”>University of Chicago News )</p>
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If your education here has gone well, indeed, you will by now have acquired what the ancient rhetoricians called the art of prolepsis. This is the knack of anticipating possible objections in the course of making your arguments. If your education has gone well, you will have come to believe that the best work — the best argument, theory, or judgment — is work that takes account of the hardest questions that might be posed against it even before they are raised.</p>
<p>I can imagine that you might yourselves right now be wanting to object that all this attention to the interrogative mode leaves our style of academic culture vulnerable. You might think it vulnerable, for example, to the invidious boast of other universities that they produce leaders, not scholars — a distinction that is not only invidious but also false, which I’ll try to show in a minute. Perhaps you also worry that our attention to the interrogative mode is vulnerable to a certain kind of ridicule…</p>
<p>In the end, the key thing to understand about good questions is that they open us to the world even as they focus the mind at the same time, which is why the antithesis of scholarship and leadership is so misleading. Last month, at a national humanities meeting in Philadelphia, I heard an address by an Iowa Congressman — a Republican, as it happens — who made a similar point with a pointed question about questions. “Is it not likely,” he asked, “that our national leaders would have asked better questions — and thus made better decisions—about Iraq, for instance, if they had seriously pondered the intricate exchanges of the Melian dialogue in Thucidides’ History of the Peloponesian Wars?” </p>
<p>Here, where Thucidides’ book is still widely read and debated, I suspect many of us will agree with the Congressman, though perhaps not without a further question or two. The greatest scholars and the greatest leaders must alike be responsive to the best and toughest questions, and they can do this only if they know how to pose them. It is not enough to have an insight or an intuition. You must be able to say what question it answers, and why, and what questions it leaves yet to be resolved.
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