When: Friday, April 15, 2016
12:00-1:30 p.m.
Where: Cohen Hall 402
University of Pennsylvania
Collegium’s Spring 2016 Humanities Forum will focus on a seminal essay of David Brooks, the New York Times Columnist who is Penn’s Baccalaureate Speaker this year and the recipient of an honorary doctorate of humane letters.
In “The Organization Kid” (Atlantic Monthly, April 2001), Brooks argued that Princeton students and their classmates at peer institutions were arriving to college as professional résumé builders – they were hardly interested in learning for its own sake, let alone for their own personal or moral development. The article stimulated a lively debate in its own time: was Brooks’s assessment fair or was it dependent upon a romantic notion of university life that never existed in any age? From that point forward, Brooks continued to write about the nature, purpose, and transformation of American higher education.
Fifteen years later, we will revisit how the Organization Kids have grown up. Some are back in the same place –elite colleges– this time trying to teach, and moreover to publish. The pressure to produce in quantity has never been greater for faculty and grad students. Does professors’ (necessary) participation in this system of retention and promotion have any impact upon the force of their erstwhile admonitions for students to eschew over-professionalization, pursue the liberal arts, take time to read widely and think deeply, etc.? If indeed there is a systemic problem affecting professors as much as students, what might be done to address it?
This is a luncheon lecture — to reserve your place, please register here here! For questions contact Katie Becker at kbec@sas.upenn.edu
Featuring Dr. Anthony Grafton
Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University
Professor Grafton’s special interests lie in the cultural history of Renaissance Europe, the history of books and readers, the history of scholarship and education in the West from Antiquity to the 19th century, and the history of science from Antiquity to the Renaissance. Professor Grafton is the author of ten books and the coauthor, editor, coeditor, or translator of nine others.
He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1989), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (1993), the Balzan Prize for History of Humanities (2002), and the Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award (2003), and is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the British Academy. In 2011 he served as President of the American Historical Association.