Beyond words

Following up an interesting discussion we had on Tuesday In section 1  (I think ) about the limits of language. Words are great, on this view, but they do not capture or convey the totality of feeling associated with human perceptual experience. Sometimes, as the Old saying goes, “you’ve just got to be there.”

William James:

“Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late. No one knows this as well as the philosopher. He must fire his volley of new vocables out of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession condemns him to this industry, but he secretly knows the hollowness and irrelevancy. His formulas are like stereoscopic or kinetoscopic photographs seen outside the instrument; they lack the depth, the motion, the vitality. In the religious sphere, in particular, the belief that formulas are true can never wholly take the place of personal experience.” VRE 

Remember to look for each class date's Questions

 Scroll down to find Thursday's (Questions Aug 27). Post your questions and comments about the day's assigned readings PRIOR to class. Three will let you "touch 'em all" and come home to score (and shade each leg of the diamond).

Midterm report presentations

 Starting Sep 10 you can indicate your preference (in the comments' space of this post) for the topic and date of your report presentation. It can be on any relevant topic of your choice that you can relate to the reading assignments (required and recommended) on the corresponding date. Presentations will begin on the 15th. We'll do two or three presentations per class, hoping to finish before Fall Break. I'll give you a free base or two on the scorecard if you volunteer to present on the 15th.

Take a look ahead at the coming syllabus assignments (reprinted below). Scan the assigned texts and select your topic accordingly. Also scan the lists of recommended books in the right sidebar, to see if you would like to use any of them as a basis for your report. If the library does not have the text(s) you choose, go to the circulation desk and request via interlibrary loan.

Have fun with the project. Be creative. Consider using the podcast/video resources in the library's MakerSpace to prepare your presentation. Plan to present for about 10 minutes, with the goal of teaching us something we wouldn't have learned merely reading the assignment. Then lead a brief class discussion. Don't stress, you'll get all 25 available points if you fulfill these minimal criteria.

15 Kaag 1 - SSHM... Midterm report presentations begin. Machiavelli, Hobbes-LHP 9-10. Rec: FL 11-12. HWT 11-13.

17 Kaag 2... Montaigne, Descartes, & Pascal-LHP 11-12. Weiner 14. Rec: FL 13-14. HWT 14-15.

22 Kaag 3... Spinoza, Locke, & Reid-LHP 13-14. Rec: FL 15-16. HWT 16-17.

24 Kaag 4... Berkeley, Leibniz, Hume, & Rousseau-LHP 15-18. Weiner 3. Rec: FL 17-18. HWT 18-19.

29 Kaag 5... Kant, Bentham, Hegel, Schopenhauer-LHP 19-23. Weiner 5. Rec: FL 19-20. HWT 20-22.

OCT

1 Kaag 6... Mill, Darwin, Kierkegaard, Marx-LHP 24-27. Rec: FL 21-22. HWT 23-24.

2 Meet the author: Applied Philosophy Lyceum Friday Oct 2, 5 pm, COE 164. John Kaag, The Digital Cave" Reading, Thinking, and Dwelling in the Age of the Algorithm. Catered reception follows. Attendance expected.

6 Exam 1.

8 Peirce & James, Nietzsche, Freud-LHP 28-30. Weiner 11. Rec: FL 23-24. HWT 25-26.

Russell, Ayer, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus-LHP 31-33. Weiner 13. Rec: FL 25-26. HWT 27-28.

Fall Break

'Declaring Independence' by Pulitzer Prize-Winning Historia...

Declaring Independence by Pulitzer Prize-Winning Historian Edward J. Lawson was MTSU’s freshman summer read... If you read it, what are your thoughts? Share them in the comments space below (and claim a base on the scorecard for doing so).

MTSU 2026 Convocation, Sat Aug 22, featuring Edward J. Larson (his address begins at 38 minutes):

https://videoplayer.telvue.com/player/h5VycNXH7bgkAv6afvGOOsaDDk8g7wPw/playlists/7483/media/1041788?showtabssearch=true

Independence matters...

https://youtu.be/CCAvLejq19Y?is=G-5Ssui5LIuXslH_

“The self-evident truths of 1776 hover over our national divisions—as inspiring ideals, as measures of how far we still must come, as the hypocrisy of slaveholders, as intrusions on local traditions. The revolutionary politics of 1776 turned from securing the rights of Englishmen to establishing the authority of an independent nation. The battlefields of 1776 cast the military mold for the war years to come and gave us an enduring symbol of gritty determination in the actions of Washington’s depleted forces at Trenton and Princeton.

Drawing together the eloquence of Jefferson and the insistence of Paine, the strategies of generals and the audacious tactics of armies on the move, and the powerful political movement that transformed colonies into states, this history of 1776 is a leading scholar’s distillation of the pivotal events we must reckon with two hundred and fifty years after the nation’s birth.“ g’r

Questions Aug 27

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO ANSWER ALL OF THESE QUESTIONS, or indeed any of them. They're here to prompt your own reflections. If you can access this without my questions, feel free. 

