Students may have seen that I will be teaching a PHIL 4900 Special Topics Seminar this spring (MWF 1:30-2:20). The course will be geared to philosophy majors and will be run as a seminar. Our topic will be Aristotle. I am still sorting out the specific readings, but I expect we will read selections from Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Physics, Ethics, and Politics.
* Modification: I have ordered the Metaphysics, Physics, Nicomachean Ethics, and De Anima (On the Soul). *
As part of a Religious Studies Directed Readings course, students Carson and Mike will be hosting a blog discussion on religion and science. We will be reading and discussing texts on various sides of the debate about the status of teleology after Darwin.
We invite you to come visit our blog and welcome contributions from all who are interested. Mike and Carson will get us started each week by providing weekly synopses and reflections on the readings. The blog is up but no posts yet; I expect Mike and Carson will get things going soon. Visit the blog to see a bit more detail on what we are doing as well as for a reading list for the term. We look forward to an exciting discussion!
‘the pipe’: A Case Study in the Errors of Modernity
I visited my parents earlier this month, and my father gave me a number of his old pipes. He rarely smokes them any longer, so was pleased to pass them down. One pipe stuck out, and not just because of its mustard yellow color. It was a pipe marketed under the name “the pipe”. Click here for an image. My Dad tells me that these were all the rage in the 1970s (something of a climax in the popularity of pipes in America), but remembered few details about it. I brought it home, smoked it a few times, and did some research on it.
The first and most immediate thing I discovered about “the pipe” is that it is not a very good smoking pipe. The smoke ran hot in it and it seemed rather harsh. Perhaps I should not give up on it so quickly, I recall seeing my Dad smoke it quite often when I was a kid so it must not be that bad. I have read that you have to pack “the pipe” much looser than a regular briar pipe, so perhaps my problem is that I packed it too tightly. Anyway, it made me wonder what the story was with this thing?
As best as I can tell it was an ill-fated effort to bring advanced technological materials and engineering to a practice (pipe-making) that is best done through time-proven artisan practices and materials. Most of “the pipe” models were made out of plastics and various composite materials. Its development began with a guy who was working on composite and carbon materials for nuclear power plants. In particular, he was making some kind of plumbing part made of pyrolytic graphite. He noticed that the cups he was molding were about the size and shape of a pipe bowl. So he tried it out, and with some testing found that the liner apparently added a venturi effect that seemed to reduce tars in the smoke. It had other alleged benefits in that it did not need seasoning (letting a “cake” develop in the bowl), it was easy to clean, and it did not require a cooling period so you could smoke the same pipe every day.
“the pipe” sold between the mid 1960s and the late 1970s and for a while sold quite well. Incredibly, somewhere between 2 and 3 million sold overall. My Dad tells me that in the 1970s it was incredibly popular, particularly among new pipe smokers and as gifts that women would buy men. It was marketed quite aggressively, and variations carried the names “the pipe”, “the smoke”, and “Venturi”.
Ads called it “a space-age gift for that man of yours” that came in various “heroic colors” that “clash with gray beards”. It was perfect for the “Emancipated Male” who did not want to be bogged down by the rituals and traditions of pipe smoking. One ad I found boasted that it was made of the same material found on the nose cones of “space missiles.” Look at this ad, which brags that you could clean “the pipe” by simply sticking it in your dishwasher. One ad made sure the message of the new generation chic of “the pipe” was not missed, noting that “any similarity between this by-product of the Space Age and the conventional pipes is purely a matter of shape.” And so it was, then, the promise of technology in the modern age – out with the old and in with the new, science and tech applied to make life better, etc etc.
Alas, almost all serious pipe smokers, guys who were used to briar pipes, agreed it was a lousy smoke. The fad passed. And so, despite the ongoing insistence by enlightenment types who think that the passage of time equals progress and that everything science produces improves the human condition, there are in fact some things that are not made better with newfangled materials and techniques. Tradition matters because it is embedded with wisdom, and this is as true in philosophy and culture as it is in pipe smoking. You might say that “the pipe” was modernism in a nutshell: reduced, scientistic, commodified, industrialized, technological, and hostile to tradition.
Regular readers of this blog will know, then, how I feel about “the pipe” and the chances of my regularly smoking it. Unfortunately for the makers of “the pipe”, a lot of the allure of pipe smoking is the tradition and the ritual. I don’t want to do away with my tamper, with the ritual of the “false light” before you get the pipe really lit, etc. I don’t want my pipe to be a piece of “standing reserve”, ready to be smoked at any time as if new. I want to enfold my humble practices into the great tradition that precedes them. So I think I will stick with the old briar pipe, tried and true as it is.
The Religious Studies program has hired Dr. Christian Haskett as a one-year appointment in Asian Religions. He will teach 6 courses next year. Along with some regularly offexred RELS courses, in the fall he will teach Religion and Children’s Literature. Dr. Barlow sounds very enthused about this course, and spoke very highly of Dr. Haskett’s scholarship and teaching. So I would encourage you to look into it if you have space for another course.
Here is a flyer for the Religion and Childrens Literature course: RELS 4910 flyer.
