important words for college students

You are, as Foucault might say, the intersection of many evaluative and potentially determining discourses: you boy, you girl, have been made.

Never has there been a more shrewd and imaginative cartographer of the psyche.

I was, you might say, discomfited, and showed up to class for a while with my cellphone jiggered to dial 911 with one touch.

Never has there been a more shrewd and imaginative cartographer of the psyche.

And all of those teachers and counselors and friends—and the prognosticating uncles, the dithering aunts, the fathers and mothers with their hopes for your fulfillment—or their fulfillment in you—should not necessarily be cast aside or ignored.

The battle is to make such writers one’s own, to winnow them out and to find their essential truths.

Embedded in all of the major religions are profound truths.

They have confronted you with scriptures—holy books that, whatever their actual provenance, have given people what they feel to be wisdom for thousands of years.

The Internet is amok with services selling term papers and those services exist, capitalism being what it is, because people purchase the papers—lots of them.

The coach knows what your athletic prospects are, the guidance office has a sheaf of test scores that relegate you to this or that ability quadrant, and your teachers have got you pegged.

Colleges are even leery of disciplining guys who have committed sexual assault, or assault plain and simple.

At the time I found his remark a tad detached, but maybe he was right.

Society has a cornucopia of resources to encourage you in doing what society needs done but that you don’t much like doing and are not cut out to do.

They’ve given you a sharp and protracted taste of what they feel is good and bad, right and wrong.

Then there are those back-breaking student loans—people leave school as servants, indentured to pay massive bills, so that first job better be a good one.

The people who do this work have highly developed intellectual powers, and they push themselves hard to reach a certain standard: That the results have almost no practical relevance to the students, the public, or even, frequently, to other scholars is a central element in the tragicomedy that is often academia.

Black limousines pulled up in front of his office and disgorged decorously suited negotiators.

As far as I can discern, the student ethos goes like this: If the professor is so lazy that he gives the same test every year, it’s okay to go ahead and take advantage—you’ve both got better things to do.

If you advance in the direction of someone else’s dreams—if you want to live someone else’s life rather than yours—then get a TV for every room, buy yourself a lifetime supply of your favorite quaff, crank up the porn channel, and groove away.

Instead of being punished, these guys frequently stay around, strolling the quad and swilling the libations, an affront (and sometimes a terror) to their victims.

The student who eschews medical school to follow his gift for teaching small children spends his twenties in low-paying but pleasurable and soul-rewarding toil.

The people who do this work have highly developed intellectual powers, and they push themselves hard to reach a certain standard: That the results have almost no practical relevance to the students, the public, or even, frequently, to other scholars is a central element in the tragicomedy that is often academia.

He couldn’t believe in the divinity of Jesus, or in the afterlife, but to Schopenhauer, a deep pessimist, a religion that had as its central emblem the figure of a man being tortured on a cross couldn’t be entirely misleading.

Occasionally—for you will need some help in fleshing-out the answers—you may have to prod your professors to see if they take the text at hand—in this case the divine and disturbing Plato—to be true.

My father compressed his brow and blew twin streams of smoke, dragon-like, from his magnificent nose.

As for the administrators, their relation to the students often seems based not on love but fear.

Shoddy work—in which the author cheats, cuts corners, copies from others—is quickly detected.

I came to college with few resources, but one of them was an understanding, however crude, of how I might use my opportunities there.

But then interest dwindles and matters go back to normal.

You have been raised in proximity to common sense, if you’ve been raised at all, and common sense is something to respect, though not quite—peace unto the formidable Burke—to revere.

Welcome and congratulations: Getting to the first day of college is a major achievement.

Brodhead, an impressive, articulate man, seems to take as his educational touchstone the Duke of Wellington’s precept that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.

Brodhead, an impressive, articulate man, seems to take as his educational touchstone the Duke of Wellington’s precept that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.

He was—and is—a perpetual challenge and goad.

Trying to figure out whether the stuff you’re reading is true or false and being open to having your life changed is a fraught, controversial activity.

The public senses this disparity and so thinks of the professors’ work as being silly or beside the point.

I learned that if I wanted to affirm any consequential ideal, I had to talk my way past Freud.

But when we expend our energies in rightful ways, Robert Frost observed, we stay whole and vigorous and we don’t weary.

A friend of mine had the temerity to detect cheating on the part of a kid who was the nephew of a well-placed official in an Arab government complexly aligned with the U.S.

