For Waller, it simply doesn’t matter that these processes are underpinned by a causal chain of firing neurons. In his view, free will and determinism are not the opposites they are often taken to be; they simply describe our behavior at different levels.

We know that changes to brain chemistry can alter behavior—otherwise neither alcohol nor antipsychotics would have their desired effects.

Galton launched a debate that raged throughout the 20th century over nature versus nurture. Are our actions the unfolding effect of our genetics? Or the outcome of what has been imprinted on us by the environment? Impressive evidence accumulated for the importance of each factor. Whether scientists supported one, the other, or a mix of both, they increasingly assumed that our deeds must be determined by something.

Charles Darwin

Immanuel Kant

discern

Our codes of ethics, for example, assume that we can freely choose between right and wrong.

The Atlantic Monthly

linguistically

pragmatic

enthralled

In my 14-year tenure as president I have often been asked to define and defend the notion of a “useful” liberal arts education. The general public has difficulty associating the liberal arts with anything useful. That obstacle prompts them to dismiss liberal arts colleges as repositories of graduates with majors such as philosophy, history, anthropology and American studies who cannot get jobs. The thought that these same colleges also have majors such as biology, chemistry, physics and economics is totally missed

repositories

tenure

it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.”

But if anything can be treated as a plug-in, it’s learning how to code.

module

transient

subsequent

permutations

Fresh out of college in 1993, I signed on with a large technology consultancy. The firm’s idea was that by hiring a certain lunatic fringe of humanities majors, it might cut down on engineering groupthink. After a six-week programming boot camp, we were pitched headfirst into the deep end of software development. My first project could hardly have been worse. We (mostly engineers, with a spritzing of humanities majors) were attached to an enormous cellular carrier. Our assignment was to rewrite its rating and billing system — a thing that rivaled maritime law in its complexity. I was assigned to a team charged with one of the hairier programs in the system, which concerned the movement of individual mobile subscribers from one “parent” account plan to another. Each one of these moves caused an avalanche of plan activations and terminations, carry-overs or forfeitures of accumulated talk minutes, and umpteen other causal conditionals that would affect the subscriber’s bill. This program, thousands of lines of code long and growing by the hour, was passed around our team like an exquisite corpse. The subscribers and their parent accounts were rendered on our screens as a series of S’s and A’s. After we stared at these figures for weeks, they began to infect our dreams. (One I still remember. I was a baby in a vast crib. Just overhead, turning slowly and radiating malice, was an enormous iron mobile whose arms strained under the weight of certain capital letters.) Our first big break came from a music major. A pianist, I think, who joined our team several months into the project. Within a matter of weeks, she had hit upon a method to make the S’s hold on to the correct attributes even when their parent A was changed.

The technologist’s argument begins with a suspicion that the liberal arts are of dubious academic rigor, suited mostly to dreamers. From there it proceeds to a reminder: Software powers the world, ergo, the only rational education is one built on STEM. Finally, lest he be accused of making a pyre of the canon, the technologist grants that yes, after students have finished their engineering degrees and found jobs, they should pick up a book — history, poetry, whatever.

it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.”

As a practice, software development is far more creative than algorithmic.

dubious

The humanities are kaput.

Software powers the world

At least, so goes the argument in a rising number of states, which have embraced a funding model for higher education that uses tuition “bonuses” to favor hard-skilled degrees like computer science over the humanities

In a software-run world, what’s wanted are more engineers.

suspicion

Passion and meaning may enter into the mix of our chats with the understanding that they sharpen your focus and make you more successful.

parcel

that taking the best care you can of your family is really a form of self-service.

It might be argued that his idea of self-fulfillment was taking care of his family,

It also ignores the idea that work itself possesses an inherent value, and most importantly, severs the traditional connection between work, talent and duty.

I offer this advice: Passion is not something you follow. It’s something that will follow you as you put in the hard work to become valuable to the world.

Building valuable skills is hard and takes time

deliberation

To a small group of people, this advice makes sense, because they have a clear passion. Maybe they’ve always wanted to be doctors, writers, musicians and so on, and can’t imagine being anything else.

A decade ago, two of the co-authors of the Flagship State study, Gregory M. Walton and Geoffrey L. Cohen, social psychologists at Stanford, began tracking the progress of black students at an elite private university. As freshmen, they had participated in a similar exercise. By the time they graduated, their grades were a third of a grade-point average point higher than their peers in the control group (the difference between B+ and A-), and they had halved the black-white achievement gap. They also reported being healthier and happier.

All students had “an initial doubt about whether they would fit in,” the researchers point out. What changed in the experiment was that, as freshmen, the participants were more likely to be drawn into campus life, seek out academic help and live on campus

“the view of intelligence that you adopt for yourself shapes your educational experience.”

In a large-scale experiment at an unnamed school I’ll call Flagship State, incoming freshmen read upperclassmen’s accounts of how they navigated the shoals of university life. The accounts explained that, while the upperclassmen initially felt snubbed by their classmates and intimidated by their professors, their lives started turning around when they reached out to their instructors and began to make friends.

The good news is that this dismal script can be rewritten. Several recent research projects show that, with the right nudge, students can acquire ways of thinking that helps them thrive.

They don’t necessarily believe that anyone can become an Einstein or a Mozart, but they do understand that even Einstein and Mozart had to put in years of effort to become who they were.

Other students believe that their intellectual ability is something they can develop through effort and education

intricately

students’ inherent intelligence is the major cause of their achievement in school

Southern Connecticut State University provides exemplary graduate and undergraduate education in the liberal arts and professional disciplines.