William James:
Monday, August 17, 2026
What is Philosophy For?
Addicted to study
School starts in a week. Time to celebrate one of the more positive addictions.
“…As obvious as this may seem, it typically goes unsaid: to be a student is ... to study. Students are not clients; they are not consumers; they are not users who can be “captured” by outcomes, indicators, or throughputs. Experts recognize this fact, yet study is not a main theme or even a topic in the shelf of books I have on recent debates. Few philosophical arguments about the future of the university analyze what it means to study.
So before we go any further, let the first idea of this book be the idea of study. What, this humanities professor asks, does the word student mean? In the academic field of higher education, students are the subject matter for vast research. But philosophers often examine what seems obvious, and, to me, this idea of study especially has the power to help reorient the research university. Framing the idea of study means making explicit a goal that exceeds our current practices.
Framing the idea of study does not mean offering an empirical account of what students today “do.” Rather, it is an attempt to identify the ideas that may guide them. With some irony, I’ll try to outline the idea of study by exploring the words student and study as documented by the Oxford English Dictionary, which emerged from the philological research of great humanities scholars.
So let me link, or turn to, the 1989 version of the Oxford English Dictionary, conveniently available to students and faculty online. student, n. 1. A person who is engaged in or addicted to study. 2. a. A person who is undergoing a course of study and instruction at a university or other place of higher education or technical training. Also const. of, in (a subject); often with defining word prefixed, as art student, law student, medical student...”
— What Could a University Be?: Revolutionary Ideas for the Future (On Campus) by Robert B. Gibbs
— What Could a University Be?: Revolutionary Ideas for the Future (On Campus) by Robert B. Gibbs
Saturday, August 15, 2026
"Please be engaged"
A note from Amy Sayward of Project Democracy:
This fall will include elections for important local, state, and federal offices, including Tennessee's Governor and U.S. Representatives in Congress. Please be engaged in this civic process...
- Monday, October 5th is the last day to register in Tennessee for the fall election.
- Wednesday, October 14th is the first day of early voting in Tennessee.
- Thursday, October 29th is the last day of early voting in Tennessee.
- Tuesday, November 3rd is election day.
MTSU's American Democracy Project stands by to assist you in all things voting. Students can find voter registration information for all 50 states on our website: https://amerdem.mtsu.edu/vote/
We also offer class presentations of 15-55 minutes about the voter registration and voting processes; simply email Amy.Sayward@mtsu.edu.
Additionally, we will be hosting voter registration drives across campus during September and October to register students and provide information about the upcoming election, including the three Tennessee Constitutional amendments that are on the ballot.
Sincerely,Amy SaywardAmy L. Sayward, Ph.D.American Democracy Project for Civic Learning
MTSU Box 267, Honors College 221
Middle Tennessee State University
Murfreesboro, TN 37132
(615) 904-8241
Wednesday, August 12, 2026
We're losing the point of college
Even Elite Colleges Have Become Trade Schools
Short-term return on investment is an impoverished view of a college education.
... it feels that, as a country, we’re “losing the point” of college, which in his mind, was supposed to be about figuring “out who you are and what you’re interested in.” His experience was that “people need to know what they want to do after college when they get to college,” which is a tall order for a teenager.
...a poignant anxiety I hear when I speak to college students: They have started worrying about employability the second they walk through the campus gates, if not before. While President Trump has pitted the idea of higher education against trade schools, as if the two types of institutions have different aims, that distinction is largely antiquated.
As the new school year begins, it’s worth pointing out how students and administrators treat colleges — even elite universities — as a catapult to a “good job” above all else.
Which is to say: Colleges are already trade schools.
The top two majors for students at four-year institutions as of 2022 are business and health professions. In June, the Department of Education issued its “earnings accountability” rule, which states that undergraduate programs have to show that their students earn more than a person with a high school diploma, and graduate programs have to show that their students earn more than a person with a college diploma, or they risk losing access to federal loans.
Nathan Heller, in a 2023 New Yorker article about the death of the liberal arts major, offered a history of the competing aims of the American university. In the 1960s, our institutions of higher ed were described by Clark Kerr, president of the University of California system, as a multiversity that “incorporates the tradition of land-grant universities, established with an eye to industrial-age skill sets. And it provides something for everyone.” The pursuit of knowledge and beauty, scientific research, and pre-professional studies were all bound together, even if it was never a harmonious union.