Questions pertaining to the assigned reading will normally be posted prior to each class.That's where you should always share your thoughts, in the comments space below each day's post (at least three relevant comments/questions/observations per class, so you can shade the whole diamond on the scorecard when you come to class, and thus receive full participation credit for that date... more than that gets you extra credit). You can also respond to your own questions(s) or your classmates' posted comments. Respond not merely with the authors' textual statements but also with your own thoughts & reflections.) 25 exam questions will pertain to the required texts. Additional bonus questions pertaining to the recommended texts will also appear.

LHP

1. Socrates saw himself as a what? Do you think such a person is valuable to a community? Can you think of anyone in our time who fills that role?
2. What kind of conversation was a success, for Socrates, and what did he mean by wisdom?
3. What made Socrates wise and unusual? Do you think he was wrong about writing? In whose writing does "Socrates" appear?
4. What theory is Plato's story of the cave connected with? What was his name for a perfect exemplar of anything (such as a circle)? Do you think some or all humans are naturally, in some allegorical sense, stuck in a cave? Do you think we need to conceive Ideas of perfection in order to pursue improvement in life effectively? (For instance, can you become a better person without having a perfectly formed notion of what a "perfect person" would be?)
5. What was Plato's profoundly un-democratic view of how the state should resemble the mind (as he understood it)? Would you want to live in Plato's Republic?
6. What was Socrates' "annoying" response to the jury that, by narrow vote, sentenced him to death? Do you think it was courageous? What would you have said, in his situation?

What did Socrates say his inner voice told him? Do you think "inner voice" is literal?

Weiner

1. "Philosopher" means what? Philosophy was what, in ancient Athens? (Introduction) 
2. What did Camus say is the one truly serious philosophical problem? Do you agree?
3. What did Marcus Aurelius need, at dawn, to remind himself of? (And ask me about his morning mantra, which I daily remind myself of. UPDATE: Turns out it wasn't Marcus, but a 19th century American named Elbert Hubbard, whose morning mantra* has been falsely attributed to the Stoic emperor.)
4. What was the first question young Needleman experienced? Have you experienced it? Do you think it is a good question? How do you answer it?
5. What kinds of questions most interested Socrates?
6. The Socratic dialogues consisted of what kinds of conversations? Do you enjoy participating in such conversations?
7. What did Socrates say about the unexamined life? What corollaries does Weiner propose? Do you think Socrates was wrong?

Plato's Euthyphro:

...EUTHYPHRO: Yes, I should say that what all the gods love is pious and holy, and the opposite which they all hate, impious.

SOCRATES: Ought we to enquire into the truth of this, Euthyphro, or simply to accept the mere statement on our own authority and that of others? What do you say?

EUTHYPHRO: We should enquire; and I believe that the statement will stand the test of enquiry.

SOCRATES: We shall know better, my good friend, in a little while. The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods.

EUTHYPHRO: I do not understand your meaning, Socrates.

SOCRATES: I will endeavour to explain...

Trial and death of Socrates:Plato's Apology, Crito, and Phaedo

...Having thus brought his subject to a conclusion, Socrates proposes to bathe himself, in order not to trouble others to wash his dead body. Crito thereupon asks if he has any commands to give, and especially how he would be buried, to which he, with his usual cheerfulness, makes answer, "Just as you please, if only you can catch me;" and then, smiling, he reminds them that after death he shall be no longer with them, and begs the others of the party to be sureties to Crito for his absence from the body, as they had been before bound for his presence before his judges.

After he had bathed, and taken leave of his children and the women of his family the officer of the Eleven comes in to intimate to him that it is now time to drink the poison. Crito urges a little delay, as the sun had not yet set; but Socrates refuses to make himself ridiculous by showing such a fondness for life. The man who is to administer the poison is therefore sent for; and on his holding out the cup, Socrates, neither trembling nor changing color or countenance at all, but, as he was wont, looking steadfastly at the man, asked if he might make a libation to any one; and being told that no more poison than enough had been mixed, he simply prayed that his departure from this to another world might be happy, and then drank off the poison, readily and calmly. His friends, who had hitherto with difficulty restrained themselves, could no longer control the outward expressions of grief, to which Socrates said, "What are you doing, my friends? I, for this reason, chiefly, sent away the women, that they might not commit any folly of this kind; for I have heard that it is right to die with good omens. Be quiet, therefore, and bear up."

When he had walked about for a while his legs began to grow heavy, so he lay down on his back; and his body, from the feet upward, gradually grew cold and stiff. His last words were, "Crito, we owe a cock to Æsculapius; pay it, therefore, and do not neglect it."