And you will have to be tough if the professor mocks you for uttering a sincere question instead of keeping matters easy for all concerned by staying detached and analytical.

He didn’t get to revise his understanding of himself, figure out what he’d do best that might give the world some profit.

Instead of being punished, these guys frequently stay around, strolling the quad and swilling the libations, an affront (and sometimes a terror) to their victims.

At the time I found his remark a tad detached, but maybe he was right.

Scholarship, even if pretentious and almost unreadable, is nonetheless labor-intense.

When he came to Harvard to talk about religion, he shocked the professors and students by challenging the divinity of Jesus and the truth of his miracles.

Much more I learned from the sage—about character, about loss, about joy, about writing and its secret sources, but Emerson most centrally preaches the gospel of self- reliance and that is what I have tried most to take from him.

His separation of the self into three parts, and his sense of the fraught, anxious, but often negotiable relations among them (negotiable when you come to the game with a Freudian knowledge), does a great deal to help one navigate experience.

The coach knows what your athletic prospects are, the guidance office has a sheaf of test scores that relegate you to this or that ability quadrant, and your teachers have got you pegged.

(Though sometimes—and this I owe to Emerson—it seems right to let the psyche fall into civil war, accepting barrages of anxiety and grief for this or that good reason.)

Amidst the impressive college buildings, in company with a high-powered faculty, surrounded by the best of your generation, all you need is to keep doing what you’ve done before: Work hard, get good grades, listen to your teachers, get along with the people around you, and you’ll emerge in four years as an educated young man or woman.

Schopenhauer, who despised belief in transcendent things, nonetheless thought Christianity to be of inexpressible worth.

Scholarship, even if pretentious and almost unreadable, is nonetheless labor-intense.

Emerson’s greatness lies not only in showing you how powerful names and customs can be, but also in demonstrating how exhilarating it is to buck them.

“Strongly spent,” the poet says, “is synonymous with kept.”

Colleges are even leery of disciplining guys who have committed sexual assault, or assault plain and simple.

You can get a terrific education in America now—there are astonishing opportunities at almost every college—but the education will not be presented to you wrapped and bowed.

The quest at the center of a liberal-arts education is not a luxury quest; it’s a necessity quest.

When he came to Harvard to talk about religion, he shocked the professors and students by challenging the divinity of Jesus and the truth of his miracles.

If you do not undertake it, you risk leading a life of desperation—maybe quiet, maybe, in time, very loud—and I am not exaggerating.

He buys shirts from the Salvation Army, has intermittent Internet, and vacations where he can.

My father was a gruff man, but also a generous one, so that night at the kitchen table at 58 Clewley Road he made an effort to let me have the chance that had been denied to him by both fate and character.

The dean of students laughed lightly when I suggested that this behavior might be grounds for sending the student on a brief vacation.

The legacy of their college years will be a legacy of difficulties overcome.

This I began to develop because of my father, who had never been to college—in fact, he’d barely gotten out of high school.

Education has one salient enemy in present-day America, and that enemy is education—university education in particular.

All right, there’s nothing wrong with this as far as it goes—after all, the student who writes a brilliant forty-page thesis in a hard week has learned more than a little about her inner resources.

Shoddy work—in which the author cheats, cuts corners, copies from others—is quickly detected.

What colleges generally want are well-rounded students, civic leaders, people who know what the system demands, how to keep matters light, not push too hard for an education or anything else; people who get their credentials and leave the professors alone to do their brilliant work, so they may rise and enhance the rankings of the university.

It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.”

From Freud I found a great deal to ponder as well.

I don’t mean Freud the aspiring scientist, but the Freud who was a speculative essayist and interpreter of the human condition like Emerson.

Instead of being punished, these guys frequently stay around, strolling the quad and swilling the libations, an affront (and sometimes a terror) to their victims.

Having found what’s best for you to do, you may be surprised how far you rise, how prosperous, even against your own projections, you become.

Brodhead, an impressive, articulate man, seems to take as his educational touchstone the Duke of Wellington’s precept that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.

They’re disguised fulfillments of repressed wishes.

It’s been said that raising a child effectively takes a village: Well, as you may have noticed, our American village is not in very good shape.

You’ll be looking into the reach of every metaphor that every discipline offers, and you’ll be trying to see around their corners.

“How about the science requirements?”

