Category: Education

  • Quotes on the moral imagination

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    Zygmunt Bauman: “We are…moral beings… we are faced with the challenge of the Other, which is the challenge of responsibility for the Other, a condition of being-for.” Relationships are “shot through with ambivalence” because responsibility for one’s neighbors has “no obvious limits” and “does not easily translate into practical steps.”

    Eugene Peterson: “God was the reality with which David had to do; giants didn’t figure largely in David’s understanding of the world, the real world.”

    Martha Nussbaum: “Situations are all highly concrete and they do not present themselves with duty labels on them.”

    Iris Murdoch: “I have used the word attention to express a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent.”

    Johann Gerhard: “Even if the parents do not protect themselves and do not shy away from loading punishment upon themselves through godlessness, why should they not protect their poor children, so that they do not bequeath to them God’s wrath and punishment instead of God’s fatherly inheritance? If the parents someday will see their children beside them in hell, the children whom they misled by their evil example, their pain and suffering on account of this will be increased in immeasurable manner.”

    Ernst Sartorius: “Where self-love is thought of it is always interwoven with the love of God and our neighbor, and regulated and hallowed thereby. It is in God that man is to love himself, his higher self, that the copy is to love its original. The love of God will prepare him for true happiness, while, if he love himself out[side] of God, he gains harm to his soul.”

  • How have universities survived for nearly a millennium?

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    How have universities managed to survive and evolve over almost 1,000 years to become wildly heterogeneous, unusually fractious, multi-product, non-profit entities? Universities began as teachers’ guilds, and they still give faculty a remarkable degree of autonomy. That structure attracts and empowers intellectuals, who are selected in part on their taste for knowledge, and those entrepreneurs and philanthropists have enabled universities to morph in ways that firms rarely do. Intellectual autonomy can also explain why universities are so often at odds with legal authorities and why faculty fight so often with each other and with their bosses. This essay presents a model of university organization and sketches the evolution of the university’s products and conflicts over the last 900 years. We also discuss the social value of university education.

    That is from an NBER working paper by David M Cutler and Edward L. Glaeser.