"This," concludes Phædo, "was the end of our friend—a man, as we may say, the best of all his time, that we have known, and, moreover, the most wise and just." Phaedo

Phaedo audio...

==

*"When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love." -Elbert Hubbard, probably... and not Marcus Aurelius, though the Internet seems to think otherwise. Don't confuse him with looney L. Ron...

And check out:

Virtual tour, map, & glossary of Ancient Athens

"Rescuing Socrates"

Socrates documentaries, podcasts

• 
  

Rec-

HWT

1. What's one of the great unexplained wonders of human history?
2. Do you agree that we cannot understand ourselves if we do not understand others?
3. What was Descartes's "still pertinent" conclusion?
4. Why did the Buddha think speculation about ultimate reality was fruitless? 
5. What aspects of western thought have most influenced global philosophy?
6. What do Africans not have, according to Kwame Appiah?

FL

1. What statement by Karl Rove began to "crystallize" Fantasyland, in Kurt Andersen's mind?

2. What are half of Americans "absolutely certain" about? What do a quarter believe about vaccines?

3. What is Andersen trying to do with this book?

 

More from The School of Life

  

==

In class on Opening Day I was asked if I could summarize my philosophy in a word or phrase like Sally Brown, who finally decides her philosophy is simply "No!"

I should have said Yes! The word is meliorism (closely related, in my philosophy as in WJ's, to possibility):

 Meliorism:

 

"...there are unhappy men who think the salvation of the world impossible. Theirs is the doctrine known as pessimism.

Optimism in turn would be the doctrine that thinks the world's salvation inevitable.

Midway between the two there stands what may be called the doctrine of meliorism, tho it has hitherto figured less as a doctrine than as an attitude in human affairs. Optimism has always been the regnant DOCTRINE in european philosophy. Pessimism was only recently introduced by Schopenhauer and counts few systematic defenders as yet. Meliorism treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become.

It is clear that pragmatism must incline towards meliorism..." Pragmatism by William James

Philosophy Bites, Nihilism vs. Meliorism

Nigel Warburton’s podcast, a good supplement to his Little History of Philosophy (which we are reading): https://philosophybites.com/

If you search the site for "definitions of philosophy" this comes up... including an episode from 2010 that asks numerous contemporary philosophers What is Philosophy? No two answers are the same. Philosophers do tend to think for themselves. The good ones, though, do not think by themselves. They converse and collaborate. They're Co-Philosophers, like we aim to be in this course.

My own definition of philosophy, beyond the etymological/literal "love of wisdom," is William James's: "an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly," and to live in the light of that clarity.

And my own personal philosophy, if reduced to a word, is decidedly not Sally Brown's "No!" That's too much like deep pessimism or even nihilism.

No, the word I'd choose is: meliorism. You'll hear it again. 

It rejects pure optimism and deep pessimism alike. It means trying to make things better. And it comes from, guess who... "Willie" James (as one of mty old Vandy mentors familiarly called my favorite philosopher who's been dead but not gone for 116+ years now. In Pragmatism-"a new name for some old ways of thinking" dedicated 

To the Memory of John Stuart Mill

from whom I first learned the pragmatic openness of mind
and whom my fancy likes to picture as our leader were he alive to-day.

he writes:

...there are unhappy men who think the salvation of the world impossible. Theirs is the doctrine known as pessimism.

Optimism in turn would be the doctrine that thinks the world's salvation inevitable.

Midway between the two there stands what may be called the doctrine of meliorism, tho it has hitherto figured less as a doctrine than as an attitude in human affairs. Optimism has always been the regnant DOCTRINE in european philosophy. Pessimism was only recently introduced by Schopenhauer and counts few systematic defenders as yet. Meliorism treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become.

It is clear that pragmatism must incline towards meliorism...

Me too.

 

 

Introductions

Let’s introduce ourselves, CoPhilosophers of Fall ‘26 (and MTSU class of 2030). 

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:

https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-interview-series/i-am-an-american-philosopher-phil-oliver/

==

I consider myself a philosopher in the peripatetic tradition, at least in the ambulatory sense: Like teachers and students at Aristotle's Lyceum, I prefer the outdoors and generally would rather roam than sit (at least on the nicer days). I agree with Kierkegaard, who said he'd walked himself into his best thoughts; and Nietzsche, who said the best thoughts are conceived while walking; and Emerson, who said walking is a gymnasium of the mind. So I look forward to getting us all out of our classroom and onto the grounds of our Lyceum at MTSU, when the weather allows.

This is me, with Nell and Pita (who we brought home with us from the humane shelter in 2018):

==

So, shall we hit the ground running? And not say, like Douglas Adams's jaded bowl of petunias in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, "Oh no, not again!"

==

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

What Do Students Lose When They Stop Writing?

