Finally! Transcript for “What is Criticality?”

Well, we got one done! Here, finally, is the transcript for one of this year’s past AIC lunchtime discussions. This was an especially engaging event on the question “What is Criticality?” held last semester on 07 December 2006. Ann Holder, Director of the Critical and Visual Studies Program and Associate Professor of History in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies, and Scott Lundberg, principle of the design firm [Make] and faculty in the Department of Industrial Design at Pratt, shared some prepared remarks. Here are two excerpts:

Scott Lundberg: Form follows function, but which function are you talking about? Are you talking about how the buffet will hold the snacks? Are you talking about its ability to fly off the shelf and create money for the client? Are you talking about how well it recycles itself? Are you talking about the function of how much value it can bring a person who receives it as a gift? You know each and everything around us is filled with so many functions so a lot of time these little phrases like “form follows function” are really more hurtful than helpful.

Ann Holder: There is this notion in the educational establishment that critical thinking is this great thing. Everybody’s jumping on the bandwagon of critical thinking, but I find students aren’t really in touch with what that is. Why would we assume they have a propensity to be critical anyways? And would the results really be as rosy and bright as everyone seems to think — like creating better market competition, keeping the US ahead in the thought game? So I have a lot of questions about critical thinking.

Read the entire conversation here, saved as a pdf.

-M. Eng

What is Critical Thinking?

Please join us!

Thursday, December 7

“What is Critical Thinking?”

Alumni Reading Room
Pratt Library, 3rd Floor, Brooklyn

Lunch will be served and begins at noon
Discussion begins at 12:30 and runs until 1:45

What is critical thinking? What forms does critical thinking take? Is
critical thinking simply something that takes place ‘in one’s head’? Or
can we imagine forms of critical thought in a more public and material
sense? How does critical thinking ‘make its appearance’ in various forms
of practice?

Leading the discussion will be Professor Ann Holder, from the Department
of Social Science and Cultural Studies, and Professor Scott Lundberg,
from the Industrial Design department.

Professor Holder teaches in the Department of Social Science and
Cultural Studies and is Director of the Program in Critical and Visual
Studies (http://www.pratt.edu/cs/)

Professor Lundberg teaches industrial design at Pratt and is principle
of the design firm [MAKE] (www.makeinc.net)

What is an Academic Imperative? (Part 2: A Conflict of the Faculties?)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wilhelm von Humboldt

 

The Idea of the University

In my last post on the “Charge to the Academic Initiatives Committee,” I began to suggest that perhaps the first “academic imperative” the committee ought to identify is the task of providing a definition of an academic imperative.

After reading Alan Wolfe’s review of Michael Bérubé’s new book, What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts?, in last Sunday’s New York Times, it finally struck me why the phrase “identify academic imperatives” in the committee’s charge seems to me so strange.