That fractious union was breaking apart long before the second Trump administration took a wrecking ball to the federal funding of research across disciplines. But the effort to put higher education in its place started much earlier. Over the past 30 years, there has been a concerted effort by mostly conservative politicians to diminish trust in the value of college, and to provide less federal funding for it. They paint America’s colleges and universities as foolish, progressive hotbeds of ethnic studies departments where impressionable young people get expensive Marxist indoctrination rather than marketable, useful skills.
It wasn’t always like this. There used to be bipartisan agreement that our universities were a source of civic strength, and local leaders wanted to keep educated young people from leaving their states. The political scientists Eric Schickler and Elina Maria Rodriguez analyzed a data set of over 1,000 state and national party platforms from 1980 to 2025 to show how Republicans have turned against higher education. In the ’80s and ’90s, some state-level Republicans supported public universities with high praise and high funding, Schickler and Rodriguez explain in an article published this year in the journal Studies in American Political Development.
...When we reduce college to metrics like short-term return on investment, we are ignoring so much human potential it is staggering: Young people who don’t have the resources to pay out of pocket for their college degrees are going to be pushed into jobs that they might be ill suited for, rather than getting to explore their intellectual potential in fields that are not immediately remunerative.
Who knows how many kids we have already trapped in a cutthroat competition to get a small number of finance or tech jobs, when their brains might have been put to better use creating the next great piece of literature, designing a new kind of green building, or working in a lab that could lead to the next medical breakthrough? When we impugn the more esoteric ambitions of higher education, we lose the ability to dream big about what our young people can accomplish...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/12/opinion/elite-college-trade-school.html?smid=em-share
Short-term return on investment is an impoverished view of a college education.
... it feels that, as a country, we’re “losing the point” of college, which in his mind, was supposed to be about figuring “out who you are and what you’re interested in.” His experience was that “people need to know what they want to do after college when they get to college,” which is a tall order for a teenager.
...a poignant anxiety I hear when I speak to college students: They have started worrying about employability the second they walk through the campus gates, if not before. While President Trump has pitted the idea of higher education against trade schools, as if the two types of institutions have different aims, that distinction is largely antiquated.
As the new school year begins, it’s worth pointing out how students and administrators treat colleges — even elite universities — as a catapult to a “good job” above all else.
Which is to say: Colleges are already trade schools.
The top two majors for students at four-year institutions as of 2022 are business and health professions. In June, the Department of Education issued its “earnings accountability” rule, which states that undergraduate programs have to show that their students earn more than a person with a high school diploma, and graduate programs have to show that their students earn more than a person with a college diploma, or they risk losing access to federal loans.
Nathan Heller, in a 2023 New Yorker article about the death of the liberal arts major, offered a history of the competing aims of the American university. In the 1960s, our institutions of higher ed were described by Clark Kerr, president of the University of California system, as a multiversity that “incorporates the tradition of land-grant universities, established with an eye to industrial-age skill sets. And it provides something for everyone.” The pursuit of knowledge and beauty, scientific research, and pre-professional studies were all bound together, even if it was never a harmonious union.
That fractious union was breaking apart long before the second Trump administration took a wrecking ball to the federal funding of research across disciplines. But the effort to put higher education in its place started much earlier. Over the past 30 years, there has been a concerted effort by mostly conservative politicians to diminish trust in the value of college, and to provide less federal funding for it. They paint America’s colleges and universities as foolish, progressive hotbeds of ethnic studies departments where impressionable young people get expensive Marxist indoctrination rather than marketable, useful skills.
It wasn’t always like this. There used to be bipartisan agreement that our universities were a source of civic strength, and local leaders wanted to keep educated young people from leaving their states. The political scientists Eric Schickler and Elina Maria Rodriguez analyzed a data set of over 1,000 state and national party platforms from 1980 to 2025 to show how Republicans have turned against higher education. In the ’80s and ’90s, some state-level Republicans supported public universities with high praise and high funding, Schickler and Rodriguez explain in an article published this year in the journal Studies in American Political Development.
...When we reduce college to metrics like short-term return on investment, we are ignoring so much human potential it is staggering: Young people who don’t have the resources to pay out of pocket for their college degrees are going to be pushed into jobs that they might be ill suited for, rather than getting to explore their intellectual potential in fields that are not immediately remunerative.
