ISI Faculty Resource Center

Now I'm told by the educrats that my style amounts to bad education. So why is it that c students consistently rank my courses as "much more learned than other courses" ?

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As part of the ongoing evacuation of academic culture from the academy, the corporate cubicle makes perfect sense: for faculty offices efficient, inexpensive, simple. Too bad that's not what the academy is about.

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If I admit that A is B, and realize in advance that B is C, and C is the contrary to my original thesis I have gained the benefit of dialectic as a game, and have played the game well, i.e., without a contentious spirit.  The dialectician who cannot see such consequences will still lose the thesis but it cannot be said that they have gained any understanding.  In dialectic there are probably many such embarrassments; unable to see implications the novice loses countless debates until finally having an insight connecting the question to its implications.

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Lehrman Fellow John von Heyking has a terrific post on Eric Voegelin and the conversion or turning of the soul. Click here to read.

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Does Socrates teach to me to trick and deceive students for their own good? Could that every be acceptable?

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When cynics and skeptics of the contemporary kind profess their accounts I worry about balance and indoctrination and the loss of reason--am I guilty of special pleading, or is the socratic somehow self-evidently the case?

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Is contemplation doomed when even the teachers of humanities are skeptical?

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Now, I happen to think that I am not a personal assistant to students, or their intern, but rather their teacher; and without any sense of personal self-aggrandizement I do believe that I (along with many others) lead (educate) them.

In addition to the sense of the propriety of what respect a student owes a teacher, I suspect as well that making a student wait is good for them. If the current time forms them into believing that each and every impulse and curious thought should be entertained, followed, sated, and quickly, then making them wait might just be good for their souls, and for my own.

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