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Andrew Delbanco’s insightful new book on the history and future of the American college exposes an institution that has no idea what it should be.
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Delbanco’s survey of the tradition of college education and its basis in Puritan faith, both its provision of a universal liberal education and its focus on building character, is a salutary reminder when today’s colleges and universities brand themselves ‘Comprehensive Knowledge Enterprises’, distance-learning hubs or engines of social mobility. Teaching at Columbia – one of the few colleges still to make two years of the liberal arts compulsory – Delbanco is in a good position to diagnose the slow death of the college model even where it should be healthiest: in the well-endowed and elite institutions of American higher education.
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Yet it was just this democratic approach to tradition that was to be thrown out along with the bathwater of religious faith. Not in the 1960s, but nearly a hundred years before, when the college began to be seen as hopelessly backward, full of dull clergymen boring America’s youth with ancient history, ill-suited to the pressing demands of the modern world and the new industrial nation. The issue came to a head with a famous debate, recounted by Delbanco, between James McCosh, president of Princeton, and Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard, who met, like boxers, on neutral ground in New York in 1885 to decide what a college curriculum should be.
"Comprehensive yet accessible, this key Handbook provides an up-to-date overview of the fast growing and increasingly important area of ‘public communication of science and technology’, from both research and practical perspectives."
"“It was the biggest upheaval in film exhibition since synchronized sound. Between 2010 and 2012, the world’s film industries forever changed the way movies were shown.”
This is the opening sentence of Pandora’s Digital Box: Films, Files, and the Future of Movies. Written in lively and accessible language, it tells the story of how the recent revolution in film projection came about. It also situates the digital change in the history of American film distribution and moviegoing."
Criticism of The Republican Brain by Chris Mooney
"But this does not mean that it is wrong to push the question even further, asking how we can be encouraged to care more about the well-being and suffering of those who happened not to be born within the same borders as us. Haidt thinks liberals ignore concepts like authority and the sacred. But really, liberalism’s power consists in challenging the moral relevance of such concepts. Since liberals dispute that authority really is of fundamental moral importance, it is circular reasoning to argue that this is a form of “moral blindness.”"
"So, is the future post-liberal? The WEIRD liberalism of the baby boomer generation was perhaps condemned to a dogmatic universalism as a result of emerging in the shadow of two world wars, the Holocaust and the anti-colonial and civil rights struggles. There was a lot to react against and it is perhaps understandable that in eagerly embracing the moral equality of all humans, some boomers slipped into a carelessness towards national borders and identities and a rigidity towards many forms of equality. The next generation of politics need not make the same mistake."
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The Righteous Mind
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by Jonathan Haidt (Allen Lane, £20)Together
by Richard Sennett (Allen Lane, £25)
"Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 is an important book that will have large influence. It is unfortunately not a good book—but its lack of merit in no way detracts from its importance. If anything, the book's flaws add to its power, by enhancing the book's appeal to the audience for whom it is intended. Coming Apart is an important book less because of what it says than because of what it omits; less for the information it contains than for the uses to which that information will be put."
Behind the headlines of our time stands an unobtrusive army of science advisors. Panels of scientific, medical, and engineering experts evaluate the safety of the food we eat, the drugs we take, and the cars we drive. But despite the enormous influence of science advice, its authority is often problematic, and struggles over expert advice are thus a crucial aspect of contemporary politics. Science on Stage is a theoretically informed and empirically grounded study of the social process through which the credibility of expert advice is produced, challenged, and sustained.
"Proponents of market morality claim that it imposes no belief system, but that's just a smoke screen. Choosing to place utility maximization at the core of your belief system is no different from choosing any other guiding ideological precept. Every problem has an incentive-based solution; every tension can be resolved by seeking the maximally efficient outcome.
This is a depressingly reductive view of the human experience. Men will die for God or country, kinship or land. No one ever picked up a rifle and got shot for optimal social utility. Economists cannot account for this basic fact of humanity. Yet they have assumed a role in society that for the past 4,000 years has been held by philosophers and theologians. They have made our lives freer and more efficient. And we are the poorer for it."
"This trenchant study analyzes the rise and decline in the quality and format of science in America since World War II.
During the Cold War, the U.S. government amply funded basic research in science and medicine. Starting in the 1980s, however, this support began to decline and for-profit corporations became the largest funders of research. Philip Mirowski argues that a powerful neoliberal ideology promoted a radically different view of knowledge and discovery: the fruits of scientific investigation are not a public good that should be freely available to all, but are commodities that could be monetized."
"Healthy information consumption habits are about more than productivity and efficiency. They're about your personal health, and the health of society. Just as junk food can lead to obesity, junk information can lead to new forms of ignorance. The Information Diet provides a framework for consuming information in a healthy way, by showing you what to look for, what to avoid, and how to be selective. In the process, author Clay Johnson explains the role information has played throughout history, and why following his prescribed diet is essential in today's information age."
The question we most need addressed is not what epistemic modals mean, but what to do with other people's.
"This book looks at relationships between the organization of physical objects in space and the organization of ideas. Historical, philosophical, psychological and architectural knowledge are united to develop an understanding of the relationship between information and its representation.
Despite its potential to break the mould, digital information has relied on metaphors from a pre-digital era. In particular, architectural ideas have pervaded discussions of digital information, from the urbanization of cyberspace in science fiction, through to the adoption of spatial visualizations in the design of graphical user interfaces. This book tackles:
the historical importance of physical places to the organization and expression of knowledge
the limitations of using the physical organization of objects as the basis for systems of categorization and taxonomy
the emergence of digital technologies and the twentieth century new conceptual understandings of knowledge and its organization
the concept of disconnecting storage of information objects from their presentation and retrieval
ideas surrounding ‘semantic space’
the realities of the types of user interface which now dominate modern computing."
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