Congratulations to graduates in the Class of 2015. Graduating high-school students often ask me how college will differ from high school. And what I say usually seems to come as a surprise: In college, you should start thinking much more seriously about happiness. “What does college have to do with happiness?” you may be thinking. [...]
By an old tradition the first lecture of the year is dedicated to the new members of our college, to the freshman students and the freshman tutors. It is a chance to tell you something about the shape and the spirit of the Program that governs St. John’s College—and not only to tell you but [...]
The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Joe Sachs (Paul Dry Books: Philadelphia 2014) Joe Sachs’ brief introduction to his translation begins, memorably, like this: “I’ve never met a translation of the Odyssey I didn’t like.” He is paying fair tribute to this most imaginatively intricate and compositionally sophisticated of epic poems—whoever has had the hardihood to [...]
There can be no question of the signal importance and influence of The Closing of the American Mind. Any future historian who proposes to explain the “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s will have to contend with the looming presence of Allan Bloom’s grand and gloomy tome—along with the words and works of the [...]
“Socrates is setting the bar for political rhetoric very high. He is demanding not only that a politician not pander to the crowd but that he go to the opposite extreme to discipline it. And he judges the politicians of the past not by any worthwhile policies they may have pursued, but solely by whether [...]
This is a splendid day for you, the students of Mesa Preparatory Academy—a day, a moment, of passage. In all the ways of life (“cultures” as they are called) that I’ve seen or read about, such a passage, such a transition, literally a “passing-over” from one stage of life to another, is taken seriously. At [...]
“We while away our time in desirous daydreaming and floating reveries; in remembering past scenes, envisioning future sights, and projecting mental images onto present perceptions; in disciplined fictionalizing; and above all in that nocturnal dreaming in which our daily places undergo a sea—change from the indifferently familiar to the intimately strange.” […]
The communitarian movement has arisen as an effort to address the evident and growing deficiencies of modern liberalism, which seems unable to think beyond the sovereign autonomy of rights-bearing individuals. But communitarianism has considerable deficiencies of its own. In particular, there is its propensity to use the language of “community” as a form of mood [...]
Milton’s Paradise Lost is a poem of such panoramic grandeur and such human acuteness as may wean one—and has even weaned me—from a lifelong exclusive Homerophilia. Partly its attraction is that it is insinuatingly suspect. I keep having the sense that something is going on that runs right counter to the overt text. There seems [...]
After more than a decade of “No Child Left Behind”* (NCLB)—the 2001 Act of Congress that was supposed “to close the achievement gap with accountability, flexibility, and choice”—it has clearly failed. Congress is busily engaged in efforts to reform** the bill, whose reauthorization remains doubtful. In his recent article for Newsweek.com, Paul Thomas writes about [...]
“A debater treats the other speaker as someone who can only be right if he himself is wrong, whom he must defeat at all costs. In a conversation, though, we generally have the decency to accept the things another person says, at least temporarily and tentatively. If we disagree, and take the matter seriously, we [...]
College costs are out of control! Middle-class students will be financially ruined by going to college! Only the wealthy can afford a good liberal education! The hype about college costs has generated many myths about higher education, and has driven them deeply into the collective consciousness—where they are wreaking havoc with parents and students trying [...]
Convocation speeches do not always come as naturally to me as you might expect of someone who has been delivering them for more than twenty years as a college president. A few years ago, I was having difficulty writing a mid-winter address. Unable to find an anchor for the address, I went to bed wondering [...]
You asked me to speak about “Intellect and Intuition,” an enormous topic and yet an intimate one—enormous because the title encompasses the two most distinctively human activities, and intimate because I have, after all, no way to come to terms with it but to look into myself. But it is a congenial inquiry you’ve chosen [...]