"Judgment is more than skill. It sets forth on intellectual seas beyond the shores of hard indisputable factual information"
About this Quote
Brewster is taking a quiet swing at the fantasy that expertise is just a bigger pile of facts. As an educator and later a university president steering Yale through the Vietnam era and the culture wars of late-20th-century America, he knew the institutional temptation: hide behind “objective” information to avoid moral heat. His line insists that judgment is the point where knowledge stops being safe.
The phrasing matters. “More than skill” demotes competence to something almost mechanical; you can be highly trained and still dodge the hard work of deciding. Then he pivots to metaphor: “intellectual seas” and “shores.” Facts are land, stable and “indisputable,” the place administrators and technocrats love to stand while insisting they’re merely reporting reality. Judgment is the moment you leave that coastline, where certainty disappears and responsibility begins. The sea isn’t anti-fact; it’s what happens after facts, when values, priorities, and consequences have to be weighed without the comfort of a single correct answer.
Subtext: universities shouldn’t pretend neutrality means abstaining from judgment. Selection is judgment: what gets taught, funded, admitted, published. Brewster’s sentence challenges the bureaucratic posture of “we’re just following the data,” and it also corrects a student-age misconception that intelligence equals winning arguments with information. He’s arguing for a cultivated capacity to navigate ambiguity, to make decisions in public life when the evidence is real but incomplete and the stakes are human.
The phrasing matters. “More than skill” demotes competence to something almost mechanical; you can be highly trained and still dodge the hard work of deciding. Then he pivots to metaphor: “intellectual seas” and “shores.” Facts are land, stable and “indisputable,” the place administrators and technocrats love to stand while insisting they’re merely reporting reality. Judgment is the moment you leave that coastline, where certainty disappears and responsibility begins. The sea isn’t anti-fact; it’s what happens after facts, when values, priorities, and consequences have to be weighed without the comfort of a single correct answer.
Subtext: universities shouldn’t pretend neutrality means abstaining from judgment. Selection is judgment: what gets taught, funded, admitted, published. Brewster’s sentence challenges the bureaucratic posture of “we’re just following the data,” and it also corrects a student-age misconception that intelligence equals winning arguments with information. He’s arguing for a cultivated capacity to navigate ambiguity, to make decisions in public life when the evidence is real but incomplete and the stakes are human.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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