Peter Starr on Wisdom and Culture
Our challenge, both as faculty and as administrators, is to make space for the wisdom of Eve II in an institution predicated on producing Eve I’s.
This past weekend, I had the pleasure of participating in a deans retreat at American University’s Airlie conference center, hosted by our Provost, Dan Myers.
Continue reading “Reflection Time”This piece first appeared in Inside Higher Ed and is reprinted here with permission
“I am wiser than he is to this small extent that I do not think that I know what I do not know.”
Socrates, in Plato, The Apology of Socrates
In October of 1979, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Barbara Tuchman delivered a lecture at West Point in which she decried the “persistence of unwisdom” among politicians across the ages. Reflecting on how American presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had embroiled the United States more deeply in the Vietnam War, Tuchman bemoaned a perennial “wooden-headedness”—a tendency for politicians to act wishfully, while not allowing themselves to be “confused by facts.”
Continue reading “Teaching for Wisdom Today”