Did you ever wonder why the computer keyboard has the design it does? It is called QWERTY, named after the first six letters located under the numbers, where you might expect to see ABCDEF.
The reason for this oddity is that the keyboard was designed in the 1870s for primitive mechanical typewriters. Some typebars (bars with letters on the end) kept hitting one another, stopping the flow of writing. By separating the most-used letters, the QWERTY layout reduced clashes of this kind (and in the process probably slowed down the typist).
But why do we have the same keyboard today, long after typebars no longer run into one another—in fact, typebars having long ago disappeared? That is the subject of a debate that reflects different views of how markets operate. Continue reading “Battle of the Keys: Why Do We Have QWERTY?”
Not long ago I identified intellectual “silos” in the fields of climate science and economics. The term refers to scholars within an academic discipline who do not communicate with one another. When one segment of a discipline doesn’t even read the prominent works of another, the discipline suffers.
What about history? In this post I will argue that history does have silos but what is troubling is not silos, but schism, that is, a “split or division between strongly opposed sections or parties, caused by differences in opinion or belief.”
First, silos. If you are studying the impact of the Anglican Church on England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 you may not have much in common with the professor researching the twelfth-century Anasazi in the American Southwest. Your intellectual coterie is likely to be composed of other professionals in your field (e.g., British history in one case, pre-Columbian American history in the other). Continue reading “Silos and Schism in the History Department”
Some years ago, in preparation for a conference, I read Harvard College’s 1650 charter. I learned that the school’s goal was “the education of the English and Indian youth of this country in knowledge and godliness.”
So Harvard was chartered to serve Indian as well as English youth? That surprised me. My knowledge of Massachusetts Indians had stopped in elementary school, with Squanto aiding the Pilgrims.[1] So I wondered, what was the relationship between Massachusetts settlers and Native Americans?
I am learning the answer, as I audit a course on U.S. agricultural history.[2] Agriculture is an important part of the story of that relationship, which fell apart in a disastrous war in 1675. “No problem vexed relations between settlers and Indians more frequently in the years before the war than the control of livestock,” wrote Virginia DeJohn Anderson in a pioneering article on the causes of the conflict known as King Philip’s War.[3] Continue reading “A Clash of (Agri)cultures”
I recently glimpsed a TV exchange between Fox News host Mark Levin and Shelby Steele, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. As I walked by, Levin was asking Steele to explain why critical race theory has been embraced on college campuses and in K-12 classes. Steele said that the cause goes back to the 1960s, when “social morality” was added to American culture.
I didn’t quite get it, but I was intrigued—I had been around in the 1960s and a civil rights worker to boot—so I bought Steele’s 2006 book White Guilt. [1]
Last fall I discussed a debate over colonialism. Bruce Gilley, a political scientist at Portland State University wrote an article titled “The Case For Colonialism.” The reaction was so negative that the article was retracted and the publisher of Gilley’s forthcoming book decided not to publish it. [1]
The response was painfully unfair. Yet in spite of the retraction (the article was re-published in Academic Questions ) his argument sparked debate. The adversarial positions were made clear.
All too often in academia, however, one intellectual viewpoint simply ignores another.
In 1994, Joseph Stiglitz wrote the book Whither Socialism? [2] At the time, Stiglitz chaired President Clinton‘s Council of Economic Advisors; in 2001 he received the Nobel Prize. In other words, he was (and is) a leading economist. Continue reading “Intellectual Silos in Academia”
