Tag Archives: Boston University

Where race and gender overrode everything

11 Sunday May 2025

Posted by in Economics, Politics, Work

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A while ago I identified what I considered the Social Justice movement‘s first tenet: that the most urgent issue facing the world in the 21st century is inequalities of race and gender (including sexual orientation and gender identity). I stand by that description. I think that that view is implicit in Ibram X. Kendi’s most widely quoted idea: that neutrality is a mask for racism, that anyone who isn’t actively antiracist is racist. Because that idea directly implies that one must prioritize racism over other issues, that neutrality might be acceptable on other issues but not on this one.

There’s plenty more evidence that a wide swath of influential people treated race and gender as the most urgent issues of all. Let’s turn first to National Public Radio (NPR), the US’s major public audio broadcaster – its audio equivalent to the BBC or CBC. An exposé of NPR delivered by its veteran ex-editor Uri Berliner makes it clear: CEO John Lansing

declared that diversity—on our staff and in our audience—was the overriding mission, the “North Star” of the organization. Phrases like “that’s part of the North Star” became part of meetings and more casual conversation.

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Breaking my silence on Ibram X. Kendi

22 Sunday Sep 2024

Posted by in Fear, Politics, Work

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Advertisement for BU’s Day of Engagement.

Four years ago, Ibram X. Kendi was the academic star of the moment, topping the bestseller lists, receiving a MacArthur Genius Grant, and being handed a plum position at Boston University (BU) with a research centre given more than $30 million. And BU, where I worked at the time, didn’t stop there. After the murder of George Floyd, BU cancelled classes and events for a virtual “Day of Collective Engagement” where Kendi took a starring role as presenter. The message was clear that the star hire would be the one telling BU what we were supposed to do from now on: not only were there no presenters expressing alternate views of race that challenged Kendi’s, such views were actively discouraged. My friend and former colleague David Decosimo recalls how he pointed out in a Zoom meeting that Kendi’s definitions were controversial and asked if the university was officially endorsing Kendi’s views. The response:

Immediately, several deans came after me in the chat. I was clearly uninformed and confused; now wasn’t the time for “intellectual debate.” They implied I might not actually oppose racism.

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The reluctant techno-pessimist

16 Sunday Jun 2024

Posted by in Politics, Work

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I’ve loved digital technology as long as I’ve been alive. Growing up in the analog world of the 1980s, I was excited by every bright light and new world opened up by a digital display. I was so excited by what computers could do that, before my family owned a computer, I wrote out the code for a text-based computer game on an electric typewriter. Circa 2000 I would physically go to the Apple Store to watch the live-streamed Steve Jobs keynote introducing new Apple products, even when I wasn’t planning on buying one soon. At a family Christmas event in 2011, I became clear that educational technology was the right non-faculty career choice for me, when I realized everyone else had left the room while my wife’s uncle and I had a heated discussion about operating systems. After all that I doubled down and got a master’s in computer science.

That’s why it pains me deeply to say: I’ve become a techno-pessimist.

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Beyond the Turing test

04 Sunday Jun 2023

Posted by in Compassion, Consciousness, Emotion, Foundations of Ethics, Friends, Honesty, Human Nature, Metaphysics, Morality, Psychology

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Artificial intelligence is all the rage right now, and for good reason. When ChatGPT first made the news this December, I tested it by feeding it the kind of prompt I might give for a short comparison essay assignment in my Indian philosophy class. I looked at the result, and I thought: “this is a B-. Maybe a B.” It certainly wasn’t a good paper, it was mediocre – but no more mediocre than the passing papers submitted by lower-performing students at élite universities. So at Boston University my colleagues and I held a sold-out conference to think about how assignments and their marking will need to change in an era where students have access to such tools.

As people spoke at the conference, my mind drifted to larger questions beyond pedagogy. One professor in the audience noted she’d used ChatGPT herself enough that when it was down for a couple days she typed in “ChatGPT, I missed you”, and it had a ready response (“I don’t have emotions, but thank you.”) In response a presenter noted a different AI tool called Replika, which simulates a romantic partner – and looks to be quite popular. Replika’s site bills itself as “the AI companion who cares”, and “the first AI with empathy”. All this indicates to me that while larger philosophical questions about AI have been asked for a long time, in the 2020s they are no longer hypothetical.

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King’s improvement on Gandhi

15 Sunday Jan 2023

Posted by in Economics, Jainism, Modern Hinduism, Politics, Protestantism

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Tomorrow the United States celebrates a holiday in honour of Martin Luther King, Jr. Boston University, where I work, is always eager to remind everyone that King got his doctorate there. They are not always as eager to remind you that King studied at the School of Theology – and clearly learned his lessons there well, for he was not merely a great activist but a great philosopher.

I have come to know King’s thought through the courses I have taught in BU’s philosophy department – even though the courses were on Indian philosophy. I have nevertheless included King on the syllabus for that class, with guest speakers introducing him to the students, because I wanted to show students the contemporary relevance of Indian philosophy. Specifically, King drew a great deal of his ideas from Gandhi – who was a philosopher-activist like King, and in turn drew on earlier Indian thought like Jainism and the Bhagavad Gītā. It seems to me on reflection, though, that the student surpassed the teacher: that what King said and wrote with Gandhi’s influence was profounder and more valuable than Gandhi’s own thought was in itself.

