Julian B. Gewirtz
Latest Articles
The Writing’s Not on the Wall
The Chinese exhortations may seem impossible to us, but perhaps that feeling comes more from our sense of frustration with—and rejection of—the values that they endorse rather than a sense that we don’t want our walls to tell us what to do.
The Rise of China
Ethical Reasoning 18: “Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory” is Harvard’s third most popular class, with 532 students enrolled. This is a new record for the class, but it has been growing for some time.
Careers with Chinese Characteristics
China’s continued development and the growing interconnection between the United States and China are allowing Harvard students to consider new, high-impact career paths involving China.
Literary Agency
Each year, many Harvard students with literary interests come up against this cultural type. It’s the purest form of the “passion versus paycheck” dilemma: Do I do what I love for no money, or do I go after a more lucrative but so-called “soulless” career path?
Passion Versus Paycheck
Is doing recruiting selling out?” wondered one senior English concentrator who has also considered trying to get a reporting job at a magazine. “I’m worried the lucrative stuff is going to feel really substanceless,” a government concentrator told me. Over and over, students I’ve interviewed describe their thinking in these terms: they feel that can follow either their passions or a big paycheck.
Three Classes, One Semester
To Noh, the problem, at least at Harvard, has more to do with a culture of competitiveness, which emphasizes indicators of merit (which can be compared and judged) over intimations of deeper meaning (which are purely personal pleasures).
Social Development
Many people on campus are involved in advocacy for the developing world; these programs and projects should count social networking tools as key strategic assets.
What We Learn about When We Learn about China
Engagement with China—the activity that was supposed to place us at the presumed center of this happy dynamism—is instead entangling us in our country’s current anxieties.
Post-Post-Aids
We all have an obligation to engage with the AIDS epidemic, whether we are among those who were there or those who were not.