September 13, 2015 - 09:33
In this weekend's Education Issue of the NYTimes Magazine, the well-known philosopher Kwame Appiah (a Ghanaian who teaches @ NYU) has an essay, "What is the Point of College?" that speaks to some of the issues we'll raise in our ESem, about what Bryn Mawr has been, and what it might be. He offers two visions of American colleges that are creating interference patterns with one another, as they attend respectively to "the qualities of your skills and of your soul": Utility U is a "means for building human capital," Utopia U "a forcing house of virtue." The title of my post quotes one important question Appiah asks, but I think my favorite one comes in the final paragraph: "Who would want to live in a nation of people without doubts?"