Thursday, November 09, 2006

Donald Rumsfeld on faculty hiring

With a hat tip to Phil Frickey, one of my oldest and best friends in this business:

Whatever else can be said about [Donald Rumsfeld], he was exactly right in his most famous quotation, as applied to faculty hiring:
As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns -- that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Unfortunately for the country, Rumsfeld left out the fourth element--unknown knowns. As someone, probably Mark Twain, once said: Its not what you don't know that will hurt you, its what your sure you know, but really don't, that'll do you in.

11/09/2006 11:55 PM  
Blogger Jeffrey Harrison said...

Unfortunately, his unknown unknowns were known by virtually everyone else.

11/10/2006 1:15 AM  

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