Kieran Healy

Moral Clarity

Via OxBlog, some snippets from Larry Summers’ Harvard Commencement Speech, including this one:

.. it is not clear to me that we do enough to make sure that our students graduate with the ability to speak cogently, to persuade others, and to reason to an important decision with moral and ethical implications.

“I mean, let’s look at a good example of the kind of problem I’m talking about,” he did not add.

Purity

Kieran Healy takes a pretty cheap shot at Harvard President Lawrence Summers. Summers said to this year’s graduating class, .. it is not clear to me that we do enough to make sure that our students graduate with the ability to speak cogently, to persua…

Come on!

That was very cheap.

Almost Luskin-like (don’t want to be too insulting).

In-house talk

Kieran Healy goes after Larry Summers, Harvard’s president, over an email he sent back in 1991, when Summers was at

I don’t buy into the presuppositions that underlie it, but the memo seems pretty cogently written to me, and persuasive on its own terms.

Your comment only makes sense if you mean that people who reach different conclusions than you do are ipso facto unable either (1) to argue cogently, or (2) to discourse persuasively, or (3) to reason to a conclusion with ethical implications. The test of these abilities is the extent to which they result in conclusions you agree with.

I have no direct connections to academia (although I will in a few years, when my kids start going to college); what I know is derived from what I read in the media and on these blogs. But I get disturbing indications, from time to time, that the current members of academia consider it to be their task, not to give students the information and intellectual tools with which they might reach their own conclusions, but rather to teach their students proper “rightthink.” This sort of post doesn’t allay my apprehensions.