By: Matt Wood

Matt Wood — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 05:17:17 +0000

Ben-
I’m not sure I understand your point about “explaining the threshold of influence”, but I don’t think these role model effects only work to maintain equilibrium. Perhaps the most potent form of contact between the academic and non-academic communities takes the form of professor-student relationships. I can only speak for myself, but the quality of my reasoning (whatever it may be) is surely, to some significant degree, a function of my contact with professors as a student. (A slightly more remote “contact” occurs when reading their written works or listening to recorded lectures.) Assuming for a moment that the degree of refinement in a university student’s reasoning abilities, per unit time of enrollment, is constant across time, academic role model effects should increase a society’s aggregate reasoning abilities as the percentage of college-educated citizens within that society rises. Furthermore, as a society’s storehouse of “great works” increases across time - with perhaps some sort of selection pressures operating to filter out all but the “best” (ie, best reasoned) works from classroom presentation (and even popular consumption) - the degree of refinement per student per unit time should itself rise across time. Of course, this entire theoretical contraption I’ve just erected may ultimately rely on the stability and primacy of community norms valuing “good reasoning” - and perhaps, as a functionally prior matter, some (at least intuitive) sense of what constitutes “good reasoning”. But perhaps we should expect this result, at least insofar as, as you suggest, “good reasoning” leads to better results. [And of course, a productive economy - capable of sustaining highly specialized academic communities and their material infrastructure, as well as generating practical questions for them to solve (perhaps in order to justify their existence) - also underwrites the model.]

Comments on: Free Speech and the Campus Left

By: Matt Wood