From: Robert Divers To: "Jeffrey E." <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Date: Thu, 04 Aug 2016 22:09:15 +0000 Jeffrey just arrived at my office in Jersey waiting to be picked u to say CUNY was underwhelming is to put it mildly 75% chance of a one course spring semester, 4 months maximum pay $20,000—that barely supports life in the city or Jersey City possibility they might get excited about me and then offer a real job, but first is this trivial matter of the course i will learn in mid-October meanwhile i am looking at other places who are looking at me not sure i want to live in Stillwater Oklahoma (Oklahoma State) but Lexington Kentucky would be more plausible (University of Kentucky) but none of these people promoting me either know me or are very strong meanwhile possibly UC Riverside and so on this is going to take a while to play out most grateful for your kind offer of support, of no use with these characters at this point, but potentially could be a chip in the game assuming you wish to offer it again damn, i forgot, this letter was meant to be about Chomsky a real don CHOMSKY i wanted you to know something about Noam that you may not; he not only laid the foundation for linguistics but he destroyed Skinner and naive behaviorism—that all human behavior could be explained by previous patterns of reward and punishment like all true mad men Skinner went one step too far—even language could be explained by his theory, so he wrote a book pushing the absurd theory that we learn to know what different sounds mean through a system of reward and punishment; parents running around with barrels full of raisins doling them out so at to create linkages; and it was Chomsky who did the take down-1959 beautiful paper showing the numerous absurdities that would be required for Skinner to be right i read it in 1965 and have been his admirer at a distance EFTA00822148