Steve Pinker has a couple of reservations about a new Report of the Committee on General Education at Harvard, especially given the fact that it ‘will attract wide attention in academia and in the press, where it will be read not for its specific recommendations, but as a once-in-a-generation statement on the nature of higher education.’

As such, we should be mindful of the way the report frames the goals of general education, and not just its suggested menu of courses. This means affirming the goal of the university as the institution dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and reason. (There is certainly no shortage of forces in the world pushing toward ignorance and irrationality.)

No, true, no shortage; more … Read the rest

Excellent. Word is out at last. Via Hari Kunzru.

Somehow the idea of culture has got very confused in the UK. Multicultural politics once provided a light in the post-imperial gloom…However, as biological racism has faded away, a form of cultural racism is taking its place, often propagated by left-liberals who consider themelves, um, whiter than white on issues of diversity. Underlying much of the current hot air about “respect” and “offence” we find implicit the idea that as BME’s…we’re somehow more determined by our culture than our flexible white co-Britons…Our more serious conversation has to be with the communitarian politicians who feel happiest when dealing with us in groups. Instead of asking us as individual British citizens what

So I’m not the only one who found Terry Eagleton’s review of Dawkins’s book more than slightly incoherent, especially the ‘God is not a person God is not a celestial super-object or divine UFO but then again God is an artist who did it for the sheer love or hell of it God is the condition of possibility’ stuff. Others have had the same reaction. Good. A C Grayling for instance.

Terry Eagleton charges Richard Dawkins with failing to read theology in formulating his objection to religious belief, and thereby misses the point that when one rejects the premises of a set of views, it is a waste of one’s time to address what is built on those premises…Eagleton’s touching