{"id":9294,"date":"2022-01-24T14:34:39","date_gmt":"2022-01-24T20:34:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.twocities.org\/?p=9294"},"modified":"2022-01-24T14:34:39","modified_gmt":"2022-01-24T20:34:39","slug":"a-rudderless-professor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/?p=9294","title":{"rendered":"A RUDDERLESS PROFESSOR"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Not just professors are rudderless morally. All kinds of people who do all manner of jobs are rudderless. Highlighting the moral vacuity of a professor is not meant to say the whole profession is rudderless. Hardly.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Here first is Harvard&#8217;s Louis Menand:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Reading Weinstein and Mont\u00e1s, you might conclude that English professors, having spent their entire lives reading and discussing works of literature, must be the wisest and most humane people on earth. Take my word for it, we are not. We are not better or worse than anyone else. I have read and taught hundreds of books, including most of the books in the Columbia Core. I teach a great-books course now. I like my job, and I think I understand many things that are important to me much better than I did when I was seventeen. But I don\u2019t think I\u2019m a better person.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>And here is Alan Jacobs commenting on Menand&#8217;s essay:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Menand is so transparently impatient with the arguments of\u00a0Mont\u00e1s and Weinstein that he gets similarly confused at several points in his essay. For instance, to Mont\u00e1s\u2019s claim that Nietzsche is \u201cSatan\u2019s most acute theologian,\u201d Menand replied that \u201cNietzsche wanted to free people to embrace life, not to send them to Hell. He didn\u2019t believe in Hell. Or theology\u201d \u2014 or, presumably, Satan. But maybe Mont\u00e1s believes in Satan, which would, surely, be the point.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>The chief point I\u2019m wanting to make here is simply this: There\u2019s something rather peculiar about a scholar who proudly disavows using professional teaching and study for personal moral formation and then says, as though he\u2019s clinching a point, that his professional teaching and study have not contributed to his personal moral formation.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Not just professors are rudderless morally. All kinds of people who do all manner of jobs are rudderless. Highlighting the moral vacuity of a professor is not meant to say the whole profession is rudderless. Hardly. Here first is Harvard&#8217;s Louis Menand: Reading Weinstein and Mont\u00e1s, you might conclude that English professors, having spent their [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[90,84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-character","category-literature"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9294"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9294\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9295,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9294\/revisions\/9295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}