Who knows how many kids we have already trapped in a cutthroat competition to get a small number of finance or tech jobs, when their brains might have been put to better use creating the next great piece of literature, designing a new kind of green building, or working in a lab that could lead to the next medical breakthrough? When we impugn the more esoteric ambitions of higher education, we lose the ability to dream big about what our young people can accomplish...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/12/opinion/elite-college-trade-school.html?smid=em-share
Are you using AI? Do Not Forget Your Whip (to create a healthy distance)
"...Next time you find yourself mindlessly on a screen, create distance. Find pure air and solitude. Stare at a tree, watch a cat, touch a leaf, smell all the smells, even the bad ones. Talk to someone who might disagree with you, such as a teenager. Be someone’s best enemy, and let them be yours. These small distances are acts of defiance against an escalatingly automatic world. It’s not too late to cherish humanity in all its mysteriousness, beauty, and ugliness, and always worth the effort."
Skye Cleary
Tuesday, August 11, 2026
Introductions
Let’s introduce ourselves, CoPhilosophers of Fall ‘26.
Go to the comments space below and tell us who you are, why you’re here, how you’d summarize your personal philosophy of "life, the universe, and everything" (but be less concise than "42"), & anything else you’d care to share. Include your section number, 1, 2 or 3 (940, 1 PM, 240 respectively).
Who am I, why am I here? Here’s an interview I gave recently:
Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu
👣Solvitur ambulando
💭Sapere aude
Sunday, August 9, 2026
Writing is thinking
Converse with A.I., but write and think for yourself.
“…What, uniquely, does writing do? It compels thought. It compels thinking in ways that silent contemplation or spoken language rarely can. It compels us to subject our thinking to the effort of articulation, the rigor of grammar, the tests of intelligibility and coherence, the inspection of others. In doing so, it also enjoins us to be clear, logical, accurate — and accountable. People may easily forgive a word said in anger but not so easily one written in anger, precisely because the fact that it was written tells us that it was considered...”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/opinion/artificial-intelligence-ai-writing.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
College Has a Political Problem, but It’s Not Woke Brainwashing
Affective polarization, or feeling incapable of amicable disagreement with those whose views differ from your own, and feeling personally threatened by the difference,stifles the healthy, robust, good-natured debate that should be at the heart of higher education and functional democracy. Let’s model a better way here.
“… A large majority of students remain in-state for college, primarily for financial reasons, so one driver of this change is likely growing regional polarization. That would help explain why, for example, so many students at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, are liberal while the student body at Auburn University in Alabama is more conservative. But the researchers found that a significant additional factor was the students’ preference for attending college with politically similar peers — and their even stronger desire not to go to school with people on the other side of the political divide...”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/07/opinion/college-politics-woke-polarization.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
Thursday, August 6, 2026
Where Gen Z Finds Meaning in Life
Re “Gen Z Fell Out of Love With Work. It’s Easy to See Why,” by Emi Nietfeld (Opinion guest essay, July 26):
As a Gen Z student preparing to enter the work force, I believe that personal ambition is far more compelling than blindly pursuing the corporate grind. Recently, while waiting in line for a concert, I struck up a conversation with a stranger who told me about a story he was writing — about a man building a piano in postapocalyptic America. I soon joined his Wednesday night “drunk writing group,” where I discovered that my greatest sense of fulfillment comes from following creative impulses.
It is passion, not rote progress, that guides our paths forward. One of my friends traveled to Ukraine to serve as a drone pilot. Another reports from the Middle East. A third spends weekends backstage interviewing underground rap artists. None of them followed a conventional script, yet each is building a career around a genuine curiosity.
To me, those acts of curiosity comprise ambition. Rather than defining ourselves by external markers of success, we increasingly define success by whether our work reflects our authentic selves…
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/06/opinion/gen-z-work-life.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
Tuesday, August 4, 2026
Lumen “speaks”
And solicits your interlocutory collaborative engagement. Just remember that personifying AI does not make it an actual person… but (contrary to popular presumption) it might actually emphasize and reinforce your own singular humanity.
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This is exactly what I’ve told my students, to engage critically (and transparently!) with AI as an interlocutor, not a search engine… with this caution: “Just remember that personifying AI does not make it an actual person… but (contrary to popular presumption) it might actually emphasize and reinforce your own singular humanity.” As Jaron Lanier keeps reminding us, we are not “gadgets”… but AI, in its non-humanity, can also be more than a mere gadget. It can be a constructive collaborator, supplementing but not displacing or replacing our distinctive form of intelligence. We should investigate, albeit with circumspect caution and reflective judgment at every step, the creative possibilities this technology may afford.