Yes, especially powerful as he, a tenured professor, looks back at his entire career and asks “why the hell am I doing this?” And freeing, in other ways e.g. perhaps it’s not that I’ve not looked hard enough for ways to do good in the world with the CS education I had, but rather that I should stop trying to use a hammer to paint a watercolour.

We may desperately want to help. But I don’t know how much more of our “help” this world can endure.

Ethics class in CS curricula really suffers from a case of warring incentives, especially as research universities rely on grants and funding from tech companies and the military. (From the note on cancelling Spring '20 teaching: “Computer scientists who question the social value of technical work will be less employable than before.”) I don’t know if there can be an adequate response to this problem under the current higher ed system, other than perhaps to hope that there are more and more professors like Rogaway out there who see the importance of offering their students a glimpse of that alternative path, and be willing to take up the mantle of being their guides. As the professor that taught your elective did, and as I am so grateful my undergrad advisor did.

You’re right! Thanks for pointing it out, I’ve updated it to point to the correct link. I think the post went haywire as I was trying to upload an image and link to a URL—still can’t quite figure out how to do both correctly, simultaneously, alas 😞