Book reviews, and a talk I gave "in" Hong Kong

 A very nice review Bill Gasarch b of Ideas that Created the Future appears in SIGACT News, Volume 52, Issue 2, June 2021, pp. 10-17. (Most people in universities can access the review through their library systems.) In general I am pleased by the reception the book is getting, have had very few second thoughts about my selection of papers, and have found that readers with little interest in reading the original texts find my introductory essays quite entertaining and informative.

I reviewed Derek Bok's latest book, Higher Expectations,  for the James G. Martin Center.

And I keynoted a quite impressive symposium on service learning organized by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. I used to visit Hong Kong regularly and was pleased by the invitation to return, virtually, to address an international audience by Zoom. The full text of my talk is included below. "Grace" refers to my host, Prof. Grace Ngai, who heads PolyU's service learning program and kindly hosted the event.

----------------------

Learning as Service

Good afternoon! I am so happy to be joining you today. I only wish I could be with you in person. I greatly miss the regular trips I used to take to Hong Kong and to the Chinese mainland, talking to people in the great universities I visited, including Hong Kong Poly. The hospitality was always wonderful, the food was always excellent. And more importantly, it made me feel part of the world’s academic society. When Grace invited me to give this address, we quickly found an unexpected way in which we are related academically—her PhD advisor was my undergraduate advisee. 

But even academics who share no family ties like that are related in ways that other professionals aren’t. 

When the Harvard students get their degrees at Commencement every spring, the president stands at the front of an enormous outdoor gathering, with the graduates sitting up front and their families filling the rest of Harvard Yard. At the crucial moment, the president uses a phrase that always sticks in my mind. 

He welcomes the new graduates “to the ancient and universal company of scholars.” Nothing like that is said of medical doctors or lawyers. The universal company of scholars. It is global and it is timeless. You are part of that universal company too. And the main purpose of my address today is to talk to you about what that means.

Now we are here together, only virtually alas, because you are part of a special branch of that company. You are engaged in service learning. What does that mean? It means you—and I am going to address my remarks to the teachers and scholars among you, though my message is for the students too—you service learning faculty are expanding education by teaching your students how to learn by helping other people, by being of service to them. You are teaching your students how to learn what it means to learn while being of service to others. You and your students are helping people help themselves, showing them how to electrify their houses or design their clothing or care for their elders. And your university includes this special kind of learning in the curriculum in the hope that your students will not just be of service to the people you are helping, but that they will develop the habit of helping others, that service will become part of what they take away from their university education. That they will keep doing it long after they earn their degrees. Your university hopes students will continue to be of service in the same way that it hopes graduates will engage in critical thinking, rational analysis, and persuasive argumentation long after they have stopped using those skills in their university courses, where of course their use is expected. 

Now I am a Harvard man through and through. I have never left the place really since I was 17 years old, except for a couple of years when I was in national service. I love the place. It has its problems and its history is far from flawless, and I have written about those things. But it’s a wonderful place and it’s given a lot to the world. One of those things, it turns out, is the idea of organized national service of a kind that was not military service.

That was first laid out in a 1906 address by William James. James was a Harvard philosophy professor who is generally regarded as one of the founders of the science of psychology. 

He gave that address at Stanford University, and it was called “The Moral Eq