Which colleges for genuine intellectuals?

tokenadult
Fri, 15 Jun 2007 13:20:49 +0000

Taking what appears to be a different position from many people posting in answer to the OP’s interesting question (which I asked, a few months ago, in a different thread), I might suggest the usual suspects: the research universities with the highest selectivity. Caltech, for example, certainly is full of smart students who like to discuss liberal arts subjects, if we agree that “liberal arts subjects” includes mathematics and the natural sciences. Harvard, Yale, or Princeton would include plenty of intellectual discussions of visual arts, history, music, literature, foreign languages, philosophy, and other subjects that perhaps the OP means when referring to “liberal arts subjects,” if what is meant is non-sci-tech subjects. Colleges that select students the way the colleges I mention select students must be full of students who learn for learning’s sake, or they wouldn’t be able to maintain the high-school-age performance that gets them into those colleges.

Let’s please discuss this further.