Word: formful
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Situated in Louvain-La-Neuve, a new town some 20 miles (32 km) southeast of Brussels, the Hergé Museum is a stunning piece of architecture. Designed by Pritzker Prize winner Christian de Portzamparc, its sleek concrete, steel and glass form makes it look like a stranded ocean liner, an image that deliberately echoes Tintin's many maritime exploits. Built at a cost of $20 million, and financed by Hergé's second wife Fanny, the museum reflects Hergé's huge corpus of work, much of which has, until now, been languishing largely unseen in studios and bank vaults...
...evolutionary studies, say, or perhaps a department of cognition and neurobiology which would unite professors from the sciences with those involved in the arts and humanities. The possibilities are endless. The idea of reshuffling the decks has considerable appeal. But here’s the conundrum: the act of forming new institutions does not, ipso facto, solve the problem of institutional exhaustion. So rather than form new departments that would just calcify in their turn, we want a device that would allow us to fold in the hands every few years and reshuffle the decks. In point of fact...
...think about the faculty of this university as an enormous stack of cards, a thousand in FAS alone. The cards are currently sorted into decks of varying sizes. Departments like English and Economics form some decks. Others correspond to the professional schools, such as HLS and HMS. Reshuffle these decks, and allow the faculty to form new groupings based on what they currently regard as their strongest and most exciting affinities. What is the likelihood that they will sort themselves into the original departments and schools...
...answer this, we need some history. Today’s departments didn’t always exist in their current form. Most of them coalesced late in the nineteenth century, as many U.S. universities shed their religious underpinnings and picked up the German style of higher education. Departments, in turn, were linked to the emergence of modern disciplines. It’s easy to track the founding of disciplines. Just check the date of the major academic journals: the Political Science Quarterly (founded 1886), American Anthropologist (1888), The American Historical Review (1895), and so on. Departments were invented to house...
...express the constructive urge that makes humanity special. Harvard, after all, is a trade school for the craft of thinking, and its students are no more than a privileged class of apprentices who mimic the techniques, manners, and values of their masters. Filling out a Selective Service registration form, the great essayist and country farmer E. B. White wrestled over what to enter for his primary job. “Physically I am better fitted for writing than for farming,” White wrote of the situation, “because farming takes great strength and endurance. Intellectually...