Lonely Thinking in Film

“In one flashback with her teacher and former lover Martin Heidegger, Heidegger tells Arendt, “thinking is a lonely business.” Outside of a few intimates, Arendt is alone throughout the film, accompanied by nothing and no one but her thoughts and her ever-present cigarette. There is a danger that Arendt’s cigarette could become an empty cipher, an obvious symbol. Instead, it lingers there, pulsing with Arendt’s breath, as she remains silent, listening. It is her silent intensity, throughout the film, that strikes the viewer, propels us to think with Arendt about what she is observing and its implications. The audience is thus transformed, moving from observing Arendt to thinking with her. And when Arendt at the end becomes a speaker, her deliberations done, the film climaxes in her speech to students at a small liberal arts college. The seven-minute long monologue, a sort of closing argument in this film’s long accumulation of evidence, is gripping. Arendt concludes: ‘This inability to think created the possibility for many ordinary men to commit to commit evil deeds on a gigantic scale, the like of which had never been seen before. The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge but the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And I hope that thinking gives people the strength to prevent catastrophes in these rare moments when the chips are down.’ The full speech is likely the greatest articulation of the importance of thinking that will ever be presented in a film.”

Roger Berkowitz "Lonely Thinking: Hannah Arendt on Film," Paris Review - http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/?p=53407

Why Do I Teach?

“College education is a proliferation of such possibilities: the beauty of mathematical discovery, the thrill of scientific understanding, the fascination of historical narrative, the mystery of theological speculation. We should judge teaching not by the amount of knowledge it passes on, but by the enduring excitement it generates. Knowledge, when it comes, is a later arrival, flaring up, when the time is right, from the sparks good teachers have implanted in their students’ souls.”

Gary Gutting, "Why Do I Teach?" The Stone - http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=144567

Newcastle Herald Op-Ed

“Recent census data in the United Kingdom and Australia indicates that rates of religious observance remain low. However, from marriage equality and reproductive rights to political radicalism and terrorism, religion remains ever visible in political life. So too, a quick pass through the cinema presents us with a popcorn of paranormal activity. The ghosts of religion haunt our secular societies, and this has prompted new research at the University of Newcastle.”

"Opinion: State of Religion in Politics" - http://bit.ly/17W0NaB​

Modal Religion

“In Australia, religious rhetoric in the political sphere seems designed almost specifically not to speak first, or most directly, to the religiously committed, who are likely to be already quite politically engaged and to have fixed their vote fairly firmly to one side of politics or the other.

Instead, its appeal seems aimed mostly at what Mol called the “modal” Australians who identify vaguely with tradition, do not go as far as to declare themselves atheist (like Gillard) or agnostic (like Hawke) but for whom religious categories speak of a nostalgic sense of safety and security.”

Marion Maddox, "God under Gillard: Religion and Politics in Australia," ABC Religion & Ethics - http://bit.ly/10aVOik​

MOOC Justice?

One of the clearest explications of what's at stake in online education today has been made public as an open letter from the San Jose State University's Philosophy Department to Michael Sandel regarding the use of the EdX MOOC on Justice.

“What kind of message are we sending our students if we tell them that they should best learn what justice is by listening to the reflections of the largely white student population from a privileged institution like Harvard?”

"The Document: An Open Letter from San Jose State U.'s Philosophy Department," The Chronicle of Higher Education - http://bit.ly/10aXPqW

Electronic Tatoos

Disposable Academics

“ON THE evening before All Saints’ Day in 1517, Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg. In those days a thesis was simply a position one wanted to argue. Luther, an Augustinian friar, asserted that Christians could not buy their way to heaven. Today a doctoral thesis is both an idea and an account of a period of original research. Writing one is the aim of the hundreds of thousands of students who embark on a doctorate of philosophy (PhD) every year... They might use their research skills to look harder at the lot of the disposable academic. Someone should write a thesis about that.”

"Doctoral Degrees: The Disposable Academic" The Economist -  http://econ.st/10dWA96​

Shady Characters

“Punctuation itself – literally, the act of adding ‘points’ to a text – did not arrive until the third century BC, when Aristophanes of the great Library at Alexandria described a series of middle (·), low (.) and high points (˙) denoting short, medium and long pauses. Over the centuries, this system gave rise to punctuation as we know it: from Aristophanes’ three dots came the colon, the full stop, and many other marks besides. At the same time the paragraphos evolved into the ‘pilcrow,’ a C-shaped mark (¶) placed at the start of each new section in a text. The word space was a late arrival, appearing only when monks in medieval England and Ireland began splitting apart unfamiliar Latin texts to make them easier to read.”

"Maximal meaning in minimal space: the history of punctuation" - http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/?p=279

Humanities STEM

“We’re not as different as they think. Yes, calculus is one of the great achievements of the human mind, but Hamlet is another. The violin is a third. With apologies to C.P. Snow, humanities versus sciences is a false dichotomy. Both the sciences and the humanities require deep creativity and intellectualism, an ability and desire to use reason, and a willingness to change your mind. When they attack the humanities, they are attacking all of us, they just don’t understand enough science to know it.”

"Why STEM Should Care About the Humanities" The Chronicle - ​http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/?p=4037

Plagiarism 101

“I conceded, however, that the effort required to produce such a convincing act of plagiarism would not be substantially less than the effort required to produce an honest research paper.”

"Successful Plagiarism 101" The Chronicle - ​http://bit.ly/10WAMTp