joe ferrare's blog

Interesting Op-ED at the NY Times today about how universities ought to change to meet new challenges.  I don’t think most people realize the modern system dates back as far as it does, and that it was apparently adopted from Germany. The Germans have an even more rigid system where your future academic life — and in some ways your ability to educate yourself into a better life — are set early on — 3rd or 5th grade. Can’t recall which.

The author beats on the tenure system pretty well, and I must say that, while I’d like to protect academic freedom as much as the next guy, that system is probably a little too protective of professors.

The thing I really got from it was what the author said about specialization.  They make kind of a big deal about this in The Great Conversation, one of the cornerstone books of the program I’m in at Harrison Middleton.  I never really thought about it much, except that I was personally lucky to be able to do what I wanted at the undergraduate level and then wrap it all into a BA in liberal arts.  I had to do some interdisciplinary work, of course, but that was the good part for me (except for the math parts, of course), as my goal was to become a better writer.  So I wanted a wide range of things.  At the graduate level I was narrowed down quite a bit, of course, but still, the writing classes let me investigate some other things.  That, combined with my electives and the ability to range from hifalutin theory to green-eyeshade journalism made it a good program.

So I think more people could benefit from things like the Great Books, that expose you not only to a wide range of things, but to famousely smart people who were themselves extremely well-versed in a wide range of things.

I’m reading a book called Write for College for school.  Kind of funny, considering my background (journalist, editor, public affairs guy, master’s in journalism), but not hard to stay with.  Writing is one of those subjects I can keep reading about and reading about. There is always, I’m sure you’ll agree as you read this, room for improvement.

This is, I think, functionally my last assignment for this course.  There’s actually one left, but that’s just designing my program.  I’m turning in what I assume will be a draft with this assignment, so the last assignment will (barring a complete failure on my part) just fine-tuning my proposal.

My proposal is still too big, and that’s holding me back from finishing.  After the initial course you have to do two 24-hour blocks and an final project.  I filled the first 24 hours with just the language part of what I want to do, and that’s not right.  I need to fit some more in there if I want to look into a couple more Great Ideas and also hit a few literary highlights — Shakespeare, Montaigne, and so on.  Have to dig in deeper and narrow things down.

I’ve narrowed my focus a bit — 35 of the 102 great ideas.  That seems ambitious, so I’ve appealed for help to my school mentor.  It looks like I’ll need to look at three areas to think about leadership and communication: government of man and all it entails (law, democracy, duty, etc.), the language of men (rhetoric, definition, sign and symbol, etc.) and prinicles (will, wisdom, opinion, etc.).  Seems daunting, but I guess that’s the idea.