Martin Luther King Jr.
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On mindfulness

15 Sunday Sep 2019

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Psychology, Work

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The term mindfulness is ubiquitous in English-language discussions of Buddhism – and beyond, in secular meditation techniques. When I first encountered Buddhism in Thailand, the English word “mindfulness” was central to my understanding of the tradition. My journals in 1997 described mindfulness as “the Buddhist virtue”, and identified it with “detachment from negative emotions, the ability to sit back and go ‘Y’know, there’s really no reason to be pissed off about this here.’” It was not a word I encountered anywhere outside my own study of the tradition.

Seventeen years later, I realized that “mindfulness” had become mainstream when my hospital had prescribed mindfulness meditation for my insomnia. It has already become considerably more mainstream in the few years since. A couple years ago I participated in a new and popular mindfulness program through my employer, Boston University. I should stress that this program had nothing to do with the religion or philosophy departments, the Center for the Study of Asia, the Buddhist students’ organization, or any other such Buddhism-related part of the university. No, it was offered through Information Services and Technology, as part of my day job assisting professors to teach with technology – whether they are professors of chemistry, public health, hospitality administration, or anything else. Continue reading →

How can you be yourself if there is no self?

10 Sunday Feb 2019

Posted by in Christianity, Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, Free Will, Modernized Buddhism, Self

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The rise of qualitative individualism in the West coincides relatively closely with Western interest in Buddhism. Nietzsche and Emerson, two of the most influential qualitative individualist thinkers, both had an interest in Buddhism stronger than was usual for philosophers of their time. And the greatest flowering of Western interest in Buddhism occured in the 1960s, the same time when qualitative individualism itself became fully mainstream.

Qualitative individualism can be put in many ways, but one of its most characteristic injunctions is “be yourself”. The injunction is often phrased further in terms of one’s true self. Such ideas are of central importance to the LGBT movement. A recent news profile asking Boston University students about the meaning of being transgender finds many of them echoing a common refrain: “discovering your truest self”, “finding one’s true identity”, “being their true selves”, “being truly, completely, unapologetically me”.

None of this seems like a great fit, on the face of it at least, with a tradition that has proclaimed for 2000 years that there is no self. Continue reading →

The psychological case for disengaged Buddhism

05 Sunday Aug 2018

Posted by in Anger, Early and Theravāda, External Goods, Fear, Happiness, Health, Mahāyāna, Politics, Psychology

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My project on disengaged Buddhism has now been submitted to a journal. It’s undergone several revisions by this point. One of the most important such revisions was suggested unanimously by BU’s magnificent CURA seminar. In an earlier draft I had attempted to emphasize the contemporary constructive significance of disengaged Buddhism by noting how its ideas were corroborated by some contemporary psychological research. The seminar participants thought that discussion of psychology did not strengthen the paper because I didn’t have the space to defend them fully; the paper would stand best discussing disengaged Buddhists’ claims in their historical context and letting those claims stand on their own.

I think they were right, and I removed the psychology discussion from the paper – a little sadly, as I thought the psychological case for disengaged Buddhism was worth making. Fortunately, I have another place to make it: here. Continue reading →

Whose religion? Which science?

24 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by in Aesthetics, Attachment and Craving, Biology, Buddhism, Christianity, Karma, Meditation, Metaphysics, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Natural Science, Self, Supernatural

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A little while ago I had the pleasure of giving a guest lecture on Buddhism to David Decosimo‘s class at the Boston University School of Theology. The students were a delight to teach – smart, actively engaged, asking many questions. One student’s question in particular stuck with me after the session. She had started to ask a long set of multiple questions, and then distilled it down to what she referred to as a simple question: “How would you describe the relation between Buddhism and science?”

My first response was: “That is not a simple question!” There is so much to say about it that there are now books written not merely on the actual relationship between Buddhism and science, but on the very idea of a relationship between Buddhism and science. I gave a relatively rambling answer. But after leaving the classroom it occurred to me that there was a relatively simple answer that I could have given – one that would have put a large part of the question’s complexity aside, but focused on something of particular relevance to students of Christian theology. Continue reading →

Understanding understanding

02 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by in Daoism, Epistemology, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Language

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I have recently begun the exciting opportunity to teach a course in Indian philosophy in Boston University’s philosophy department. Thinking about and designing the course, I had the great opportunity to work with the small but excellent staff of BU’s Center for Excellence and Innovation in Teaching. They asked me: what’s your objective for the course? More specifically, what will your students be able to do when the course is done? They recommended that I pay particular attention to the verbs identifying these student abilities.

Such a question is easier to answer in skill-oriented courses – courses in Java programming or academic writing. There, the point of the course is all about something that students will be able to do. In a humanistic course, objectives are different, and often not easily specified. It’s not just that humanistic learning may have as much to do with personal transformation as with any acquired ability. It’s that even the abilities acquired are themselves difficult to define. In particular: one of the first verbs to come out of my mouth in response was “understand”. And one of the staff soon said in response, “we’d like to encourage you to avoid the U-word.” Continue reading →