Posts tagged universities

How to do everything you can to avoid being a child of grace: the entitled and the striver fuse in the Adderall-dependent overachiever. Notice the strenuous managing downward of expectations in the last quote of this excerpt—the "enhancement" actually achieved by people who use these pharmaceuticals seems to be slight indeed. For those with genuine deficits these drugs may be of great value, just as cosmetic surgery is a gift to those with real disfigurement. But for others "cosmetic neurology" is likely to be no more permanent than Botox, no more truly transformative, and just as painfully obvious to the rest of us. And like cosmetic surgery, it is all too likely to become our culture's next false god.

re: drugs, grace, universities, work

Andy:

“One of the most impressive features of being a student is how aware you are of a twenty-four-hour work cycle. When you conceive of what you have to do for school, it’s not in terms of nine to five but in terms of what you can physically do in a week while still achieving a variety of goals in a variety of realms—social, romantic, sexual, extracurricular, résumé-building, academic commitments.” Alex was eager to dispel the notion that students who took Adderall were “academic automatons who are using it in order to be first in their class, or in order to be an obvious admit to law school or the first accepted at a consulting firm.” In fact, he said, “it’s often people”—mainly guys—“who are looking in some way to compensate for activities that are detrimental to their performance.” He explained, “At Harvard, at least, most people are to some degree realistic about it. . . . I don’t think people who take Adderall are aiming to be the top person in the class. I think they’re aiming to be among the best. Or maybe not even among the best. At the most basic level, they aim to do better than they would have otherwise.”

This is one of those essays I thought I had already read, since it had been quoted so many times. But actually it had escaped my attention until Santiago Ramos named it one of his favorite essays of 2008. And it is in fact, you might say, all about escaping attention. As with so many semi-jeremiads written by people a decade or so older than me, I find myself more hopeful than Mark Edmundson. (He obliquely refers to the interactive teaching techniques of Eric Mazur at Harvard—my wife's postdoctoral advisor—in a way that largely misses the point of the remote-control-like devices that Mazur uses.) But if what Edmundson says about teaching, learning, and reading applies doubly so to preaching, worship, and prayer, and it does, this is must reading for Christian leaders.

re: communication, education, reading, technology, universities

Andy:

A Romantic, says Nietzsche, is someone who always wants to be elsewhere. If that’s so, then the children of the Internet are Romantics, for they perpetually wish to be someplace else, and the laptop reliably helps take them there — if only in imagination. The e-mailer, the instant messenger, the Web browser are all dispersing their energies and interests outward, away from the present, the here and now. The Internet user is constantly connecting with people and institutions far away, creating surrogate communities that displace the potential community at hand.

Then too, booking by computer has made travel easier and, by eliminating a certain number of middlemen, kept it reasonably cheap. So there’s an inducement to take off physically as well. The Internet is perhaps the most centrifugal technology ever devised. The classroom, where you sit down in one space at one time and ponder a text or an issue in slow motion, is coming to feel ever more antiquated. What’s at a premium now is movement, making connections, getting all the circuitry fizzing and popping.

For students now, life is elsewhere. Classes matter to them, but classes are just part of an ever-enlarging web of activities and diversions. Students now seek to master their work — not to be taken over by it and consumed. They want to dispatch it, do it well and quickly, then get on to the many other things that interest them. For my students live in the future and not the present; they live with their prospects for success and pleasure. They dwell in possibility.

Catherine and I are spending the coming week at Following Christ 08, an amazing conference for graduate and professional students and faculty. The theme this year is "human flourishing," and the conference background paper on that subject is well worth reading. It's one of the many terrific things that InterVarsity Christian Fellowship produces. Some of the most thoughtful and soulful events, books, communities, and people we know have come from InterVarsity. (Including, of course, Culture Making from InterVarsity Press!) We love supporting several IVCF staff and events like Following Christ—partly because our own lives were so shaped by InterVarsity's work in college. We're doing our best to pay it forward.

re: charity, education, ministry, universities

Andy:

Are there universal elements of human flourishing, things that every person needs to flourish? If so, which of these are immediate gifts of God and which can be created, shaped, or nourished by the practice of the academic and professional disciplines?

Why do men and women fail to flourish? To what extent does sin, both personal and systemic, account for this failure?

In the face of such failure, how is the gospel good news and how does it help us flourish ourselves within our vocations and beyond?

Is it really true that to fully flourish one must be a follower of Jesus? How can such an outrageous claim be presented compellingly in our culture?

Must our bodies be doing well for us to flourish? In what ways does our embodiment affect our flourishing?

What does pursuing excellence have to do with human flourishing? Is elitism inherent in excellence, and does it impede human flourishing in a diverse society?

Will the career and personal path I’m on lead to my flourishing and that of others? Are my vocation and occupation in sync? Should I perhaps change paths, and how can I know?

What kinds of suffering stifle human flourishing, and what kinds can contribute to it?

How can we prepare to flourish and help others flourish in the face of an uncertain future and rapid social, cultural, economic, and technological change?