I.

I'm musing on this passage from Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America and I'd like to start with some free writing in response to this:

"There is no other country in the world where the law speaks so absolute a language as in America or where the right to apply it is divided among so many hands." (Goldhammer, trans., p. 80)

This seems especially poignant and compelling to me after our experience together on Thursday Friday afternoons. I'd like to write about this for ten minutes and then split up into small groups to talk about what we've written.

II.

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?"

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 directly to the questions Tong raises below.

of possible interest next week
(after our tour of Eastern State...?
it's 2 1/2 miles away...)
 

[hoping to Skype, but mostly on speaker phone...]

Really looking forward to getting to know you this semester. Last night I read your responses to the questions I posed and was delighted at how knowledgeable and engaged you are with the subject of incarceration. The diversity of students in this class will greatly enrich the dialogue. I have written some brief responses to all of you.

Before I begin, I would really like to know you a little better before we begin. Could you go around the room and say your name, your major, your year and why you chose to take this course. And, are there other questions which you would like to see added to my list of questions?