Only related to that fact that I'm in a large university for the first time in a long while, I'm overcome lately at how clear the synergistic effects of pooling human ingenuity can be. I think I'm lucky to be at the LBJ school in particular (I've been in equally demanding, but much more competitive academic settings in the past, and I would never have been inspired to write a post like this about them). The cooperative learning environment is what I believe will make the most significant social contribution. Possibly the more competitive law and business schools will bring greater achievement of a certain kind to the individual students, but I wonder at how much new ground is covered when "networking" there has different connotations from what I describe below.
This feels obvious, and will be obvious to anyone already at the university. But just think! Individuals who have amassed a great deal of knowledge, in some cases a lifetime's worth, every day stand for 3 hours and try to pour this knowledge into as many ears as can sign up for courses. But not only that, a TA or even student, for instance, can make their own connections between wildly disparate classes they are taking, and the idea can spontaneously emerge, not necessarily because the student is intellectually superior, but because they are exposed to a rare combination of ideas. I think pinpointing that the student does not necessarily have to be a genius to have a significant idea or contribution really shows the way in which they are a node in a system, that their community is as much responsible for the burgeoning idea as the individual herself (or himself).
I know we talked about this in the first two classes, and I think in some ways the focus on pragmatism and land-grant universities, as well as my natural distaste for elitist ideas, made this concept not as obvious to me. But, as Professor Rhodes said, "how do we be elite without being elitist?" We clearly have to recognize that a university is a great resource, but by no means the only one. We also need to make sure that these brilliant, spontaneously-generated ideas make it outside of the university setting, where they can actually be of use.
Incidentally, from Wikipedia:
The word university is derived from the Latin universitas magistrorum et scholarium, roughly meaning "community of teachers and scholars".
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This is a timely post. It's a pathway to 'connect' a last big-picture issue - moraity (beliefs) and ethics (values) - related to development.
Why do we think (believe) the way we do - our moral grounding?
Why do we do (ethics) what we do?
The case examples I've presented have inequality and poverty imprinted on them. A particular set of beliefs inform how I think about inequality and poverty. I can find and use theory that helps me refine my thinking about and behavior toward poverty, an 'unacceptable' kind of inequality.
For example, strong or radical democracy is a particular belief about controlling resources/assets (i.e., how the world should work, but does not). How would a truly egalitarian society look and work? What would we see if we used that standard to analyze particular local, national, or global cases? Where would the theory (model) guide me, in making structural changes in the system?
We'll discuss a couple of possibilities this afternoon.
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