Universities are Useless if they Won't Spend their Endowments on Covid-19 Relief
thenegrosubversive.substack.com
Bloomberg columnist and professor of economics at George Mason University, Tyler Cowen, argues that universities should not use their endowments to help provide for food service workers and other staff while they’re unable to work because of the ongoing and expanding Covid-19 epidemic. The piece crescendos at the line: “The real contributions of Harvard, MIT, and Stanford to the world are not the food-service workers they hire. They are the ideas and innovations produced by its researchers, plus the talented students they educate.” This vision of the university would deprive it of not only its character, but any character at all. While it is now common to trumpet Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, as the core competencies of the university, the idea and purpose of the university lie in the humanities. Whether we’re talking about the great African Islamic temples of learning clustered around Timbuktu, the Chinese civil service academies rooted in Confucian teaching, Oxford, Bologna, Wittenberg, or any of the other great European universities; all were built upon a basic notion, that there is such a thing as right and wrong, and that it matters whether a human being does right or wrong, not because of some cost-benefit analysis, but because human is the creature that reflects upon its conduct and creates principles to guide its conduct. All intellectual traditions, one way or another are rooted in: Theology: the notion that every human creature carries within his or herself an irreducible spark of the rational principle ordering the universe. Philosophy: the notion that this spark empowers us to reflect upon and know more deeply ourselves and the world we inhabit. And Law: , whether formal or traditional, the idea that a community is defined by the rules it sets for itself. In short, the university, like all houses of learning, indeed, all learning, roots itself in the proposition that the world mankind creates, can and ought to be better than the world it was handed.
Universities are Useless if they Won't Spend their Endowments on Covid-19 Relief
Universities are Useless if they Won't Spend…
Universities are Useless if they Won't Spend their Endowments on Covid-19 Relief
Bloomberg columnist and professor of economics at George Mason University, Tyler Cowen, argues that universities should not use their endowments to help provide for food service workers and other staff while they’re unable to work because of the ongoing and expanding Covid-19 epidemic. The piece crescendos at the line: “The real contributions of Harvard, MIT, and Stanford to the world are not the food-service workers they hire. They are the ideas and innovations produced by its researchers, plus the talented students they educate.” This vision of the university would deprive it of not only its character, but any character at all. While it is now common to trumpet Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, as the core competencies of the university, the idea and purpose of the university lie in the humanities. Whether we’re talking about the great African Islamic temples of learning clustered around Timbuktu, the Chinese civil service academies rooted in Confucian teaching, Oxford, Bologna, Wittenberg, or any of the other great European universities; all were built upon a basic notion, that there is such a thing as right and wrong, and that it matters whether a human being does right or wrong, not because of some cost-benefit analysis, but because human is the creature that reflects upon its conduct and creates principles to guide its conduct. All intellectual traditions, one way or another are rooted in: Theology: the notion that every human creature carries within his or herself an irreducible spark of the rational principle ordering the universe. Philosophy: the notion that this spark empowers us to reflect upon and know more deeply ourselves and the world we inhabit. And Law: , whether formal or traditional, the idea that a community is defined by the rules it sets for itself. In short, the university, like all houses of learning, indeed, all learning, roots itself in the proposition that the world mankind creates, can and ought to be better than the world it was handed.