All the Answers: The quiz-show scandals—and the aftermath. by Charles Van Doren

I was considered well spoken, well educated, handsome—the very image of a young man that parents would like their son to be. I was also thought to be the ideal teacher, which is to say patient, thoughtful, trustworthy, caring. In addition, I was making a small fortune. And then—well, this is what happened:

Mind Over What’s the Matter

Simon Blackburn, in yesterday's New York Times, reviews Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists, by Susan Neiman.

Neiman, an American who is currently the director of the Einstein Forum in Berlin, boldly asserts that when Marxism, postmodernism, theory and fundamentalism challenge the Enlightenment they invariably come off second best. I agree, and I wish more people did so.

Saying challengers to the Enlightenment "invariably come off second best" seems inconsistent with "wishing" more people were convinced of it.

--Terrence Berres

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

William Deresiewicz in The American Scholar, Summer 2008

The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.

(via Shark and Shepherd)

Education: the deflationary view

Stanley Fish in the Yale Alumni Magazine July/August 2008

So what is it that institutions of higher learning are supposed to do? My answer is simple. College and university teachers can (legitimately) do two things: (1) introduce students to bodies of knowledge and traditions of inquiry that had not previously been part of their experience; and (2) equip those same students with the analytical skills -- of argument, statistical modeling, laboratory procedure -- that will enable them to move confidently within those traditions and to engage in independent research after a course is over

.

After 49 years Charles Van Doren opens up . . .

At the 2001 memorial service of Mortimer Adler, a close friend of Van Doren's father, the famous writer and poet Mark Van Doren, the disgraced son talked of "the time when I fell down, face down in the mud, and [Adler] picked me up, brushed me off, and gave me a job." I interviewed Van Doren about Adler last year, and he called the late 1950s the time "when my life changed." He said he was working on a memoir, which he declined to discuss.

An Original Confession

Darwin revised the text of the “Origin” extensively each time the book was republished in his lifetime; by the 6th (and last) edition, the text had evolved considerably. The final paragraph of the 6th edition differs from that of the first in that it includes mention of “the creator.” The relevant sentence of the 6th edition reads “…having been originally breathed by the creator into a few forms or into one…”