Course info: 53526/53527 RELS/HIST 4910-001 ST: Religion & Children’s Literature – MWF 10:30-11:20 in AGSC 302.
I just read that my alma mater, Cornell College, is going to basically double the size of their enrollment (from 1,100 to 2,000 students). I meet this news with great disappointment. I don’t know if this post is really a philosophy post or more of me just venting, probably a bit of both. My wife (also an alum) and I talked about it, but I was not done venting. Thanks for indulging me (particularly since students at this school of some 25,000 probably see my complaint about tiny Cornell College getting too big as bizarre).
I understand one of the arguments for the growth. Colleges are fixed-cost businesses. A library costs $X to run and maintain, and costs $X whether you have 1100 or 2000 students. But, obviously, in the latter case that same $X is spread out over many more students and tuition dollars. In lean times, I can understand the attraction of this sort of financial argument.
I am considerably less moved by the other argument coming from the Cornell College administration. The other argument they are making concerns recruiting. Studies apparently show that high school students are less and less interested in going to small colleges. Apparently only 8% of all college-bound students are interested in a college with fewer than 2000 students.
That may be, but I am always unmoved by arguments from what graduating high school seniors want because I am generally against student-led curricular choices and thinking about students as “consumers” who colleges need to satisfy. To my mind, what matters is not what incoming students desire. Rather, what matters is what outgoing students desire. High school seniors generally do not know what is good for them, do not know what it means to get an education, and do not know what environment is best for getting an education. So don’t shape your college’s identity around what high school seniors say they want.
But, one might reply, you have to have sufficient enrollment to impact these students. If you are not giving high school seniors what they want, they won’t apply and Cornell College will cease to exist. But Cornell College is not suffering from a shortage of applicants. While only 8% of students might be interested in a college as small as Cornell, Cornell has 4000 applicants a year for only about 300 spots. That is extremely competitive. Also, I am not sure Cornell should be looking at the entire class of college-bound students as a measure of what they should be. After all, the vast majority of college-bound students are (a) not able to get into Cornell to begin with, (b) not interested in a liberal arts education, and (c) not able to afford Cornell College (currently about $41,000 a year). So Cornell College is going to be targeted by a small demographic of students. It is something like a top 75 national liberal arts college in the country, so it is competing against the Grinnell Colleges, Colorado Colleges, Colbys, Puget Sounds, etc of the world. The student market for those schools still seems sufficient.
To me it is like a fine winery looking at a study that shows that most wine buyers are uninterested in buying a bottle of wine that costs more than $40. That might be true, but so long as there are sufficient numbers willing to buy $100 bottles, you can still make them and sell them. It does not appear that Cornell is suffering from low interest (number of applicants has risen consistently over the last 10 years).
All of that said, I am not privy to the inside financial pressures Cornell College faces. It is difficult in times like these – endowments are down so you cannot maintain the same levels of subsidies for tuition. This can put but downward pressure on the quality of incoming students because you need students capable of paying full or nearly full tuition. Perhaps the financial situation is such that this move is inevitable. Still, I wonder about making identity changing decisions in a time of financial crisis. Assuming the college can survive as it is (and there is no indication that it cannot; Cornell is not one of those schools teetering on bankruptcy), why not wait until the storm passes?
But here is what really bothers me. The first thing that came into my head when I saw the enrollment increase was, ‘The college is going to move toward pre-professional programs and away from the liberal arts identity’. When I went to Cornell College, there was none of that. Pure liberal arts, no business major, engineering, environmental studies, none of that sort of a thing. Everyone got a very broad liberal arts eduction, and you majored in philosophy, English, history, psychology, fine arts, etc.
So I went to the website and was very disappointed to see that they have already headed down that road. They have already added a bunch of pre-professional programs — business, dentistry, nursing, social work, engineering, environmental management, law, etc. How vulgar!
In all seriousness, I am torn on this. On the one hand, these programs can be good if the school maintains a very serious dedication to the liberal arts. After all, we need more liberal arts minded bankers and doctors, etc.
However, these programs seem to invariably travel with a weakening of the liberal arts culture and curriculum (see the general trend of higher ed toward vocational education). Once you add the pre-professional programs, I think the culture of the institution changes. Why? Because the curriculum shapes student attitudes. If you have students already coming in planning on a specific profession and going for that program, the liberal arts attitude among students (even if the core remains the same) will change. Over time, the liberal arts start to look like boxes on a check list, “requirements” that have to be fulfilled instead of the meat and strong beer of real education.
This is not how it was when I went to Cornell. Most of us went not knowing what we wanted to be or do. What we wanted was to become genuinely educated persons. And guess what? I don’t hear a lot of alumni harping about high unemployment rates among Cornell grads because of some lack of job training at school. As best as I can tell, people coming out of Cornell College (and top tier liberal arts colleges generally) tend to do pretty well for themselves. We have bankers and doctors, businessman and policymakers, professors and PR experts. You don’t need to go pre-professional to prepare people for those jobs. So why add them? Because some focus group of high schoolers suggested they want to get a job right out of college and so want vocational training?! GROSS!
USUPhilosophy 
