Word: minding
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Although the complaints are useful in shaming University Hall out of its more draconian antics, there are more important times when the idea of Harvard as Harvard surfaces in the mind. It’s during solitary moments when, despite the desire for humility and the claims of disillusionment, the mythology of this place overtakes one. For me, it happened one day when I was walking through the snow-covered yard and I realized that, sometime in the past three hundred years, someone whose name I learned in elementary school probably walked roughly the same path—and probably...
...encouraged me to think of banjo as an avocation rather than a vocation.” After earning her MBA, Brown embarked on a two-year stint with the investment bank Smith Barney in the public finance division of their San Francisco office. But she could not keep her mind away from music and the banjo. Eventually, Brown said, she gathered up the nerve to ask for six months of leave.“When I [told my parents] I was quitting my I-banking job, there was a pregnant pause at the other end of the line...
Such distinctions, however, are precisely those which ought to be made. A proper liberal-arts education, the kind which Harvard still prides itself on offering, should cultivate in its students an appreciation for and dedication to the life of the mind. Traditionally understood, this implies not a ravenous appetite for promiscuous knowledge regarding all sorts of curiosities and trivialities, but rather the pursuit of truth and the contemplation of beauty. The liberal arts were those studies befitting the liber, a free man—one free not only from physical enslavement but also the more debilitating and servile subjection...
...been trained to do. Kids these days, up on their Pynchon and following “The Wire,” think of the world as studded with allusions, teeming with hidden meanings. We lap up explanations and cure-alls; we accept the experts’ forecasts (never mind that they got us here); we tape on our rose-tinted glasses, cross our fingers, squeeze our eyes shut, and hope with all our hearts for change—the kind we can really believe in. That’s faith, real faith, and it’s being practiced...
...believe it fitting to start at another time—1969—a time as unknown to us graduates as the uncharted waters beyond our Commencement. That year, change was in the air, Nixon was in the White House, and Vietnam was on everyone’s mind...