Espionage at I-House

JHS
Mon, 04 Nov 2019 16:13:11 +0000

[Students] commonly talked about what they were reading at meals and in other spare time during the day - and late, late into the night" (p. 141). Is that how it is in today’s College, I wonder?

That’s certainly how it was when my kids were in the College, roughly a decade ago now. When my daughter took her first trip to visit friends at other colleges, she marveled, “For most of them, there’s some sort of social taboo against talking about what you are studying, which seems crazy! All they are allowed to talk about with their friends is TV. They spent hours telling me about their courses, because they knew I wouldn’t mind it.”

But it’s also exactly how it was when I was at Yale 40+ years ago, not long after marlowe1 was at Chicago. At lunch time, depending on whom you were sitting with you would get active debate about whatever artwork Vin Scully had been talking about that morning, or what Robert Kagan was saying about Thermopylae, or Gaddis Smith on modern diplomacy, or Arthur Galston on the biology of Agent Orange. Not everyone read the same books, but in Directed Studies we did, and sometimes we would swap books and articles with friends. One treasured memory is a party with a bunch of football players, and watching most of the starting offensive line, all multiple sheets to the wind, earnestly critiquing their captain’s senior thesis on pre-Socratic philosophy at 2 am. I will admit, though, that they may have been a bit farther from the truth than Hutchins would have preferred.