Throwback Thursday: A Horse With No Name

America’s “A Horse With No Name” has been the subject of previous posts, such as this one from May of 2021. Along with Al Green’s “Look What You’ve Done For Me” it brought me back to music after I had basically stopped listening to the radio for reasons long forgotten.

Although my birthday is in March I wanted to point out something I just realized: “A Horse With No Name” was the number one song on the Billboard Top 40/Hot 100 on my birthday 50 years ago, 1972. Could that be a reason I am fond of the song? I doubt it, although I have wondered if my affinity for instrumental music could in any way be related to the fact that “Theme From A Summer Place” topped the Billboard charts the day I was born. This is how my mind works or doesn’t.

 

 

“🎼 On the first part of the journey

I was looking at all the life. 🎼”

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A link to a post from Why Evolution Is True on the topic of how too many US universities have turned into bastions of wokeness losing all semblance of fairness and respect for expression of diverse opinions. The piece shows an excerpt from the Kalven Report of 1967, a document that still guides policy at some American colleges, but not enough of them, in my opinion.

 

“The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars. To perform its mission in the society, a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures. A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community. It is a community but only for the limited, albeit great, purposes of teaching and research. It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby.”

 

Apparently, Princeton University is having a crisis of sorts started, somewhat ironically, by two undergraduate students who called out the school for repeated violations of “institutional neutrality.” Jerry Coyne, the author of Why Evolution Is True, included the thoughts of a distinguished Princeton professor, Robert P. George. Here is part of what George wrote:

 

“I have made clear that my own preference would be for the University and its units to respect institutional neutrality. I think that such a policy best serves the mission of universities such as ours by fostering for our students as well as our faculty the conditions of robust, civil debate. Where institutional neutrality is respected, no one is a heretic for deviating from an official party line. What the university and its units provide is a forum for the presentation of reasons, evidence, and arguments by people representing different views—a forum in which there is a genuine engagement among equals with no institutional thumb placed on the scales.

To my mind, the best policy is the one set forth in the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report, which was issued in 1967 and whose principles have guided that distinguished institution ever since…”

 

I love the phrase “with no institutional thumb placed on the scales.” Individuals at universities have the right to free speech; the institutions themselves should adopt no official positions. That position makes sense to me, but common sense is not common enough.

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Without revealing too many details, the additional delay of the repairs to the Z06 has ramifications far beyond the return of the car. When/if everything is sorted out, I’ll fill in the facts.

 

#ThrowbackThursday

#AHorseWithNoName

#somanyCARSjustonelife

#disaffectedmusings

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