Love the Questions: University Education and Enlightenment (2009) by Ian Angus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing upon experiences from his career as a professor in Canada and the United States, Ian Angus evaluates the current state of the university in Love the Questions: University Education and Enlightenment.Rather than a detailed overview, this slim book provides Angus' reflections on a host of significant questions in contemporary higher education.He argues that selfenlightenment and the philosophical heritage of the university must be defended against corporatization and commodification.In his efforts to explain how the university has changed in recent decades, Angus examines the changing social function of the university.In doing so, he addresses links between education and global capitalism, technology and science, growing corporate influence, issues of public and private funding, the commodification of education, and the manner in which knowledge is understood.At the heart of his arguments is a historical interpretation of what the university has traditionally been and what it has become.Comparing the contemporary university with its 1960s counterpart, Angus' book "is an attempt to explain what has changed" (p.10).Attempting to avoid "another lament about the fate of the university," Angus promises "a realistic assessment of the state of the contemporary university and the forces that would undermine it" and he optimistically provides "a sense of what can be saved, reinvented, or discovered of its potential" (pp.10-11).The work has two major themes.The first theme is self-enlightenment, defined as "the struggle for self-knowledge" (p.24), and "the ability to think meaningfully about one's experience that allows a deeper judgment of the current situation" (p.19).Enlightenment includes "all of those attempts that humans make to form their lives through a relationship to thought" (p.134).For Angus, enlightenment is itself historical, "an intervention into the present situation that draws on the resources of the past for inspiration and guidance" (author's emphasis, p. 36).This overall "project of enlightenment" has historically been central to the university's social function (p.19).Enlightenment, like education, is an ongoing process.The second theme is the university's philosophical heritage.The university, Angus argues, is indebted to a philosophical tradition of self-enlightenment dating from ancient Greece.Corporate interests and techno-science are challenging this heritage.Angus defines technoscience as "the integration of technology and science through the model of cybernetics" (p.146), a system in which information is shaped by automation, virtualization, and delocalization.This system breaks knowledge down into little more than bits of information.This organization of information into individual units creates a "network society" that is contrary to the holistic
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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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
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".