{"id":8,"date":"2005-02-22T13:05:09","date_gmt":"2005-02-22T17:05:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/2005\/02\/22\/what-is-a-university-supposed-to-be-"},"modified":"2005-02-22T13:05:09","modified_gmt":"2005-02-22T17:05:09","slug":"what-is-a-university-supposed-to-be-about","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/2005\/02\/22\/what-is-a-university-supposed-to-be-about\/","title":{"rendered":"What is a University supposed to be about?"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

… especially one that fancies itself the greatest steward of the humanities in the world?<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

You
\ncan click the picture for a 2x enlargement. Even so, You can’t see it,
\nbut in the upper right hand corner, Paul Gauguin wrote three questions:<\/p>\n

Where do we come from?
What are we?
 Where are we going? <\/p>\n

{I
\nwill put up the original french [I’ll clip from the Web \ud83d\ude42 ] after I
\nenable French Characters on my [I’m ashamed to say] WinXP.}<\/p>\n

As
\nwe sit on the brink of World War III, this last seems most pressing.
\nMuch like the NBER assessment of the economy, we won’t know until we’re
\na bit farther down the road. WWW III is actually a small worry compared
\nto the extinction of our species which we seem to be signing up for.
\nWe’re in deep s**t and could use all the help we can get. Honest
\nscience can help. I say let’s invite the women. [Gee that was a bit
\nawkward!] Let’s ask the women to help us. [Would a truly efficient
\nmarket ignore more than half of the talent pool?] It’s not enough to
\nwait till University, but it’s a start. Let’s get cracking shall we? We
\ndon’t really know how much time we have.<\/p>\n

Professor Stephen, who
\nrecently left us, would be very sad. He quotes Charles Darwin, “If the
\nmisery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our
\ninstitutions, great is our sin.” Not only are we mismeasuring man,
\nwoman, and child, but we are mismeasuring [or in some cases not
\nmeasuring when we should and could] homo economicus as well. Let’s look
\nat this more carefully shall we? Before we reduce any more economies
\nand our own to feudalism. A ray of hope is Professor Stephen, who is
\nstill with us. Others though, including some of the most influential in
\nthe University, have, I fear, caused Harvard’s sin to be huge.<\/p>\n

I don’t really know why Professor Cornell is no longer here. I did not know him personally. Still I miss him. Google points<\/a>
\nme to context of the quote from Professor Charles. He believes that
\nslavery is a greater sin than what might be caused by the market. Like
\nProfessor Michael, he believes there are moral limits to markets. I
\nwill ask, [real soon now] has ‘market’ ever been defined without
\nexplicit or implicit moral limits? And have the definers been honest
\nabout their purpose? <\/p>\n

I apologize to Professor Diana. Her
\nsweet, beautiful misapprehension was not of the business model of this
\nUniversity, but a hopefully small portion of our fellows. I will tell
\nyou. And I would like to tell about the day that Professor Margaret
\ntook on all the faculty on Observatory Hill to say what honest
\nempiricism required her to say. <\/p>\n

But what do I know?
I’m just the guy by the door who looks after things.<\/p>\n

randy.f<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

… especially one that fancies itself the greatest steward of the humanities in the world? You can click the picture for a 2x enlargement. Even so, You can’t see it, but in the upper right hand corner, Paul Gauguin wrote three questions: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? {I will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":168,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/168"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}