"Let's be Friends"

When family squabbles or business disagreements erupted, I half jokingly would say, "Let's be friends". Part of this declaration resulted from an innate dislike of conflict and part of this exhortation came from the practical progress from consensus. Today, I am delighted that Barack Obama will be inaugurated as President of the United States. He is a uniter and pragmatist, who in an unsophisticated moment, might say, "Let's be friends".

On this inauguration day, David Brooks' column -http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/opinion/20brooks.html - states these principles more eloquently. I greatly dislike the George W. Bush administration's requirement of loyalty - "You're with 'em or agin 'em". I think that honest, thoughtful debate from many perspectives is the only way to approach a fair and realistic solution to complex problems.

In contrast, the "Think Again" column by Stanley Fish, entitled "The Last Professor" - http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/the-last-professor/?em - paints a stark choice between utilitarian and non-utilitarian higher education. As an engineer and businessman, I should naturally come down on the side of practical education to the exclusion of liberal arts, but I do not. Having attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as an undergraduate and Princeton University as a graduate student, I saw the extreme differences in these academic philosophies. With another engineer as a roomate, and another engineer as my baseball teammate, learned engineering efficiently at RPI. At Princeton, my roomate was a linguistics major and my table mates at dinner in the Graduate College studied philosophy, physics, and medieval history. During my life and career, the combination of insights from the arts and humanities were at least as impactful as those from engineering. So, I disagree with the premise of "The Last Professor". I believe that there should be a "grand debate" about higher education and the that a rich and chaotic mix of the practical and the humane forms of intellectual pursuit should continue for another 800 years. And to the proponents of these distinctly different types of higher education, "Let's be friends".