Having last spent any considerable time on a college campus or in a college classroom in 1972, I can’t comment on what is or is not going on there today, albeit that the issue does seem quite prominent in some circles. But my time there, spent at three very different institutions - an Ivy, a very large land grant university, and a catholic college night school - with a four year stint in the US army in amongst it all, altered my life. as it was supposed to.
For reasons I’m not sure I could explain at this distance, it never entered my head that college was supposed to be about a career. When I first entered a college classroom in the fall of 1963, I assumed that, like my father, three of my uncles, one of my aunts, several of my great uncles, and both my grandfathers, all of whom were graduates of that Ivy, I would major in English, probably because I’d spent my life surrounded by English teachers at one level or another, and I’m not sure I was fully aware of any other possibility.
By the end of that first year, having been immersed in the variety of mandatory freshman courses, many of them in the humanities and social studies, a whole new world of possibilities had opened in front of me. The only thing I was absolutely certain of at that point was that I was never going to spend another second in any course or career related to economics (my apologies to the soul of Paul Samuelson whose Econ I textbook had been my nemesis).
I’m not going to go on at any length about the rest of my collegiate career, although it certainly was spent at a time of campus upheaval on a rather larger scale, sometimes violently so than anything going on today.
But I came away from it, and yes, from my army service as well, with a mind significantly more oriented toward exploration and discovery than that with which I’d first set foot on campus in 1963. And if that kind of thing is not happening on college campuses today, then this nation is much the poorer for it.
College did not specifically prepare me for my career, which became that of an elementary school history teacher. Indeed, I avoided history in college, as well as further explorations in English, eventually settling on Anthropology with a specialty in human origins and evolution. Along the way I sampled economics, sociology, biology, archaeology, religion, philosophy (in which I almost majored) geology (both paleo and current), astronomy, French, and, of all thing outdoor camping.
I sometimes think that the most important concept I came away with was some understanding of how much I didn’t know (yes, partially attributable to a course in Ancient Greek thought and an immersion in Socratic dialogues). It is a concept far too little appreciated by far too many of our leaders and pundits.
But on those occasions when I try to understand exactly what I brought away from college and how that experience has come to whatever fruition it has over the intervening years (not an easy thing to know given that it’s been over half a century) is that while I am frequently disappointed in humanity, I am almost never surprised by it. Indeed, I am prone to much multi-sideism, perhaps on occasion too much so. One current example seems most relevant - my inability to come down wholly on one side or the other in the current campus brouhaha - Israel, the Palestinians, and Gaza - as so many seem to have. I’ve been called out on this one by more than one acquaintance who has so come down.
It is this understanding, however flawed it may be, of who we are and how we came to be what we are that I have always taken as the most important thing I carry about with me. It did not come about in any one course or event or experience, but the possibility of that understanding was born in those classrooms. If that birth is not constantly being midwifed in today’s college classrooms, then it is indeed a failure of epic proportions.
Excellent article with a somewhat misleading title. For sure, one could not possibly develop anything soulful without standing on the shoulders of the giants who came before us. Even in this era of social media and AI, reading the classics is an absolute requirement of discovering one's soul. However, reading alone is hardly sufficient. As an organic being, we learn more from our actions than the books that we read. We learn best when the two, actions and books, are combined or integrated in real world settings. Modernity has been a mixed blessing for us in that on one hand it frees up more time for ordinary people like ourselves to pursue our own intellectual and spiritual development; on the other hand, deep specialization makes the integartion of our actions and knowledge more difficult. So far, our institutions of higher learning have not been able to adequately risen up to this challenge. Over the past half a century or longer, specialization has deepend as tenure decisions have been made almost exclusively on criterias and by peers within the same discipline. Therefore, at a faculty level, our universities are populated mostly by brilliant specialists. For them, teaching is a side kick and after thought. It is not true that our faculties had lower moral standards than they used to. It is driven by larger and deeper social forces: there is hardly any room left in the busy schedules of most faculties to care about students' soul. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this over emphasis on specialization and neglect of the soul have made our institutions vulnerable to idealogical capture. Thus DEI has taken over many if not most academic institutions, governments and increasingly private corporations in the US and other developed countries. It is high time indeed for us to reverse this trend before institutions and individuals collapse under the dead weight of a souless life. Deep reading is an excellent starting point, integrating reading and experience into live learning is the real solution. I do disagree with the author on one point. If I understood him correctly, he is advocating reading for reading's own sake. I disagree. The cure for over specialization is not to give up all goals but to seek connections and, above all, organic integration between different goals. That's how we discover and live our soul.