They have confronted you with scriptures—holy books that, whatever their actual provenance, have given people what they feel to be wisdom for thousands of years.

Edmund Burke saw common sense as a loosely made, but often profound, collective work, in which humanity has deposited its hard-earned wisdom—the precipitate of joy and tears—over time.

Amidst the impressive college buildings, in company with a high-powered faculty, surrounded by the best of your generation, all you need is to keep doing what you’ve done before: Work hard, get good grades, listen to your teachers, get along with the people around you, and you’ll emerge in four years as an educated young man or woman.

You must ask whether reason should always rule the passions, philosophers should always rule the state, and poets should inevitably be banished from a just commonwealth.

For students, that end is a good job.

And, too, you’ve been tested, probed, looked at up and down and through.

The students write their abstract, over-intellectualized essays; the professors grade the students for their capacity to be abstract and over-intellectual—and often genuinely smart.

When they face equally arduous tasks later in life, students will tap their old resources of determination, and they’ll win.

Welcome and congratulations: Getting to the first day of college is a major achievement.

The proof is that virtually no undergraduate students can read and understand their professors’ scholarly publications.

We’ve got guns, drugs, two wars, fanatical religions, a slime-based popular culture, and some politicians who—a little restraint here—aren’t what they might be.

You have been raised in proximity to common sense, if you’ve been raised at all, and common sense is something to respect, though not quite—peace unto the formidable Burke—to revere.

The virtue in most request is conformity.

He declares that dreams don’t predict the future and that there’s nothing benevolent about them.

Embedded in all of the major religions are profound truths.

The work they are compelled to do to advance—get tenure, promotion, raises, outside offers—is, broadly speaking, scholarly work.

One night after dinner, he and I were sitting in our kitchen at 58 Clewley Road in Medford, Massachusetts, hatching plans about the rest of my life.

The professor saves his energies for the profession, while the student saves his for friends, social life, volunteer work, making connections, and getting in position to clasp hands on the true grail, the first job.

You’re to be commended, and not just you, but the parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts who helped get you here.

For their essays can be brilliant, in a chilly way; they can also be clipped off the Internet, and often are.

Let the profs roam free in the realms of pure thought, let yourselves party in the realms of impure pleasure, and let the student-services gang assert fewer prohibitions and newer delights for you.

Freud has something challenging and provoking to say about virtually every human aspiration.

I learned that if I wanted to affirm any consequential ideal, I had to talk my way past Freud.

The idea that a university education really should have no substantial content, should not be about what John Keats was disposed to call Soul-making, is one that you might think professors and university presidents would be discreet about.

The professor saves his energies for the profession, while the student saves his for friends, social life, volunteer work, making connections, and getting in position to clasp hands on the true grail, the first job.

Amidst the impressive college buildings, in company with a high-powered faculty, surrounded by the best of your generation, all you need is to keep doing what you’ve done before: Work hard, get good grades, listen to your teachers, get along with the people around you, and you’ll emerge in four years as an educated young man or woman.

Self-reliance is its aversion.

You are, as Foucault might say, the intersection of many evaluative and potentially determining discourses: you boy, you girl, have been made.

But the public also senses that because professors don’t pay full-bore attention to teaching they don’t have to work very hard—they’ve created a massive feather bed for themselves and called it a university.

You may find your own suppressed and rejected thoughts flowing back to you with an “alienated majesty.”

It’s just that smart people are prone to look into matters to see how they might go about buttering their toast.

Amidst the impressive college buildings, in company with a high-powered faculty, surrounded by the best of your generation, all you need is to keep doing what you’ve done before: Work hard, get good grades, listen to your teachers, get along with the people around you, and you’ll emerge in four years as an educated young man or woman.

(Detached analysis has a place—but, in the end, you’ve got to speak from the heart and pose the question of truth.)

Then there are those back-breaking student loans—people leave school as servants, indentured to pay massive bills, so that first job better be a good one.

Emerson’s greatness lies not only in showing you how powerful names and customs can be, but also in demonstrating how exhilarating it is to buck them.

Trying to figure out whether the stuff you’re reading is true or false and being open to having your life changed is a fraught, controversial activity.

But he writes another—in part out of a feeling of injured merit, maybe—and that one they do buy.

As far as I can discern, the student ethos goes like this: If the professor is so lazy that he gives the same test every year, it’s okay to go ahead and take advantage—you’ve both got better things to do.

