When Gordon Brumm re-met his future wife June in 1989, she showed him a clipping from their high school days, in which they sat among Lakewood High classmates at a school assembly, discussing the public concerns of the day. Commenting on that picture, Brumm says, "I went away to learn how to do it right. Having more or less learned how, I came back."
The "it" refers to discussion of questions of public policy; "do it right" refers to reasoned discussion; "went away" refers to Brumm's departure for Harvard College on a National Scholarship after graduating from LHS in 1949.
After he finished college and served his obligatory stint in the Army, he returned to graduate school in philosophy a changed person, for although the peacetime Army had been a positive experience it had also been, as he puts it, "an introduction to absurdity." Having been sensitized to absurdity, he began to recognize it at Harvard. In particular, he noticed the lecture method, which is "doubly foolish -- an inefficient way of transmitting information and the worst way to use classroom time, because it precludes the students' active participation. Without students participating through discussion, they don't learn how to reason, which is the most important purpose of any liberal arts curriculum." In an analogy which betrays his long residence in Cambridge, Brumm says, "You can't learn how to reason by listening to someone else any more than yo can learn how to play basketball by watching Larry Bird."
If this critique showed the beginning of an increasingly skeptical attitude toward the academic profession -- and professionalism in general -- it also marked the beginning of a continually growing commitment to reasoning, which to his mind is the most profoundly human activity and the essence of philosophy.
In any event, Brumm got his Ph.D. and by chance stayed in Cambridge throughout a variegated career in academia and various business environments.
Now fast-forward through the 1960s, during which his experiences in the civil rights movement and other events of the time "awoke me from my professional slumbers," as he puts it. In the '70s he was teaching adults at Northeastern University. In ethics and political philosophy courses, he saw his main job not as transmitting the thoughts of Plato, Hume, Kant, et. al., but rather to teach students how to reason out justified conclusions on moral or political questions. So he would pose a problem --welfare reform, for example,--and ask various students for their opinions. Then he would ask for the reasons behind their judgments, so that the arguments of one could be compared with the arguments of another and they could identify the issues on which they differed. In Brumm's eyes, this all seemed simple and obvious. To his great surprise, his students hardly knew what he was talking about, and he realized that reasoning must be taught for its own sake. Thus began his attempts to understand the reasoning process and how to teach it.
Over the years, Brumm had made regular family visits to Lakewood, and he returned for good in 1988. He had learned the art of indexing books in order to supplement his part-time teaching, and he continued doing so. In 1989 he attended an LHS class reunion, a move which eventually led to his marrying a classmate, June Conley. ("That's a story in itself, involving aircraft carriers, yearbooks, and the power of fate," he says, "but not everybody finds it as interesting as we do.")
In 1991 he also formed a group devoted to reasoned discussion of public issues, called CLURT, for "Come Let Us Reason Together." The group has continued to meet, discussing questions of public policy as diverse as health care and police surveillance cameras -- an exhibition of democracy as reasoning. In these discussions, Brumm serves as logic-master, trying to make the conversation hew to the reasoning process and writing a summary of each session in which the logical structure is displayed.
CLURT is now being expanded into a non-profit corporation called "The Committee for the Fourth R," whose mission is to "perfect, promote and practice the reasoning process." (The fourth "R" is of course reasoning.)