Not so long ago, colleges made a promise that sounds a bit strange today. Administrators and faculty promised not just to teach students knowledge and skills, but to make them better people. Our communications department might like to highlight the good Middlebury students do, but few students enter ...
Too often, our politics is corrupted by advocacy, leaving no time for reflection or critical thought. Every new piece of information serves only to bolster or refute an argument we were already trying to make. The danger of such an approach to politics is evident: it is close-minded and simplistic. ...
Books teach us that culture matters. This truth, as the late Democratic New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed, is fundamentally conservative. But liberals would also do well to take account of it. Any attempt to improve society through political means must recognize the limits and restraints ...
An increasingly dominant strain of thought at American universities and colleges embraces a certain materialism. Materialism here refers not to a consumerist urge or to a Marxist ethic, although neither is wholly unrelated, but rather to a worldview that treats reality as no more than what can be observed ...