A month and a half ago, I took a plane to Reno, a bus out into the desert, and spent a week at Burning Man. This is an attempt to order some of my thoughts about that week.

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Surviving (even in relative comfort) wasn't as hard my pre-trip reading billed it as. Of course, it helped that I was camping with engineers who could reliably make a plan, ask themselves what would cause it to go wrong, fix that, repeat -- and then problem-solve when something unanticipated broke. Basic competence, responsibility, and leadership -- together with a well-adhered-to norm of "make sure you have everything you personally need, even things the camp has plans to provide" ('radical self-reliance' is the usual term) -- left us with a lot of slack.

From there, it was mostly just a matter of drinking enough water / electrolytes, noticing when I needed to eat, remembering sunscreen and moisturizer and lip balm, wiping my hands and face and feet for dust, and using earplugs, a face mask, and melatonin to get enough sleep. Easy.

(And I hadn't even been camping since I was a kid.)

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And, together, we built some awesome things:

...which took, at one point, a lift team of ~forty volunteers to lift the top section of the sphere onto the base:

And now, for a philosophical digression. (Shocked! Shocked to find that philosophical digressions are happening here!)

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Zvi Mowshowitz argues that the modern world is out to get you and eat your entire life and that we should literally bring back the Sabbath:

We need restrictions that free us from the world. We need a new four freedoms

Here are some Harvard Crimson headlines from this week:

• [Sean] Spicer, [Chelsea] Manning to Join [Institute of Politics] as Visiting Fellows
• CIA Director Cancels IOP Appearance After Manning Appointment
• After Backlash, Kennedy School Withdraws Manning's Fellowship

So here we go...

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One of the more annoying things about this affair has been the way the discussion has chased a dramatized, misleading version of the facts. To borrow a phrase, the commentators (in my social bubble) seem content with -- if not actively interested in -- framing the matter to produce heat, instead of light.

The easiest antidote for this is actually to read Dean Elmendorf's statement announcing and explaining the withdrawal of the IOP's Visiting Fellow appointment. I say this not because I agree with the decision or Elmendorf's justification, but because it at least explains what the decision was:

Some visitors to the Kennedy School are invited for just a few hours to give a talk in the School’s Forum or in one of our lecture halls or seminar rooms; other visitors stay for a full day, a few days, a semester, or longer. Among the visitors who stay more than a few hours, some are designated as “Visiting Fellows,” “Resident Fellows,” “Nonresident Fellows,” and the like. At any point in time, the Kennedy School has hundreds of Fellows playing many different roles at the School. In general across the School, we do not view the title of “Fellow” as conveying a special honor; rather, it is a way to describe some people who spend more than a few hours at the School.

We invited Chelsea Manning to spend a day at the Kennedy School. Specifically, we invited

Two things.

First, these selected quotations from the voir dire of Martin Shkreli's trial for securities fraud are widely understood to be hilarious:

The Court: The purpose of jury selection is to ensure fairness and impartiality in this case. If you think that you could not be fair and impartial, it is your duty to tell me. All right. Juror Number 1.

Juror no. 1: I’m aware of the defendant and I hate him.

[Defense attorney] Benjamin Brafman: I’m sorry.

Juror no. 1: I think he’s a greedy little man.

...

The Court: Juror Number 1 is excused. Juror Number 18.

Juror no. 18: Both of my parents are on prescriptions that have gone up over the past few months, so much that they can’t afford their drugs. I have several friends who have H.I.V. or AIDS who, again, can’t afford the prescription drugs that they were able to afford.

The Court: These charges don’t concern drug pricing. Could you decide this case based only on the evidence —

Juror no. 18: No. No.

The Court: — presented at this trial and put aside anything you might have heard in the media?

Juror no. 18: No. No.

The Court: Sir, we are going to excuse you from this panel. Juror Number 25, come forward, please.

Juror no. 25: This is the price-gouging, right, of drugs?

The Court: This case has nothing to do with drugs.

Juror no. 25: My kids use those drugs.

The Court: As I said, the case does not concern anything that you might have read or heard about the pricing of certain pharmaceuticals.

Juror no. 25: It affects my opinion of

Still, this report shows that Harvard could learn a lot from MIT about how to run a university.

—Harry Lewis, "The Report Harvard Should Have Asked For", 2013

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Around the time I came to Harvard, both Mass Ave schools were dealing with the fallout of embarrassing, messy institutional mistakes. Both started with relatively small incidents, compounded by administrative decisions that were incredibly contentious during and after the fact.

