Discussing both her time at Stanford and her recent book “Drift,” Rachel Maddow told a packed Memorial Auditorium that “my Stanford advice is to…get good at making good arguments…There will be a role in your life for assessing facts well and putting them in a structure that makes sense.”
Although Nayoung Woo ’12 will be graduating this spring with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, her involvement in many activities at Stanford reflects the diversity of her academic interests. She was a student representative on the Study of Undergraduate Education at Stanford (SUES) committee, which included two student representatives and a dozen professors.
Arguing that “the good guys can win,” Michael Walzer, professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, called for fixed and unambiguous rules in war during a presentation at Annenberg Auditorium Thursday night.
Associate Professor of History Priya Satia discussed the British invention of air control as a military surveillance tactic in Iraq during the interwar years. She said British perceptions of the region, which they called “Arabia,” allowed British officials to reconcile their ethical scruples with the violence of the tactic, and she added that these British experiences in Iraq have influenced Americans’ thinking about the region today.
“We’re in the middle of a crisis…that has been going largely unnoticed–a worldwide crisis in education,” said philosopher Martha Nussbaum Thursday evening to a near-capacity audience at Cubberley Auditorium. “There are radical changes in what democratic societies teach young people, and these changes have not been well thought through.”
Relativism, roughly speaking, is the idea that what’s ethically wrong in one place, in one culture or in one era may be ethically right or permissible in another, and that we therefore ought to refrain from criticizing objectionable practices that occur outside our nation, our culture or our time period.
Carol Rosenberg, recent recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for outstanding human rights reporting, spoke Wednesday and relayed some of her struggles covering events in Guantanamo Bay, where she has logged more time than any other reporter.
The national Occupy Wall Street movement is a reactive movement. Stemming from the financial crisis, Occupy has started conversations about economic inequality only after the economic downturn. There is little conversation about what changes need to be made in our society’s culture in order for us to prevent a future crisis — that is why I propose the addition of an Ethics in the Major requirement.