Category Archives: Academe

The Difference Principle

Elizabeth Anderson:

The current troubles of President Summers remind me of a conversation I had with my dissertation advisor, John Rawls, nearly 20 years ago. No two great Harvard scholars could be more opposite in intellectual temperament: Summers the supremely arrogant; Rawls, the supremely modest. (Whenever a student offered a misguided criticism of his work, Rawls would blame himself for not expressing himself clearly, rather than the student for failing to read him correctly.) Yet even Rawls had a blind spot for Harvard’s faults, which is shared by Summers today. In that conversation long ago, Rawls told me of his recent visit to Oxford University, warning me not to accept an offer to teach there until I was securely tenured somewhere in the U.S. Oxford was too obsessed with rank, he said, happy to treat the likes of him as royalty, but terribly snobby to not-yet-established scholars, who could expect to be treated shabbily. While I appreciated his kind advice, it was almost too much to keep from laughing. Here I was at Harvard, an institution that bent over backwards to make distinctions of rank invidious–even to the point, in those days, of putting their “folding chairs” (Assistant Professors on terminating 3-year appointments) on a common party line, instead of giving them the dignity of individual office phones! (When I arrived at the University of Michigan to take up a tenure-track position after graduating from Harvard, the atmosphere felt so egalitarian by comparison that I felt like Orwell arriving in Catalonia. My feeling didn’t last, but neither did Orwell’s.)
— Elizabeth Anderson, “What’s Troubling Harvard”

Soren Kierkegaard on his heirs

Soren Kierkegaard:

Somewhere in a psalm it tells of the rich man who painstakingly amasses a fortune and “knows not who will inherit it from him.”
In the same way I will leave behind me, intellectually speaking, a not-so-little capital. Alas , but I know who is going to inherit from me, that character I find so repulsive, he who will keep on inheriting all that is best just as he has done in the past — namely, the assistant professor, the professor.

And even if ‘the professor’ happened to read this, it would not stop him, it would not prick his conscience — no, he would lecture on this, too. And even if the professor happened to read this remark, it would not stop him either — no, he would lecture on this, too. For the professor is even longer than the tapeworm which a woman was delivered of recently (200 feet according to her husband, who expressed his gratitude in Addresseavisen recently) — a professor is even longer that — and if a man has this tapeworm “the professor” in him, no human being can deliver him of it; only God can do it if the man himself is willing.
— Soren Kierkegaard, Journals, 6: 6817-18

Kant’s “Jewish Mind”

Stephen Greenblatt reminisces:

In 1969, in my first year of teaching at Berkeley, I was in the English Department office checking my mail (a ritual I repeated several times a day in the vague hope that something, as Mr. Micawber was fond of saying, would “turn up”). I was carrying a copy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, though I can no longer remember why: perhaps I was actually reading it or perhaps I merely hoped to impress one of my new colleagues. If the latter was my motive, the strategy sorely backfired. A senior professor did indeed notice the book. “You are reading Kant, Greenblatt?” he said. (He was one of those who affect the brusque manner of address of the Oxford Senior Common Room.) “That’s right.” “I don’t like Kant,” he declared flatly. “Oh, why is that?” I ventured to ask. “Because Kant had a Jewish mind.” “A Jewish mind? What on earth do you mean?” “Clever, sterile, absorbed in endless hair-splitting subtleties — a mind without true culture.” “Oh,” I said, for want of something better to say.
— Stephen Greenblatt