Some advice [Lee Bollinger]

[Latimer]

I was at graduation today at Columbia. In his final address to the students as president of the university, Lee Bollinger gave the following advice:

1. Know your bad impulses.
2. Feel our vast ignorance.
3. Work at seeing the complexity of things.
4. Make openness a habit.
5. Ask more questions than give answers.
6. Imagine you are the person you disagree with.
7. See complexity in ordinary life.
8. Be open in relationships.
9. Keep notes.
10. Let age help you out.

As Columbia has become a reliably close-minded and ideologically intolerant university in recent years, adopting lock step all of the fashionable leftist dogmata no matter how irrational and ill-considered, I sense that the speech was intended as much for the faculty and administration as it was the students.

 

[LoveMyPeppermill]

It's also the sort of advice -- good advice -- that has been standard at university commencement ceremonies for at least 50 years and probably more.

 

[NotHardUp1]

President Bollinger sounds quite wise indeed. It isn't really fashionable any longer to quote luminaries and hold them up as exemplars as the Victorians did. He has successfully repackaged the wisdom of the ages into language that the young of today will listen to.

And that is really what all good educators do, as few discover new things, but work afresh to impart what is already known to the wise.

1. But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door. Moses
2. I know one thing -- that I know nothing. Socrates
3. For every problem there is a solution which is simple, clean and wrong. Henry Louis Mencken
4. A mind is like a parachute. It doesn't work if it is not open. Frank Zappa
5. The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. Albert Einstein
6. Grant that I may not ask to be understood, as to understand. St. Francis of Assisi
7. To see a world in a grain of sand. William Blake
8. Honestly, everyone loves more than one person, and people often lie about that. Tristan Taomino
9. A tree's wood is also its memoir. Hope Jahren
10. I am not young enough to know everything. Oscar Wilde

 

[rareboy]

I was at graduation today at Columbia. In his final address to the students as president of the university, Lee Bollinger gave the following advice:

1. Know your bad impulses.
2. Feel our vast ignorance.
3. Work at seeing the complexity of things.
4. Make openness a habit.
5. Ask more questions than give answers.
6. Imagine you are the person you disagree with.
7. See complexity in ordinary life.
8. Be open in relationships.
9. Keep notes.
10. Let age help you out.

As Columbia has become a reliably close-minded and ideologically intolerant university in recent years, adopting lock step all of the fashionable leftist dogmata no matter how irrational and ill-considered, I sense that the speech was intended as much for the faculty and administration as it was the students.

The only thing he didn't add was 'Don't Forget to Wear Sunscreen'.

 

[Latimer]

^
I would add: "Make your bed first thing in the morning. Even if you have servants to do it for you."

 

[NotHardUp1]

You and Jordan Peterson.

 

[pat grimshaw]

^
Don't mention that name. You will be vilified.

https://forums.justusboys.com/threads/jordan-peterson.470941/

 

[rareboy]

What stupid men think smart men sound like.

Went to rZza to be put into a coma so he wouldn't have to be awake for his drug addiction withdrawal.

Emerges with brain damage.

Fortunately everyone but the Proud Boys seems to have realized what a fake he is.

 

[pat grimshaw]

I was at graduation today at Columbia. In his final address to the students as president of the university,

Were you graduating?

 

[NotHardUp1]

How are we to deem the president of Columbia, an ivy league university, as "stupid"?

What does Bollinger have to do with Proud Boys?

If you're referring to the dorm naming, which I had never heard of until your comment made me wonder, the culture wars and the demand for purges is going to be the undoing of a nation if it continues.

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slave owners, but we're not going to be removing their names from thousands of honoraria.

For 200 years and more, U.S. leaders, and the rest of the world, made homosexual acts illegal, imprisonable offenses. There IS no virtue in looking backwards with arrogance of evolved "enlightenment" to condemn all prior generations for shifting mores.

 

[rareboy]

How are we to deem the president of Columbia, an ivy league university, as "stupid"?

What does Bollinger have to do with Proud Boys?

If you're referring to the dorm naming, which I had never heard of until your comment made me wonder, the culture wars and the demand for purges is going to be the undoing of a nation if it continues.

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slave owners, but we're not going to be removing their names from thousands of honoraria.

For 200 years and more, U.S. leaders, and the rest of the world, made homosexual acts illegal, imprisonable offenses. There IS no virtue in looking backwards with arrogance of evolved "enlightenment" to condemn all prior generations for shifting mores.

It was Jordan Peterson and the Proud Boys.

One of their philosopher kings along with Andrew Tate.

 

[Latimer]

Were you graduating?

The son of a favorite cousin.

^
I would add: "Make your bed first thing in the morning. Even if you have servants to do it for you."

I didn't know Jordan Peterson said that. He's right. And it's not simply a matter of personal discipline, it's a matter of personal aesthetics. The world we create for ourselves. The world we choose to live in.

The second sentence of my advice is, of course, an exaggeration. But it comes out of my own experience seeing how lazy some people get when they depend on servants to do all of the work around the house. I'm appalled when I visit a client's house on the housekeeper's day off and none of the beds are made. I've turned down projects when I visit a prospective client's house and don't see proper attention paid to housekeeping.