Originally published on November 14, 2018 (Episode 86)
Introduction
Today’s conversation is one of our forays away from historical thinking, and to instead explaining and thinking about higher education. As I’ve said before, think of this as a series entitled “Higher Ed: A Guide for the Perplexed.” I’m always astonished how little very well-educated people, long out of the academy, know about how a college or university works. This ignorance can lead to bad choices when their kids are looking for a school. It also leads to all sorts of misconceptions evaluating the news that emanates from the campus. And if people want to understand ideas, than they have to understand the place that those ideas come from, and the culture that creates those ideas.
My guest Joseph Davis has thought a lot about that culture. Our conversation is one of the most important that I think I’ve had on the podcast. It’s about how many undergraduates are obsessed with personal achievement, and where that obsession takes them. As you’ll hear, Davis believes that anxiety is the natural result of a world in which everything is possible.
About the Guest
Joseph E. Davis is Research Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia and moderator of the “Picturing the Human” colloquy at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. He is editor of To Fix or To Heal: Patient Care, Public Health, and the Limits of Biomedicine (NYU Press, 2018).
For Further Investigation
Joseph E. Davis, “ADD for All: On Big Pharma, overdiagnosis, and the questions unasked about medicalization”, The New Atlantis, Spring 2017.
—, “Biomedicine and Its Cultural Authority: The origins of our “health society” and why holistic medicine doesn’t catch on”, The New Atlantis, Winter 2016.
Joseph E. Davis and Ana Marta González, eds., To Fix or To Heal: Patient Care, Public Health, and the Limits of Biomedicine (NYU Press, 2018)
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