The keynote speaker at Brown’s opening convocation this year urged that students, according to the Brown Daily Herald, “should not limit definitions of themselves to those imposed by society” that they “should they should use their time at Brown to forge their own values and determine their own priorities” and “the importance of independent thinking and the danger of trying to ‘pass’ for a certain identity to gain the validation of others.”
Sound like exactly what you’d hear at a Brown convocation, as students head off to define their own grade-less majors and resist the pressures of society by immediately adopting whichever political opinions prevail in their dorms? Well, yes, but the speaker was Glen Loury, who, while generally left-minded, is considerably more independent-minded than any of his professorial peers. The same platitudes? Yes. An advocacy of independent thinking from someone who occasionally engages in it? That’s something new.
