Back in the 60s when I was at MIT the focus was on how to think. One was taught to look at a problem and use tools learned but to often think outside the limits, to absorb the problem, and often to intuit the answer. Feynman's approach was a model, if you understood the issues, if you grasped the laws of nature, then you could intuit the answer. You were not taught to follow rules, but to apply what you had learned and if necessary modify it. I could use that approach in financial models decades later, almost intuiting the answers, frequently driving my financial analysts to distraction. I could see the patterns of a bad financial problem as a visual dissonance.
Unfortunately in today's university one must learn what to think not how to think. Students absorb a group think mentality, eschewing the individuality of thought and bonding on the group think they have been fed. What is worse the students now must be indoctrinated in this group think by administrators imbued in that doctrine.
If MIT wants to get out of the mess its current President demonstrated so publicly, perhaps it clean the proverbial Augean Stables at the top, and reconstitute with leaders who demand thinking and not following. The current leaders appear to demand group think. After all why would a President of MIT enshrine herself in a Barbie Doll habitat!
Some of the best "how to thinkers" I have ever had the pleasure to work with were: (1) Marty Samuels, Prof Neurology Harvard Med, who taught how to find where the problem was before listing dozens of differential diagnoses, Ed Habib, a colleague from DC who taught me how to look at systems and how the "gears" work, Gus Hauser, a colleague and dear friend for over 40 years who taught me how to question every assumption, and finally Bob Gallager, one of my PhD advisors at MIT who made me explain my understanding in words and not to try to impress with the elegance of my equations. Not once did any of these friends ever try to tell me "what to think". Regrettably at MIT today we have Commissars in each Department telling people what to think and punishing those who they feel deviated from the proscribed new norms.
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