September 13, 2015 - 09:26
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. He offers two visions of college 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, which is of course relevant to our course on The Rhetorics of Silence, but I think my favorite question of his comes in the final paragraph: "Who would want to live in a nation of people without doubts?"