In a culture where the major and determining values are monetary, what else could you do?

Let the profs roam free in the realms of pure thought, let yourselves party in the realms of impure pleasure, and let the student-services gang assert fewer prohibitions and newer delights for you.

For somehow your predecessors are more yourself than you are.

The idea that the courses you take should be the primary objective of going to college is tacitly considered absurd.

The reason to read Blake and Dickinson and Freud and Dickens is not to become more cultivated, or more articulate, or to be someone who, at a cocktail party, is never embarrassed (or who can embarrass others).

Whatever the case, no one wants to invest too much in them—for life is elsewhere.

He declares that dreams don’t predict the future and that there’s nothing benevolent about them.

And all of those teachers and counselors and friends—and the prognosticating uncles, the dithering aunts, the fathers and mothers with their hopes for your fulfillment—or their fulfillment in you—should not necessarily be cast aside or ignored.

The proof is that virtually no undergraduate students can read and understand their professors’ scholarly publications.

The professor saves his energies for the profession, while the student saves his for friends, social life, volunteer work, making connections, and getting in position to clasp hands on the true grail, the first job.

This kind of perspective-altering teaching and learning can cause the things which administrators fear above all else: trouble, arguments, bad press, etc.

The work they are compelled to do to advance—get tenure, promotion, raises, outside offers—is, broadly speaking, scholarly work.

You may find your own suppressed and rejected thoughts flowing back to you with an “alienated majesty.”

We need to see where they fall short and where they exceed the mark, and then to develop them a little, as the ideas themselves, one comes to see, actually developed others.

You have to ask yourself if wildly expressive music (rock and rap and the rest) deranges the soul in ways that are destructive to its health.

I continue to hold in mind one of Emerson’s most memorable passages: “Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater.

He had talent: My brother and I each got about half the raw ability he possessed and that’s taken us through life well enough.

Edmund Burke saw common sense as a loosely made, but often profound, collective work, in which humanity has deposited its hard-earned wisdom—the precipitate of joy and tears—over time.

For their essays can be brilliant, in a chilly way; they can also be clipped off the Internet, and often are.

They want the certificate that will give them access to Wall Street, or entrance into law or medical or business school.

And you will have to be tough if the professor mocks you for uttering a sincere question instead of keeping matters easy for all concerned by staying detached and analytical.

The idea that the courses you take should be the primary objective of going to college is tacitly considered absurd.

What if you arrive at college devoted to pre-med, sure that nothing will make you and your family happier than a life as a physician, only to discover that elementary-school teaching is where your heart is?

The idea that a university education really should have no substantial content, should not be about what John Keats was disposed to call Soul-making, is one that you might think professors and university presidents would be discreet about.

But the public also senses that because professors don’t pay full- bore attention to teaching they don’t have to work very hard—they’ve created a massive feather bed for themselves and called it a university.

The work they are compelled to do to advance—get tenure, promotion, raises, outside offers—is, broadly speaking, scholarly work.

What he told me that evening at the Clewley Road kitchen table was true in itself, and it also contains the germ of an idea about what a university education should be.

Schopenhauer, who despised belief in transcendent things, nonetheless thought Christianity to be of inexpressible worth.

He never had a world of possibilities spread before him, never made sustained contact with the best that had been thought and said.

You’ll not only question the statistics teacher about what numbers can explain but what they can’t.

So, if you want an education, the odds aren’t with you: The professors are off doing what they call their own work; the other students, who’ve doped out the way the place runs, are busy leaving the professors alone and getting themselves in position for bright and shining futures; the student-services people are trying to keep everyone content, offering plenty of entertainment and building another state-of-the-art workout facility every few months.

Right now, if you’re going to get a real education, you may have to be aggressive and assertive.

They’ve done a fine job skating on surfaces in high school—the best way to get an across-the-board outstanding record—and now they’re on campus to cut a few more figure eights.

We’ve got guns, drugs, two wars, fanatical religions, a slime-based popular culture, and some politicians who—a little restraint here—aren’t what they might be.

Much more I learned from the sage—about character, about loss, about joy, about writing and its secret sources, but Emerson most centrally preaches the gospel of self-reliance and that is what I have tried most to take from him.

Welcome and congratulations: Getting to the first day of college is a major achievement.

Such students leave and become donors and so, in their own turn, contribute immeasurably to the university’s standing.

