Looking forward to interviewing on “The Clinton School Presents” radio show on Little Rock’s NPR affiliate, KUAR, 89.1 radio.
| Date: | October 19, 2015 |
|---|---|
| Time: | 1:30-2:00 p.m. |
| Appearance: | Interview on The Clinton School Presents |
| Outlet: | NPR Affiliate in Little Rock, AR |
| Location: | Little Rock, Arkansas |
| Format: | Radio |
If you're in town, come to the book signing earlier that day at the Clinton School for Public Service, from 12-1. If you're interested in having me speak with your group, visit my Speaking page.
At so many colleges and universities, administrators can be checked out and out of touch, or be disaffected pencil pushers. Faculty and their administrators rarely get along well. I am with folks who want to challenge leadership when it’s wrong. At the same time, it’s important to give credit where it is due. On top of that, when there is great leadership, we should recognize it and point it out, especially if we want more of it.
Some fantastic universities can be really poorly run. I recall hearing recently about some foolishness from Emory University’s President. He encouraged compromise in the public sphere with reference to the 3/5ths compromise as his guiding example. It was one of the awful elements of our Constitution. Fortunately, Emory will soon have a new President, who will, I hope, be a bit more thoughtful and wise in his public commentaries.
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Thanks to Daniel Perea for snapping these pictures at the book signing on Wednesday (September 9th, 2015)! Daniel kindly agreed to let me have the copyright for the images (Weber, 2015). Please do not use these without permission. Visit my contact page and drop me a line if you’d like to use one, especially for press or promotional purposes for future events. Thank you, Daniel!
I also want to thank Cody Morrison and Square Books for being great hosts. It was a wonderful first book signing experience. I’m honored and was very grateful and encouraged to see a number of nice folks brave the weather to hear about Uniting Mississippi. I’m pleased to report that we sold all but two copies, though one of those remaining is now gone. Square Books has one left as I write this, though a new shipment will be there soon. I’ll head over at some point soon to sign those, as one of the really cool things about real, brick and mortar bookstores like Square Books, and about literary towns like Oxford, is that authors sign books here and you can get your new book already signed by the author. You can’t do that on the forest-river-yellow Web site site. Thanks again, Square Books!
To learn more about the book, visit my page for Uniting Mississippi. If you’d like to support local bookstores like Square Books, you can order your copy on their Web site here:
Buy ‘Uniting Mississippi’ from Square Books
You can also see a brochure about the book here:
I’ve got a gallery of photos from that evening, which won’t be found here if you clicked on the “Photos” link in the menu. It has something to do with the kind of post I put the gallery in. Anyway, click here to see all the photos from that night.
Thanks again to Daniel Perea for taking the pictures that night. Please do not reuse these without requesting permission first. Copyright Weber 2015.
Click for a printable PDF scan.
Mississippians have been entangled in a deep philosophical debate about education funding for months, though attention has focused largely on technical details. Ballot initiative 42 that will be decided this November asks: “Should the state be required to provide for the support of an adequate and efficient system of free public schools?” If voters pass the initiative, they would be demanding an amendment to the state Constitution making that requirement explicit.
People who want voters to choose “yes” explain that such a requirement should be enforceable in the courts. Without that, a parent would have no recourse when his or her child must attend a chronically underfunded and failing school.
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Now that my new site is up, I’m slowly but surely adding to it the pieces I had up on my old site. This was my first op-ed published in The Clarion Ledger, published March 6, 2010, on 9A. I am grateful for permission to republish my pieces here and elsewhere.
Here’s a scan of the piece, though the character recognition in the file didn’t work well. Therefore, I’m posting here the text from the piece.
In January, three University of Mississippi undergraduates advocated for charter schools before the Mississippi House Committee on Education out of concern for the crisis of education in the state. The Public Policy Leadership majors, Chelsea Caveny, Cortez Moss, and Alex McLelland, met resistance to partial measures for progress.
Aside from a few vocal opponents, the general response from Republicans in the room was positive and some Democrats were cautiously open to charter schools. The most vocal opponents of charter school legislation worried about the children who stay behind in traditional schools. One representative exclaimed: “Separate but unequal!”
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“‘Acceptance & Happiness with Stoicism,’ Ep1 of Philosophy Bakes Bread”
by Eric Thomas Weber
Sorry, listening to the audio on this website requires Flash support in your browser. You can try playing the MP3 file directly by clicking here.
Here’s episode 1 of Philosophy Bakes Bread, titled “Acceptance & Happiness with Stoicism.” You can listen to it here above or you can visit the podcast’s page for this episode here. You can subscribe to the podcast’s RSS feed here. If you prefer, you can download the MP3 file here and listen to it later.
iTunes has it too, though for some reason as I post this the episodes are out of order.
“Acceptance & Happiness with Stoicism”
This first episode of Philosophy Bakes Bread presents a very personal story about how stoic philosophy can make a profound difference for the better in our lives when we encounter difficulties beyond our control.
The transcript for this episode is available here.
Check out the other episodes of Philosophy Bakes Bread here.
Finally, if you’d prefer to “watch” the podcast on YouTube, here it is:
If you prefer that format, here’s a playlist of the podcast episodes on my YouTube channel.
Professor Chris Skowronski, Associate Professor of Practical Philosophy in the Institute of Philosophy at Opole University, Poland, interviewed me at the Berlin Practical Philosophy International Forum conference on August 13, 2015.
I’m grateful to Chris and to Maja Niestroj for the interview, the video, and the hospitality while I was in Berlin. It was a great conference on a wonderful public philosophy, Dr. John Lachs, who has been my mentor in philosophy since around 1998 or 1999.
Scholars tend to be shy or humble, often going to great lengths to avoid anything that might smack of self-promotion or over-confidence. There’s good reason for this. The academy trains you to be skeptical, to demand evidence, and to be reserved about matters that you’ve not yet carefully considered.
There are two troubling consequences of this phenomenon, however. The first is captured in one of Bertrand Russel’s famous sayings. In New Hopes for a Changing World, he wrote that
One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.
It’s a riff on William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” where he writes that “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
In other words, self-doubt and the training for skepticism, so vital to good philosophy, can lead scholars not to speak up, while so many ignorant voices cry. If scholars are waiting for certainty, we’ll never hear from them. This is one of the troubling dangers.
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If you’re interested in the issue of corporal punishment in our public schools, check out my 2013 interview with SVT Nyheter, Sweden’s national TV news service. Soon, I’ll post my Clarion Ledger article from earlier that year on the topic. That article was part of what caught the attention of the Swedish TV folks. When I post that article, I’ll update this post with a link.