Derek Gittus

J. Clifford Hobbins Chair of History Dept. and Head Baseball Coach, Portsmouth Abbey School

[Danny Deraney @DannyDeraney]

Every year, I share this video of French caretakers who take sand from Omaha Beach in Normandy, and scrub them into the letters to give them the gold coloring.

They do this for all 9,386 US soldiers who died.

France also gave us this land as American soil. #MemorialDayWeekend

[Derek Gittus @DerekGittus]

@FriedgeHNIC Best sport, worst league. It never changes.

[Derek Gittus @DerekGittus]

@EvanMarinofsky @BlackAndGold277 The “cornerstones” of Pasta and McAvoy aren’t good enough. Goal #3 showed why neither of them should ever wear a C.

[Derek Gittus @DerekGittus]

@michaelFhurley Get rid of ALL of them

[Derek Gittus @DerekGittus]

@HackswithHaggs Will anybody put some blame on 88? So soft.

[Derek Gittus @DerekGittus]

@_TyAnderson “Race”. So soft

[Derek Gittus @DerekGittus]

@JonesWEEI An actual authentic and positive reaction? 🧐

[Derek Gittus @DerekGittus]

@Buccigross Tuch #bucciovertimechallenge

[Derek Gittus @DerekGittus]

@ConorRyan_93 Ref Show

[Bridgestone Golf @bridgestonegolf]

Goodbye, friends, from Augusta Georgia!
As a farewell, we’re giving away one of the limited edition Peach Reserve TOUR-ISSUE Staff Bags.
To win: Just REPOST!

[Derek Gittus @DerekGittus]

@BizNasty2point0 Not this time.

[Derek Gittus @DerekGittus]

@GregABedard Chad Pennington?

[Derek Gittus @DerekGittus]

@BruinsBenders Wow

[Derek Gittus @DerekGittus]

@BaseballQuotes1 It reads like the old Big 8 football standings.

[Derek Gittus @DerekGittus]

@GraigKreindler Billy Ripken FF ‘89 Fleer. Smart kid!

[Derek Gittus @DerekGittus]

@NHLBruins 1 game tank is on. Better win tomorrow.

[Derek Gittus @DerekGittus]

@NFLExcelerated @TomCaron And who earned a one seed of that group

[John Loeber 🎢 @johnloeber]

Teachers vs Professors

This has been on my mind since I first encountered it almost 15 years ago.

When I was in high school, I had a few teachers in the humanities/social sciences who were really, really good: deep, serious thinkers, with lots of interesting views synthesized over decades of globetrotting experiences.

As teachers, even at a nice private school, they were not real “winners” in the sense of climbing a prestigious career ladder, and neither did they publish academic papers. You could call them very advanced amateurs, and as dabblers they got to toy with lots of interesting ideas, kind of randomly assembled, without outside judgment.

When I got to the University of Chicago, known for its life of the mind in the humanities, I didn't really find anybody who seemed to be as deep or as interesting a thinker as these teachers I encountered in high school.

I always wondered why.

Partially, it's because I got lucky with my teachers. They were the best we had. Maybe I didn't get so lucky with my professors.

But today I may have figured it out: I think the actual reason is that my professors at UChicago were, in a sense, winners on an academic career ladder. It’s an extremely competitive environment, and they had somehow made it to the top. By definition, this is a tremendously powerful filter.

And I think this had actually filtered against a whole group of people whom I consider interesting.

This has become especially clear over the last few years, as a lot of traditional academia has been losing prestige rapidly: people are trusting the kind of professorial expert class less and less and less. It turned out that professors of ethics and sociology are just as unethical and susceptible to groupthink as the general public. And the general conformity of ideology and thought in academia is now well-known.

These professional humanities academics may publish papers that are respected or even highly esteemed within their own niche communities, but this particular value system has long since been removed from what I consider interesting, or, in many cases, even related to the pursuit of truth.

Reflecting on it, the heart of the matter is that those teachers in high school were unconstrained by convention and had been allowed to fully lean into their interests — kind of like the platonic dream of academia — whereas the professors I encountered in university, even when very successful, had been conformed by the academia-industry pressure cooker and their work sanitized, professionalized, and ultimately made uninteresting under the constraints.

[Derek Gittus @DerekGittus]

@Jomboy_ @JomboyMedia Anybody who has been to a youth tourney with pool play knows they hadn’t clinched yet. Or if they watched the Olympic hockey, where there was a three-way tie just last month. No executive above DeRosa figured that out?

[Derek Gittus @DerekGittus]

@packers He stunk in NE.