You must ask whether reason should always rule the passions, philosophers should always rule the state, and poets should inevitably be banished from a just commonwealth.

In terms of their work, students live in the future and not the present; they live with their prospects for success.

Let the profs roam free in the realms of pure thought, let yourselves party in the realms of impure pleasure, and let the student-services gang assert fewer prohibitions and newer delights for you.

Never has there been a more shrewd and imaginative cartographer of the psyche.

So, if you want an education, the odds aren’t with you: The professors are off doing what they call their own work; the other students, who’ve doped out the way the place runs, are busy leaving the professors alone and getting themselves in position for bright and shining futures; the student-services people are trying to keep everyone content, offering plenty of entertainment and building another state-of-the-art workout facility every few months.

This kind of perspective- altering teaching and learning can cause the things which administrators fear above all else: trouble, arguments, bad press, etc.

And you will have to be tough if the professor mocks you for uttering a sincere question instead of keeping matters easy for all concerned by staying detached and analytical.

He gave me the chance to see what I was all about, and if it proved to be different from him, proved even to be something he didn’t like or entirely comprehend, then he’d deal with it.

To merely survive in this American village and to win a place in the entering class has taken a lot of grit on your part.

In terms of their work, students live in the future and not the present; they live with their prospects for success.

Because every subject you study is a language and since you may adopt one of these languages as your own, you’ll want to know how to speak it expertly and also how it fails to deal with those concerns for which it has no adequate words.

Reading the great writers, you may have the experience that Longinus associated with the sublime: You feel that you have actually created the text yourself.

After the kid-samurai episode, the chair of my department not unsympathetically suggested that this was the sort of incident that could happen when you brought a certain intensity to teaching.

I came to college with few resources, but one of them was an understanding, however crude, of how I might use my opportunities there.

Reading the great writers, you may have the experience that Longinus associated with the sublime: You feel that you have actually created the text yourself.

The coach knows what your athletic prospects are, the guidance office has a sheaf of test scores that relegate you to this or that ability quadrant, and your teachers have got you pegged.

The world wants him to write more, lecture, travel more, and will pay him for his efforts, and he likes this a good deal.

My father had some experience with lawyers, and with policemen, too; he was not well-disposed toward either.

If you do not undertake it, you risk leading a life of desperation—maybe quiet, maybe, in time, very loud—and I am not exaggerating.

Reading the great writers, you may have the experience that Longinus associated with the sublime: You feel that you have actually created the text yourself.

Because every subject you study is a language and since you may adopt one of these languages as your own, you’ll want to know how to speak it expertly and also how it fails to deal with those concerns for which it has no adequate words.

One kid I knew (and rather liked) threatened on his blog to mince his dear and esteemed professor (me) with a samurai sword for the crime of having taught a boring class.

The people who do this work have highly developed intellectual powers, and they push themselves hard to reach a certain standard: That the results have almost no practical relevance to the students, the public, or even, frequently, to other scholars is a central element in the tragicomedy that is often academia.

I was about to go off to college, a feat no one in my family had accomplished in living memory.

The primary function of Yale University, it’s recently been said, is to create prosperous alumni so as to enrich Yale University.

These essays are honest: Their footnotes reflect real reading, real assimilation, and real dedication.

Colleges are even leery of disciplining guys who have committed sexual assault, or assault plain and simple.

The idea that a university education really should have no substantial content, should not be about what John Keats was disposed to call Soul-making, is one that you might think professors and university presidents would be discreet about.

He never had a world of possibilities spread before him, never made sustained contact with the best that had been thought and said.

He was—and is—a perpetual challenge and goad.

This view informed an address that Richard Brodhead gave to the senior class at Yale before he departed to become president of Duke.

No matter what anyone says this work has precious little to do with the fundamentals of teaching.

You’ll be the one who challenges your biology teacher about the intellectual conflict between evolution and creationist thinking.

You have been raised in proximity to common sense, if you’ve been raised at all, and common sense is something to respect, though not quite—peace unto the formidable Burke—to revere.

One does not need to be as harsh as Schopenhauer to understand the use of religion, even if one does not believe in an otherworldly god.

When you read Plato, you’ll probably learn about his metaphysics and his politics and his way of conceiving the soul.

But until I had the reincarnation stuff from a solid source, I better get to work and pick out some English classes from the course catalog.

