I wanted to say hi on Substack after meeting you, Tessa, and Rufus at an event a couple weeks ago. (I'm the guy who bought you a Heineken.) Great pair of essays, these two! I listened to them while biking through Brooklyn on this gorgeous spring morning, and they gave me a lot to think about.
I am extremely fortunate to be of an age where tuition was still so low it was basically free – especially at a big state school in the midwest like where I went – and where tuition at elite places like Dartmouth and Yale was paltry by today's comparison. I spend a lot of time thinking (actually, worrying) about ensuring an education for my kids – my oldest is 10 – without them incurring asphyxiating debt that will impose a a long chain of financial Faustian bargains on them reaching into middle-age. I really like the ideas proposed in part II of these essays, that education should be about verve and dialogue instead of traditional institutional forms, and as a parent will meditate on nurturing that.
My own path into the humanities is nontraditional but possibly typical. My freshman year I enrolled my university's business school. (As a teenager my career dream was becoming a hedge fund manager, but the term "hedge fund" didn't really exist in the 1980s, and that's separate story.) Business school was stultifying. I realized what I really loved was mathematics; I switched majors, transferred schools, and because mathematics was in the college of Liberal Arts and Sciences, it became a gateway drug for the humanities: two years of Latin, lots of philosophy, and, as I recall, one course shy of fulfilling an English minor – because I wanted to graduate in exactly four years. That brief time, and especially the dialogues had with the friends I made, was the crucible where I learned to engage with the ideas, poetry, and broader culture of both the past and the present.
Thanks for sharing your intellectual journey here.
Jerry—thank you for your thoughtful comment (and for the Heineken)! I love your reflections on humanities study. As I wrap up college now, I already feel similarly wistful. And the “gateway drug” metaphor seems perfectly apt…
I wanted to say hi on Substack after meeting you, Tessa, and Rufus at an event a couple weeks ago. (I'm the guy who bought you a Heineken.) Great pair of essays, these two! I listened to them while biking through Brooklyn on this gorgeous spring morning, and they gave me a lot to think about.
I am extremely fortunate to be of an age where tuition was still so low it was basically free – especially at a big state school in the midwest like where I went – and where tuition at elite places like Dartmouth and Yale was paltry by today's comparison. I spend a lot of time thinking (actually, worrying) about ensuring an education for my kids – my oldest is 10 – without them incurring asphyxiating debt that will impose a a long chain of financial Faustian bargains on them reaching into middle-age. I really like the ideas proposed in part II of these essays, that education should be about verve and dialogue instead of traditional institutional forms, and as a parent will meditate on nurturing that.
My own path into the humanities is nontraditional but possibly typical. My freshman year I enrolled my university's business school. (As a teenager my career dream was becoming a hedge fund manager, but the term "hedge fund" didn't really exist in the 1980s, and that's separate story.) Business school was stultifying. I realized what I really loved was mathematics; I switched majors, transferred schools, and because mathematics was in the college of Liberal Arts and Sciences, it became a gateway drug for the humanities: two years of Latin, lots of philosophy, and, as I recall, one course shy of fulfilling an English minor – because I wanted to graduate in exactly four years. That brief time, and especially the dialogues had with the friends I made, was the crucible where I learned to engage with the ideas, poetry, and broader culture of both the past and the present.
Thanks for sharing your intellectual journey here.
Jerry—thank you for your thoughtful comment (and for the Heineken)! I love your reflections on humanities study. As I wrap up college now, I already feel similarly wistful. And the “gateway drug” metaphor seems perfectly apt…