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Photo of Stephen Linder

Stephen H. Linder, Ph.D.

Professor and Associate Director Institute for Health Policy, School of Public Health

UT Health Science Center at Houston

My aspiration in teaching is to be an agent of change.

This means building together certain habits of mind that unsettle convictions, contest assumptions and discomfort beliefs and their supporting conventions; moreover, these habits are meant to apply as equally to one's own positions as to the authors one reads. The basic strategy is to subvert what is comfortably known as a means of hastening systematic reassessment and reconstruction. When this works, it not only inspires a healthy skepticism, it allows us to think and do things with fresh eyes, inventive arguments and confident knowledge.