He wasn’t invited back for decades.

The student who eschews medical school to follow his gift for teaching small children spends his twenties in low-paying but pleasurable and soul-rewarding toil.

You must ask whether reason should always rule the passions, philosophers should always rule the state, and poets should inevitably be banished from a just commonwealth.

“No!” he said, filling the air with an invisible forest of exclamation points.)

You are, as Foucault might say, the intersection of many evaluative and potentially determining discourses: you boy, you girl, have been made.

So, if you want an education, the odds aren’t with you: The professors are off doing what they call their own work; the other students, who’ve doped out the way the place runs, are busy leaving the professors alone and getting themselves in position for bright and shining futures; the student-services people are trying to keep everyone content, offering plenty of entertainment and building another state-of-the-art workout facility every few months.

In saying that, he (like my father) hinted in the direction of a profound and true theory of learning.

Education is about finding out what form of work for you is close to being play—work you do so easily that it restores you as you go.

To be poor in America is to be a failure—it’s to be without decent health care, without basic necessities, often without dignity.

In saying that, he (like my father) hinted in the direction of a profound and true theory of learning.

If you do not undertake it, you risk leading a life of desperation—maybe quiet, maybe, in time, very loud—and I am not exaggerating.

The quest at the center of a liberal-arts education is not a luxury quest; it’s a necessity quest.

(Detached analysis has a place—but, in the end, you’ve got to speak from the heart and pose the question of truth.)

But when we expend our energies in rightful ways, Robert Frost observed, we stay whole and vigorous and we don’t weary.

Of course, given your intellect and discipline, you can still probably be one.

You’ll ask your history teacher about whether there is a design to our history, whether we’re progressing or declining, or whether, in the words of a fine recent play, The History Boys, history’s “just one fuckin’ thing after another.”

This was my own experience reading the two writers who have influenced me the most, Sigmund Freud and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

I continue to hold in mind one of Emerson’s most memorable passages: “Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater.

The quest at the center of a liberal-arts education is not a luxury quest; it’s a necessity quest.

He’s always behind on his student-loan payments; he still lives in a house with four other guys (not all of whom got proper instructions on how to clean a bathroom).

You must inquire of yourself if balanced calm is the most desirable human state.

I need the wherewithal, as Emerson did, to say what’s on my mind and to take the inevitable hits.

The idea that the courses you take should be the primary objective of going to college is tacitly considered absurd.

When they face equally arduous tasks later in life, students will tap their old resources of determination, and they’ll win.

What if you arrive at college devoted to pre-med, sure that nothing will make you and your family happier than a life as a physician, only to discover that elementary-school teaching is where your heart is?

But he writes another—in part out of a feeling of injured merit, maybe—and that one they do buy.

But he writes another—in part out of a feeling of injured merit, maybe—and that one they do buy.

They want the certificate that will give them access to Wall Street, or entrance into law or medical or business school.

To get an education, you’re probably going to have to fight against the institution that you find yourself in—no matter how prestigious it may be.

He declares that dreams don’t predict the future and that there’s nothing benevolent about them.

The question “Who do they think you are at home?” is never an idle one.

He’s always behind on his student-loan payments; he still lives in a house with four other guys (not all of whom got proper instructions on how to clean a bathroom).

They’ve given you family traditions—you’ve learned the ways of your tribe and your community.

The Internet is amok with services selling term papers and those services exist, capitalism being what it is, because people purchase the papers—lots of them.

Freud challenges nearly every significant human ideal.

If you advance in the direction of someone else’s dreams—if you want to live someone else’s life rather than yours—then get a TV for every room, buy yourself a lifetime supply of your favorite quaff, crank up the porn channel, and groove away.

But then interest dwindles and matters go back to normal.

You’ll be the one who challenges your biology teacher about the intellectual conflict between evolution and creationist thinking.

My father was a gruff man, but also a generous one, so that night at the kitchen table at 58 Clewley Road he made an effort to let me have the chance that had been denied to him by both fate and character.

Instead of being punished, these guys frequently stay around, strolling the quad and swilling the libations, an affront (and sometimes a terror) to their victims.

They gave words to thoughts and feelings that I had never been able to render myself.

The people who do this work have highly developed intellectual powers, and they push themselves hard to reach a certain standard: That the results have almost no practical relevance to the students, the public, or even, frequently, to other scholars is a central element in the tragicomedy that is often academia.

