SPA-U

I link to South Philly Athenaeum resident Nate Davis pretty often (the previous post, for instance), b/c we are bros of like 4 years or something like that, but fellow SPA-er Brandon Joyce has an engaging blog of his own that provides some more details of the exuberant intellectual life of SPA-U:

Last Wednesday inaugurated my Outline Survey of Western Philosophy 101 Introductory Short Course; the first in a series of crunchtime, birds-eye-view classes on the pillars of Classical Knowledge-- all engineered to catch everyone up to speed. Matching names with ideas basically. I was the professor. Nate Davis, the T.A., was away on business.  The class was held in the kitchen, with a squeaky dry-erase board and a handful of notes. The student body was pretty focused, considering the bottle of vodka being passed among them. With each swig, there were more tangents and ever more centrifugal force. This is good though. Philosophy is all about implication rather than knowledge, anyway. Even in the history of philosophy.

What are we doing with this, opening up a philosophy department, with other departments on their way? We'll take a minute here to talk about the University Ideal. About the University Ideal at work in the South Philadelphia Athenæum. In the smallest number of words, there are secret truths to the social organization of college life. The confluence, the floating schedules, the exuberance and experimentation, the breadth of learning,  dorm life, and hopeless poverty. More cities should organize themselves like universities rather than corporations.

The South Philadelphia Athenæum is currently seeking professors and overdriven know-it-alls to trade words and wisdom at the SPA. We want to become the greatest center-of-learning in Philadelphia, by the same m.o. by which we always triumph: pure enthusiasm. By eliminating money and legitimization, we prune away those who have come for the wrong reasons. What's left over is sure to be nothing but a phalanx of superstoked and accessible individuals who enter in the true spirit of manic inquiry and action. A true thinktank.

Hear that, Philly-area academix?  You couldn't ask for a better group of students/teachers than these guys:

Hopefully I'll be able to sign up for some summer courses.  Good field trips, too!