Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  Recently, the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania all testified to a committee of the House of Representatives on anti-semitism on college campuses. I will leave MIT out of the following and will comment on an important difference between the other two universities.   The difference: Harvard has people who are very good at portfolio management.  U.Penn does not have their equal.  Heck, books have been written about Harvard's endowment strategy.  Without going into the details of those books, they seek to explain how Harvard continues to make a solid stream of income from the money it received from donors decades ago.   Now, one might think that this would allow them to drop what students and their families have to pay in tuition. (HAHAHA you silly person.) No  ... what this does is allow Harvard's directors some freedom from the shifting whims of the donor class. They can respond to indignant alums when the latest...

Robert Caro, the famous biographer (of Robert Moses, and more recently, continuingly, of Lyndon Johnson) recently published a memory of his own, about his early days in journalism, fresh out of college. I'll paraphrase his article, with some direct quotes along the way. Caro went to work for Newsday on Long Island, in 1959. The managing editor was Alan Hathway, an old-school fellow who didn't like the Ivy League. Caro, a Princetonian, had been hired despite Hathway not by him. At that time, Newsday didn't have any Sunday issue. Which meant there was almost nobody in the office on Saturday, since such offices are always working on the next day's paper. What if something important happened on a Saturday? The low man on the office hierarchy would be there, would take the call and put the information in a memo, those higher up on the totem pole could act on it Sunday. Aa the '50s ended and the '60s revved up, the future of Mitchel Field (an air force bas...

William James delivered his now-notorious essay on "The Will to Believe" first as a guest lecturer, a guest of the combined "Philosophical Clubs" of Yale and Brown University in 1896. That's important to remember because it gives one a sense of who is the "we" is when James talks about what "we" believe. Ivy League students almost all (possibly all) white men from well-off families. I will contend in what follows that there was an esoteric message in this essay, a message that was likely very clear to many if not most of those in the hall, but the salience of which faded with the passage of time. The pertinence of a key contemporary reference came to seem quaint. So the esoteric meaning has become utterly inaccessible until recovered by -- well, by me. Just now. In the passage below, James is making the point that we take a wide range of our beliefs on authority - we believe a lot on no evidence or personal consideration of our own. T...