Spring 2019. What are colleges for?

There are 16 million students currently enrolled in American colleges and universities. Higher education is a cornerstone of the American economy. Politicians promote college accessibility, while families set aside their spare pennies to provide their children upward mobility through higher education. There is a near universal consensus that college is important, and the prevailing opinion is that it is good.

We want to sit down and ask why this should be. Higher education has transformed over the centuries and is still changing today, all without anything resembling agreement on the simple question: What are colleges for? Why do we commit so much time and so many resources to education, and why to this particular kind of education? Employers demand credentials unrelated to the jobs they offer; students take on life-crushing debt for the opportunity to earn a degree of uncertain utility; meanwhile, precarious employment with poor pay and benefits is becoming the norm at nominally wealthy institutions.

We will examine the history of higher education in America, both public and private institutions, and consider how their role in public life has changed. This background will inform our discussion of the current state of affairs, our own experiences, and, finally, our hopes and fears for the place of education in the society of the future.

Autumn 2019. Where I end and you begin.

The word individual means a unit, defined against the world, inseparable from itself. The equivalent word in Greek is atom, the fundamental unit of matter. Just as physics has first explained away the discreet form of the atom, and then parsed, sliced, and collided it in so many ways, so have other fields cast doubt on what once seemed so simple: the individual self.

Deciding where I end and you begin is no easy matter. My biological organism relies on countless microbes that interact with my body with the same intimacy as my organs to each other. Mothers carry the DNA of their sons in their bloodstream for the rest of their lives. The structure of our brain changes, permanently, in response to environmental factors, and so therefore do our moods, our feelings, our thoughts, and our experience of the world—in a word: all that we call our self.

Asking after the self, where it begins and ends, is an inquiry into our relationships with each other, socially, politically, philosophically, biologically. Is there a single thing called the “self,” and, if so, how can we begin to understand it? What obligations does the self have to others? What are the consequences of thinking of humanity as a group of discreet individuals? And what are the alternatives?

Disciplines each bring their own methods to bear on these questions. Our goal this semester is to step behind these boundaries and see what a diverse set of perspectives and experiences can tell us about the self and the other. We will read philosophers, scientists, humanists—through us, they will speak to each other.