Having last spent any considerable time on a college campus or in a college classroom in 1972, I can’t comment on what is or is not going on there today, albeit that the issue does seem quite prominent in some circles. But my time there, spent at three very different institutions - an Ivy, a very large land grant university, and a catholic college night school - with a four year stint in the US army in amongst it all, altered my life. as it was supposed to.
For reasons I’m not sure I could explain at this distance, it never entered my head that college was supposed to be about a career. When I first entered a college classroom in the fall of 1963, I assumed that, like my father, three of my uncles, one of my aunts, several of my great uncles, and both my grandfathers, all of whom were graduates of that Ivy, I would major in English, probably because I’d spent my life surrounded by English teachers at one level or another, and I’m not sure I was fully aware of any other possibility.
By the end of that first year, having been immersed in the variety of mandatory freshman courses, many of them in the humanities and social studies, a whole new world of possibilities had opened in front of me. The only thing I was absolutely certain of at that point was that I was never going to spend another second in any course or career related to economics (my apologies to the soul of Paul Samuelson whose Econ I textbook had been my nemesis).
I’m not going to go on at any length about the rest of my collegiate career, although it certainly was spent at a time of campus upheaval on a rather larger scale, sometimes violently so than anything going on today.
But I came away from it, and yes, from my army service as well, with a mind significantly more oriented toward exploration and discovery than that with which I’d first set foot on campus in 1963. And if that kind of thing is not happening on college campuses today, then this nation is much the poorer for it.
College did not specifically prepare me for my career, which became that of an elementary school history teacher. Indeed, I avoided history in college, as well as further explorations in English, eventually settling on Anthropology with a specialty in human origins and evolution. Along the way I sampled economics, sociology, biology, archaeology, religion, philosophy (in which I almost majored) geology (both paleo and current), astronomy, French, and, of all thing outdoor camping.
I sometimes think that the most important concept I came away with was some understanding of how much I didn’t know (yes, partially attributable to a course in Ancient Greek thought and an immersion in Socratic dialogues). It is a concept far too little appreciated by far too many of our leaders and pundits.
But on those occasions when I try to understand exactly what I brought away from college and how that experience has come to whatever fruition it has over the intervening years (not an easy thing to know given that it’s been over half a century) is that while I am frequently disappointed in humanity, I am almost never surprised by it. Indeed, I am prone to much multi-sideism, perhaps on occasion too much so. One current example seems most relevant - my inability to come down wholly on one side or the other in the current campus brouhaha - Israel, the Palestinians, and Gaza - as so many seem to have. I’ve been called out on this one by more than one acquaintance who has so come down.
It is this understanding, however flawed it may be, of who we are and how we came to be what we are that I have always taken as the most important thing I carry about with me. It did not come about in any one course or event or experience, but the possibility of that understanding was born in those classrooms. If that birth is not constantly being midwifed in today’s college classrooms, then it is indeed a failure of epic proportions.
Excellent article with a somewhat misleading title. For sure, one could not possibly develop anything soulful without standing on the shoulders of the giants who came before us. Even in this era of social media and AI, reading the classics is an absolute requirement of discovering one's soul. However, reading alone is hardly sufficient. As an organic being, we learn more from our actions than the books that we read. We learn best when the two, actions and books, are combined or integrated in real world settings. Modernity has been a mixed blessing for us in that on one hand it frees up more time for ordinary people like ourselves to pursue our own intellectual and spiritual development; on the other hand, deep specialization makes the integartion of our actions and knowledge more difficult. So far, our institutions of higher learning have not been able to adequately risen up to this challenge. Over the past half a century or longer, specialization has deepend as tenure decisions have been made almost exclusively on criterias and by peers within the same discipline. Therefore, at a faculty level, our universities are populated mostly by brilliant specialists. For them, teaching is a side kick and after thought. It is not true that our faculties had lower moral standards than they used to. It is driven by larger and deeper social forces: there is hardly any room left in the busy schedules of most faculties to care about students' soul. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this over emphasis on specialization and neglect of the soul have made our institutions vulnerable to idealogical capture. Thus DEI has taken over many if not most academic institutions, governments and increasingly private corporations in the US and other developed countries. It is high time indeed for us to reverse this trend before institutions and individuals collapse under the dead weight of a souless life. Deep reading is an excellent starting point, integrating reading and experience into live learning is the real solution. I do disagree with the author on one point. If I understood him correctly, he is advocating reading for reading's own sake. I disagree. The cure for over specialization is not to give up all goals but to seek connections and, above all, organic integration between different goals. That's how we discover and live our soul.