Shoddy work—in which the author cheats, cuts corners, copies from others—is quickly detected.

You can get a terrific education in America now—there are astonishing opportunities at almost every college—but the education will not be presented to you wrapped and bowed.

And you will have to be tough if the professor mocks you for uttering a sincere question instead of keeping matters easy for all concerned by staying detached and analytical.

Scholarship, even if pretentious and almost unreadable, is nonetheless labor- intense.

I confessed that I was.

He had talent: My brother and I each got about half the raw ability he possessed and that’s taken us through life well enough.

After the kid-samurai episode, the chair of my department not unsympathetically suggested that this was the sort of incident that could happen when you brought a certain intensity to teaching.

If I had such info, pre-law would be fine, and maybe even a tour through invertebrate biology could also be tossed in.

Black limousines pulled up in front of his office and disgorged decorously suited negotiators.

The quest at the center of a liberal-arts education is not a luxury quest; it’s a necessity quest.

The students write their abstract, over-intellectualized essays; the professors grade the students for their capacity to be abstract and over-intellectual—and often genuinely smart.

Students come to college with the goal of a diploma in mind—what happens in between, especially in classrooms, is often of no deep and determining interest to them.

The battle is to make such writers one’s own, to winnow them out and to find their essential truths.

But when we expend our energies in rightful ways, Robert Frost observed, we stay whole and vigorous and we don’t weary.

The Internet is amok with services selling term papers and those services exist, capitalism being what it is, because people purchase the papers—lots of them.

At the time I found his remark a tad detached, but maybe he was right.

It’s been said that raising a child effectively takes a village: Well, as you may have noticed, our American village is not in very good shape.

Then I had better study literature, unless I had inside information to the effect that reincarnation wasn’t just hype, and I’d be able to attend college thirty or forty times.

And how can we blame them?

Colleges are even leery of disciplining guys who have committed sexual assault, or assault plain and simple.

We’re drawn to them because we hunger for absolute authority.

Amidst the impressive college buildings, in company with a high-powered faculty, surrounded by the best of your generation, all you need is to keep doing what you’ve done before: Work hard, get good grades, listen to your teachers, get along with the people around you, and you’ll emerge in four years as an educated young man or woman.

But until I had the reincarnation stuff from a solid source, I better get to work and pick out some English classes from the course catalog.

Scholarship, even if pretentious and almost unreadable, is nonetheless labor-intense.

No matter what anyone says this work has precious little to do with the fundamentals of teaching.

Doing so requires energy from the professor—which is better spent on other matters.

To ease your grief, society offers alcohol, television, drugs, divorce, and buying, buying, buying what you don’t need.

(The class was a little boring—I had a damned cold—but the punishment seemed a bit severe.)

Occasionally—for you will need some help in fleshing-out the answers—you may have to prod your professors to see if they take the text at hand—in this case the divine and disturbing Plato—to be true.

One can slave for a year or two on a single article for publication in this or that refereed journal.

What if you arrive at college devoted to pre-med, sure that nothing will make you and your family happier than a life as a physician, only to discover that elementary-school teaching is where your heart is?

Amidst the impressive college buildings, in company with a high-powered faculty, surrounded by the best of your generation, all you need is to keep doing what you’ve done before: Work hard, get good grades, listen to your teachers, get along with the people around you, and you’ll emerge in four years as an educated young man or woman.

The virtue in most request is conformity.

They want the certificate that will give them access to Wall Street, or entrance into law or medical or business school.

You’ll ask your history teacher about whether there is a design to our history, whether we’re progressing or declining, or whether, in the words of a fine recent play, The History Boys, history’s “just one fuckin’ thing after another.”

Instead of being punished, these guys frequently stay around, strolling the quad and swilling the libations, an affront (and sometimes a terror) to their victims.

Periodically the public gets exercised about this situation, and there are articles in the national news.

The dean of students laughed lightly when I suggested that this behavior might be grounds for sending the student on a brief vacation.

The people who do this work have highly developed intellectual powers, and they push themselves hard to reach a certain standard: That the results have almost no practical relevance to the students, the public, or even, frequently, to other scholars is a central element in the tragicomedy that is often academia.

He never had a world of possibilities spread before him, never made sustained contact with the best that had been thought and said.

The virtue in most request is conformity.

In saying that, he (like my father) hinted in the direction of a profound and true theory of learning.