… Students need to write well enough to have a sense of which A.I. text suggestions to accept and which to reject, she said. Ms. Maxwell also insisted that creativity in writing would persist, because people would still want to express their personal voice and style.

To that end, companies like Grammarly, Google and OpenAI are creating so-called Socratic versions of their chatbots, sold to schools as writing helpers that will guide students through assignments without doing the work for them...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/17/us/student-writing-essays-ai.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Debate start dates

“My undergraduates open their free will essays the same way every term: "The problem of free will has been debated since time immemorial." It hasn't. Socrates never mentions it. It isn't in Plato or Aristotle. Not because they missed it — because they had no concept of will for it to be free or unfree. The thing you assume is the most basic fact about being a person turns out to have a start date.“

 https://substack.com/@davidjfrost/note/c-320219158?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

Applied Philosophy Lyceum: Oct 2, 5 pm, COE 164

The Digital Cave

Reading, Thinking, and Dwelling in the Age of the Algorithm

An Applied Philosophy Talk by John Kaag

Abstract

We live in an era of industrial-scale shadow-play. The map of reality is no longer drawn from our own experience but projected by algorithms designed to keep us looking at a particular kind of wall. This talk argues that the oldest resources in the philosophical canon offer the most precise diagnosis of our newest predicament. Plato's cave anticipates the architecture of the feed—with one grim perversion: his prisoners at least shared a wall, while the algorithm builds a bespoke cavern for each of us. The Buddhist vocabulary of maya, tanha, and upadana describes with uncanny accuracy the mechanics of craving, clinging, and curated selfhood that the infinite scroll exploits. And Heidegger's account of Enframing—read alongside his catastrophic biography, which cannot be waved away—explains how attention itself became “standing reserve,” a resource to be extracted.

The talk concludes with the question increasingly posed to our machines: why is talking to a large language model so strange? The answer reveals a schism between information and meaning, between the calculative synthesis at which AI excels and the meditative, embodied, abductive thinking that a life—with something at stake—alone makes possible. Philosophy's task has not changed since the cave: to make us suspicious of the reality that appears most obvious, and to recover the gritty practices that might let us turn our heads, a few degrees, toward the light.

About the Speaker

John Kaag is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and Visiting Professor at Harvard Divinity School. He is the author of three widely acclaimed books published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux: American Philosophy: A Love Story, Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are, and Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life. These books were named NPR Best Books of the Year and New York Times Editors' Choice selections.

His work bridges American pragmatism, intellectual history, ethics, and the philosophy of technology, and he writes regularly for general audiences on why philosophy still matters for everyday life.

Canada internship opportunity

We encourage students to consider applying for the Fulbright Canada-Mitacs Globalink Internship Program for Summer 2027.

Interested students should contact Laura.Clippard@mtsu.edu.

Program Information:
https://www.fulbright.ca/programs/undergraduate-students/fulbright-canada-mitacs-globalink-program

This prestigious program offers U.S. undergraduate students the opportunity to undertake a 10 to 12-week research internship with Canadian university faculty across a variety of academic disciplines, from science and engineering to the humanities and social sciences. Previous research experience is required, but students from all majors are welcome to apply.

Key Details:

• Application Deadline: September 16, 2026
• Reference Submission Deadline: September 23, 2026

Program Overview:

• Duration: 10 to 12 weeks, with internships beginning between May and July 2027
• Location: Canadian universities
• Experience: Engage in advanced research projects while exploring cultural, social, and recreational opportunities in Canada

Eligibility Requirements:

• Must be currently enrolled as an undergraduate at a U.S. university
• Must be a U.S. citizen with a valid U.S. passport
• Must have one to three semesters remaining in their undergraduate program as of Fall 2027 (Meaning graduation in Fall 2027, Spring 2028 or Fall 2028)
• A competitive GPA of 3.8 or higher is recommended

Program Benefits:

• Join the prestigious Fulbright network
• Gain access to top research facilities in Canada
• Obtain valuable international experience
• Develop academic research and professional skills
• Receive a grant of up to CAD $9,000

A

gain, interested students should email Laura.Clippard@mtsu.edu.

We encourage students to take advantage of this unique opportunity to expand your academic and professional horizons.

Warm regards,

Laura Clippard
Undergraduate Fellowships Director

What is Philosophy For?

William James:

...I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds. You know the same of me. And yet I confess to a certain tremor at the audacity of the enterprise which I am about to begin. For the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos... Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use... Pragmatism (1907)

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

"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 5^th is the last day to register in Tennessee for the fall election.

• Wednesday, October 14^th is the first day of early voting in Tennessee.

• Thursday, October 29^th is the last day of early voting in Tennessee.

• Tuesday, November 3^rd 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 Sayward

Amy 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

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

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

https://skyecleary.substack.com/p/are-you-using-ai-do-not-forget-your?r=35ogp&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

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

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