Review of "Love the questions: University education and enlightenment"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This "little book", as Angus modestly describes it, is tome-like in its elucidation of the forces that have altered the university from its traditional ideals into a contemporary corporate ethos.Angus champions enlightenment as a worthy and viable enterprise to protect as the raison d'être of the university.Inspired by the poet Rilke's statement to "love the questions themselves" (p.29, italics in original), Angus declares self-knowledge and self-expression to be the enlightenment ideal.He is careful not to romance the concept, and instead seeks to redefine enlightenment and demonstrate its rootedness despite the trending toward "practical" and "material" endeavors that mark the contemporary university.The commitment to questioning self and world gives a university coherencethat necessary "unity of knowledge" (p.61).Ultimately, enlightenment is a disposition and process of critique rather than a product, much like education is something one lives rather than has, as Angus explains.It is these careful dissections of definitions and concepts that give Love the Questions explanatory power and argumentative force.Angus outlines his agenda in the preface and defines the problem in the first three chapters.The purpose of his book is to explain how university has changed and why, and to champion enlightenment as the epitome of education.His writing is personable, if not vulnerable, for he shares his experience of teaching university seminars and admits to being "horrified" (p.30) at students' nonchalance with ideas.This admission is a narrative hook: readers are drawn into the notion that university and what goes on there is not (or should not be) an abstract or inert idea or venture.It has affect.Angus' willingness to share his disillusionment may be a position with which others in the academic community may resonate.That professors such as Angus care about students' experiences is something about which those outside the academy should know.Despite the shift in students' posturing toward ideas, and the corporatized environment in which they seek their credentials, Angus constructs a positive argument and not a "narrative of decline" (p.101).What makes Love the Questions different from some books about the changing
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".