Harvard's began with the Gov 1310 cheating scandal -- and it escalated when scandal erupted over the administration's search of faculty emails to find which sub-dean had spoken to the press, raising both privacy concerns and unease about the relationship between the faculty and the administration.

MIT's began with the arrest of Aaron Swartz for downloading academic articles from JSTOR -- and escalated over the Institute's complicity with the US Attorney's Office, which many members of the community felt betrayed the school's values.

That fall and spring, I was a freshman overburdened with courses that I could just barely keep up with. I was just barely finding my way around Harvard (and had not yet begun this blog!). But I wanted to understand the community I had joined, so I read commentary on what seemed to be the pressing issues, by people that I had come to respect. Some drew parallels between the questions of identity that faced each school. And I began to piece together a theory -- or at least an understanding -- about the soul of the modern university, at least as it was understood along Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, Mass.

Now, I'm a degree-holder on the University's donor rolls, flung some two-hundred miles from Cambridge.

A course I used to teach -- cs50 -- has seen some on-campus news (and editorial) coverage recently in the wake of a leak that 60 students in the course were reported to the Administrative Board on suspicions of academic dishonesty. I don't have any relationship with the course since 2016 and I don't have any particularly relevant inside information as a former Teaching Fellow. As a relatively junior member of the course staff, I wasn't asked to work on any cases of academic dishonesty; the revelations that I could give have already been shared with the press.

But there's one thing that's come up in the ensuing commentary that I would like to put a finer point on.

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The Crimson's Editorial Board has called for the course to lay out a more explicit collaboration policy:

The course has an open-ended and amorphous honor policy, under the banner of being "reasonable." We understand that the collaborative nature of computer science requires students to work together, and may thus make promulgating strict rules about plagiarism more difficult...

Though the course staff have undoubtedly given this matter some thought, we urge them to more explicitly delineate what is allowed and what is unacceptable. That many of the accused students allege that they were unaware of having done anything wrong may suggest

Alasdair MacIntyre, The 1984 Lindley Lecture at the University of Kansas. excerpted to 1787 words.

One of the central tasks of the moral philosopher is to articulate the convictions of the society in which he or she lives so that these convictions may become available for rational scrutiny. This task is all the more urgent when a variety of conflicting and incompatible beliefs are held within one and the same community, either by rival groups who differ on key moral questions or by one and the same set of individuals who find within themselves competing moral allegiances. In either of these types of case the first task of the moral philosopher is to render explicit what is at issue in the various disagreements and it is a task of this kind that I have set myself in this lecture.

For it is quite clear that there are large disagreements about patriotism in our society. And although it would be a mistake to suppose that there are only two clear, simple and mutually opposed sets of beliefs about patriotism, it is at least plausible to suggest that the range of conflicting views can be placed on a spectrum with two poles. At one end is the view, taken for granted by almost everyone in the nineteenth century, a commonplace in the literary culture of the McGuffey readers, that 'patriotism' names a virtue. At the other end is the contrasting view, expressed with sometimes shocking clarity in the nineteen sixties, that 'patriotism' names a vice. It would be misleading for me to suggest that I am going to be able to offer good reasons for taking one of these views rather than

Today's the first time that many of Harvard's graduands will hear the little-known final verse of "Fair Harvard". So it seems as good a time as any to muse on the administration's decision to change that verse's final lyric.

It would be pretty natural to be outraged at the prospect, but after trying to start that blog post and failing for a while, I realized that I'm actually in favor of the change.

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"Fair Harvard", as far as almae matres go, is actually quite good. Here are a few others for comparison:

Notre Dame, our Mother
tender, strong, and true,
proudly in the heavens,
gleams thy gold and blue.
Glory’s mantle cloaks thee;
golden is thy fame
and our hearts forever
praise thee Notre Dame.

MSU, we love thy shadows
When twilight silence falls,
glushing deep and softly paling
o’er ivy covered halls;
beneath the pines we'll gather
to give our faith so true,
sing our love for Alma Mater
and thy praises, MSU.
When from these scenes we wander

and twilight shadows fade,

our mem’ry still will linger

where light and shadows played;

in the evening oft we’ll gather

and pledge our faith anew,

sing our love for Alma Mater

and thy praise, MSU.

Where the rolling foothills rise

up t’wards mountains higher,

where at eve the Coast Range lies,

in the sunset fire,

flushing deep and paling;

here we raise our voices hailing

thee, our Alma Mater.

Tender vistas ever new

thru’the arches meet the eyes,

where the red roofs rim the blue

of the sun-steeped skies,