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The Value of Listening—From Joel Klein, Paul Alivisatos, and Exodus

Plus, Israeli general predicts postwar economic boom; three terrible New York Times stories

Ira Stoll's avatar
Ira Stoll
Oct 01, 2025
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Studies of nine ears from different positions with accompanying explanatory text, from a series of figure studies for the education of artists and amateurs, printed in red ink in the crayon manner. Designer Pierre Thomas Le Clerc, French, ca. 1740 - ca. 1796. Print-maker Jean-François Janinet, French, 1752-1814. Purchased for the Museum by the Advisory Council. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

The University of Chicago just extended president Paul Alivisatos’s term through June 2030. Here is the message Alivisatos sent to students on September 30 at the start of the Autumn Quarter: “Here we argue hard and listen harder. …Harmony is not the goal—the goal is truth-seeking, however fraught and hard. People may say things that you find deeply offensive. We will not punish them for expression that falls within the wide bounds of our carefully crafted policies of time, place, and manner, and anti-harassment and anti-discrimination. Rather, we have set the conditions to refute bad ideas. So, take the opportunity to contest them, take them apart, and help one another drive toward truth. To make that dialogue possible, we also hold a simple limit: you may disagree, protest, and challenge ideas, but you may not prevent others from learning, speaking, or being heard. Passion is welcome; preventing the conversation from happening is not. Enter disagreements with kindness and humility, and always be ready to hear another view. That is how understanding deepens.”

Meanwhile, at

The Free Press
, Joel Klein, who is the former chancellor of New York City’s public schools system and the former head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, has a beautifully written piece, published September 28, about his experiences clerking for Chief Judge David Bazelon on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (who, by Klein’s account, was cruel) and for Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell. Klein writes, “I now find certainty overrated….. Don’t get me wrong: I have beliefs, deep beliefs, and strong convictions. But I rarely let conviction harden into certainty. When people disagree with me, I try to listen and evaluate their contentions. At times, I’ve changed my mind.”

The bolding is mine. I was struck that these two messages from wise and accomplished people both emphasize listening. Not just sitting there quietly and pretending to listen, but listening in a way that you actually hear and might adjust in reaction to the new information. It’s such an important skill and one that often gets overlooked in favor of other skills and virtues—being good at math, or public speaking, or reading and writing, or working hard, or grit/resilience or excellence at social media or sales or stock-picking. Those are all important and valuable, but so is listening.

It reminded me, also of Exodus 24:7. I had to sort through a lot of English translations to find the one that conveyed the point I was looking to bring out from the Hebrew text, but our friends at Sefaria have one from Metsudah Publications that conveys the response of the people after Moses read the Book of the Covenant in their ears.

Exodus 24:7 as translated by Metsudah Publications via Sefaria,org

They reply: “we will do and we will listen.” There’s endless rabbinical commentary about the order—why listen, or hear, only after doing, not before—but the point that I think I hear coming from Alivisatos and Klein and maybe even also Exodus is that it’s listening that gets us closer to truth, not even strictly in that academic sense of accuracy or advancing the frontiers of knowledge, crucial as those are, but in the big-T Truth and virtue sense of relating to other people with dignity, opening the possibility of learning from them.

Israeli general predicts postwar economic boom:

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