Recent Comments
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In response to “The Ph.D. Problem,” matt writes:
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In response to “Ayn Rand,” Ko Q. writes:
How sad the destructive “philosophy” of that woman! Compare her with the generosity of a “real” person like Claude Lévi-Strauss, gone yesterday. A “real” person being an individual who knows that alone you can only burn, that by killing you die, that by consuming the other you consume yourself.
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In response to “Ayn Rand,” NickL writes:
It’s ironic that Rand is being lauded here as an anti-academic “iconoclast”, as if the university was some kind of all-powerful bully and Rand spoke truth to power.
To shill for capitalism in 20th century America! To flatter financiers and their epigones! What heroism!
What Rand did, and what her work does, is tell power exactly what it wants to hear.
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In response to “Ayn Rand,” Stephen Grossman writes:
When can Harvard students expect Rand’s systematic thinking to guide their professors instead of the intellectual disintegration that provoked even the modernist Bob Dylan to sing, “You’ve gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely. But you know you only used to get juiced in it.”
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In response to “The Ph.D. Problem,” Rick Cherwitz, professor and IE director, UT-Austin writes:
I just finished reading Professor Menand’s thoughtful article. It addresses a set of issues about which I (as a humanist and former grad dean) have been thinking for the past fifteen years. I encourage readers to examine the Intellectual Entrepreneurship (IE) initiative I created at UT in 1996—the goal of which remains to “educate citizen-scholars,” individuals who own and are accountable for their education and who leverage their knowledge for social good (whether in academe or the community).
https://webspace.utexas.edu/cherwitz/www/ie/
While vested, I believe IE provides a way to reunite the worlds of thought and action—to reconnect what the last several centuries of human development have, wittingly or unwittingly, tended to separate: thinking (encapsulated by the term “reflection”) and doing (described by the word “action”).
A colleague of mine, a Classics scholar, recently suggested:
“Intellectual entrepreneurship seeks to reclaim for the contemporary world the oldest strain in our common intellectual tradition: the need for thought and reflection in the midst of the world of action. As the experiment of the original Greek teachers of practical affairs demonstrated, and as Plato demonstrated through his reflections on these very themes, some of the deepest problems of thought emerge from the affairs of practical life. When one brings together the demands for action and the equally unrelenting demands for reflection characteristic of the new electronic and global marketplace, the term “intellectual entrepreneur” describes a new form of union between the academy and the world and between the academy and its own deepest traditions.”
Readers might find interesting many of the articles about IE:
https://webspace.utexas.edu/cherwitz/www/ie/selected_pubs.html
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In response to “Ayn Rand,” Sasy Kumar writes:
Alan Greenspan is the personification of the phrase “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely ! “.// When he was appointed as Chairman of the Fed in the late 70’s[Ronald Reagen presidency ?];-I had looked forward to the possibility of a phase out of the Fed’s role, and a return to the “gold standard”;[as he had eloquently expounded in his essay “Gold and Economic Freedom” [in the Ayn Rand’s essay collection “Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal”].;—-but that was not to be !. He became a deviant,-in many ways comparable to Dr.Stadler, one of the characters in Rand’s magnum opus =Atlas Shrugged.//
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In response to “Ayn Rand,” William R. Everdell writes:
The claim that what Rand offers is “reality” is the kicker for me. Rand spoke at my college the first September I was there, in 1959. Buckley had not yet organized real conservatives to exclude her “Reality.” What Rand said not only turned my stomach, but convinced me for good that the ethical paradigm she offered was not only illogical but fatal to the trust required for any positive relationship between people to exist. Since such trust is absolutely essential to the functioning of any market, let alone a republican citizenry, or any society at all, I decided “Reality” would have to take a back seat to the continued possibility of love. Here at my high school I teach Rand every year in a course that includes Lucian, Dante and Montaigne, mostly assigning her book “The Virtue of Selfishness,” a solecism that says it all. The object of my game is to inoculate people smart enough to know better with the weakened virus, to prevent the Randian faithful from taking over, ignoring (like Greenspan) the distinction between their church and the state, and quite possibly wrecking my grandchildren’s future.
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In response to “The Ph.D. Problem,” Jenn writes:
The duration of graduate degrees, and the age at which people most often pursue them, may also play a key role in explaining why although women are increasingly well represented in medical and law schools, this is still not the case in PhD programs and academia.
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In response to “Ayn Rand,” Adrian writes:
The “Ayn Rand” article in the Harvard Magazine by Jennifer Burns ’97, assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia clearly shows the wisdom of Ayn Rand to give up on the intellectually dishonest professors at our universities. Thanks to the efforts of the Ayn Rand Institute that incomprehensible hostility is now slowly abating. Let’s hope that Professor Burns will fail miserable to halt the Second Renaissance.
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In response to “A Leap of Faith, and a Prayer Answered,” Nelson writes:
It is so refreshing to read about a young person going the extra mile to bless others as he has been blessed.
In the comments here there are people who cite personal exceptions, or historical context, or other anecdotes in an apparent attempt to offer an alternative to, or more inclusive view of, the reality and implications presented in this article. I wouldn’t expect anything different from my fellow humanities PhDs.
Here is my prediction for the future of humanities departments in the academy: They will begin to look more and more like it did 100 years ago. They will be much smaller, and dominated by rich upper-class dilettantes who don’t really need to work and want a nice place to indulge their interests. I am not trying to place a value judgment on that. But my hope is that there are a few young people out there who might be on the fence about going to humanities grad school or doing something else, and they realize they should do something else.