Word: logical
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Departments and schools are a necessary administrative device, and in some cases the original logic of disciplines and departments is powerful and worth preserving. But as the recent restructurings of biology and anthropology have suggested, a century-old logic is not necessarily a logic that best promotes research, teaching, and inquiry. For many faculty, our current departments reflect only a part of our intellectual and teaching horizons. Much the same is true for our students, as I learned this year. So if the decks were reshuffled, wholly new departments might emerge: a department of evolutionary studies, say, or perhaps...
Tenure at Harvard requires, above all else, copious publication. The peer-review process in scholarly journals and university presses subjects one’s work to harsh criticism by one’s intellectual rivals and demands punctilious caution in the handling of evidence and logic. The best way to guarantee success is to choose a specialty where mastering the entire literature is feasible and where one has few rivals. Such pursuit of expertise can generate finely tuned knowledge, but it can also generate territorialism and stifle debate. For example, another faculty resident in Leverett House in 1997-98 (when...
...sometimes difficult to discern the intellectual logic, rules, or sectional interests that brought about such decisions by the deans. In fact, deans do not have the statutory right to make such decisions, but they control the appointments procedure to a degree that faculty-members fear to oppose them. In department meetings, professors spend a lot of time guessing about how to satisfy the ego needs, idiosyncrasies, and disciplinary biases of the deans, who distribute the resources that make departments grow or wither. Lacking tenure, the career administrators themselves constantly trade rumors about who needs to be in the favor...
...Gates seems uncomfortable talking about military intellectual stuff like counterinsurgency doctrine. He insists that logic, not doctrine, has driven everything he has done as Secretary of Defense. The highest priority was supporting the troops. "He resourced the important bureaucratic knife fights," said one senior Army officer. "He sided with us on MRAPs [mine-resistant vehicles] and unmanned drones, and increased intelligence, and more helicopters. Those should have been no-brainers, but it had been a real struggle to fund them before Gates." A military intelligence officer who was an Iraq specialist told me he had been pleading for more resources...
Back home, my sadness turned to joy. A quick search of online ticket sellers revealed that a Legends Suite ticket can be had for about $100 on some nights. So by a twist of logic, I had not only soaked the Yankees for $27, I had tripped on a great recession value. The New York Yankees: what a bargain...