Your degree is not a waste of time

By Maureen Mancuso. Grim tales are taking over our story. If there is one virtue that university education values above all else it is critical thinking. Doubt, not the false security of certainty, is what we seek to instill in our students; we value questions over answers, because only in withstanding the most challenging questions can an answer begin to satisfy the truly critical mind. Oh, we are hardly immune to the paralysis of orthodoxy, but the very essence of scholarship is to relentlessly question what is known, how it is known, and whether there is some further insight to be had by a mind open to what it does not yet know. This is why “revolutions” – disruptive events in the political sphere – are so essential, and so frequent, in the academic world. Maybe too frequent, and appearing to outsiders as a ferment of undirected, purposeless chaos. Read more...