Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - Holiday Message 2025 | The Romance of the University

Episode Date: December 22, 2025

Time for the holiday message! Rounding off the year with a brief and casual reflection on some issue that doesn't quite rise to the level of a full solo podcast. And hopefully something uplifting. This year, I offer a short apologia for higher education in the liberal arts and sciences, focusing not on the down-to-earth economic/occupational benefits of a college degree, but on the very real ways in which such an education opens up possibilities for personal growth. I think all of us in academia should be loud and unapologetic about the more romantic, idealistic values of the modern university. Happy holidays all! Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/12/22/holiday-message-2025-the-romance-of-the-university/ Support Mindscape on Patreon.

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 22nd. 25 holiday message for the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Whenever it's a holiday break, I sometimes think about my first year in college. In fact, going back for holiday vacation and meeting up with all my old friends from high school. You know, I had a group of friends, mutual friends that we had had for years. We basically all went to different universities, very different universities, so didn't keep close touch with each other at the time.

But then, of course, got back together. and then again during the summer after that next semester was over, I could not help but be struck by how different my friends were. Not in bad ways or not always in good ways. They were just different. They were a little bit different people when they came back from a short exposure to university life than they had been for the years when I knew them. You know, of course they changed.

We all changed during high school, during the four or five years, whatever, we were hanging out together, but relatively gradually. And then they went off to the four corners of the earth. They came back and they were noticeably different. The thing that obviously occurred to me at the time was, wow, going to college really changes you in some ways. And I'm sure that it changed me and they noticed that just as well. But what I eventually realized is that they all changed differently, right? it wasn't as if there was something that happens to you when you go to college and it all happened to them and now they were different or we were different.

It's that somehow they had all grown into people who were closer to who they always should have been. They blossomed in some way. There were always those tendencies and characteristics inside them that now you could recognize more clearly because they came much more to the surface. There was the techie guy who was now really into computers, the poetic soul who was reading literature and literary theory a lot more and could quote it suddenly. There was a Reagan Republican who was now very into free markets and business strategies and all that. Again, not all good or bad, just different. They had become a little bit more who they really should have been all along. Now, obviously a huge amount of this, if you think that this is,

is a common kind of phenomenon going to college, changing a little bit, coming back. A lot of it is socialization, right? A lot of it is meeting friends, being with people who are like you, getting into a different crowd, stuff like that. Just the fact of living away from home in a very different environment is bound to change you in some ways. I do, however, think that some of it is academic, that some of it has to do with taking classes when you're at that university, or at least just being in an environment where what everyone doing is taking classes. That's a kind of a unique thing. It's not a chance that we get after we leave college for most of us. Honestly, the boundaries are a little bit blurry between what is because of the

classes you take, what is because of the people you hang out with. And the reason why I'm thinking of all this right now during the holiday message version of the Mindscape podcast, at the end of every year. I do a little thing, a little bit low impact, not a lot of research, not a lot of thought, a short solo episode. The original idea when I started was to sort of recap the year in the podcast, but that's kind of silly because the podcast is very eclectic. It's a different thing. Every week, it's hard to summarize in a holiday message. So what I've been doing instead was just using it as an excuse and opportunity to offer some reflections that are a little bit less formal and thought out a little bit more casual and impromptu than the usual solo episode or

interview would be. And if you're sitting where I'm sitting, it's been a tough year for higher education, especially here in the United States. Obviously, there's been a huge impact in research funding, and research funding pays not only for research, it pays for university operations more generally, as I talked about in a special episode, podcast. way back in spring. But there's been other things. There's been attacks on academic freedoms and intellectual independence. There's been state level attempts to make sure that, for example, just as I'm recording this, North Carolina, the University of North Carolina wants all syllabi to be approved by the university rather than just having professors or faculty be in charge of

them. The Trump administration, as you know, tried to get universities to sign a compact that would basically turn over a lot of their academic independence to the federal government. And this is not the usual system. This is very, very concerning, very, very scary to those of us in academia, in higher education. We have a vice president of the United States who has said professors are the enemy and universities are the enemy. It's not just rhetoric now. It's becoming very, very real. So there's a temptation when you're under attack like this to a assert relevance to say, like, no, no, no, we universities, we really are important, we should not be attacked like this.

And in the modern era, for whatever reasons, deep sociological, economic, political reasons, I'm sure, that assertion of relevance often takes the form of saying that we are practically important, that going to a university is good for a human being because it helps train them to enter the workforce and get a good career and learn things. that will be valuable to them in some kind of economic transactional way. All that's true. I actually all believe that. I think that it's borne out by all the data that we have.

But I want to take a different tack. For this holiday message, I want to go back to talking about the idealistic, the romantic aspect of getting an education in the liberal arts at a college or university. To stand up for what John Henry Newman in a book that I read when I was an undergraduate called the idea of a university. Liberal education not as training for something else, but as an end in itself. I think that we need to do a better job at this. There's a podcast I recently recorded. It'll come out in January where we talked about the fact that the values of liberal democracy have been so taken for granted that now that they're under attack, we've become, we've almost

lost the ability to articulate those values and defend them very effectively, I think the same thing is true to some extent for the values of liberal education. There's even a lot of professors who wouldn't put these more idealistic, romantic ideals first when they talk about why universities are important. I'm an old softie. I'm a helpless romantic about these things. I think we should stand up for the impractical side of higher education to really think about what good it is as human beings confronting the world to not just learn how to do our jobs, but to be human beings in a more full and fulfilling sense of the word. So that's the heavy burden I have for this lighthearted, short, casual holiday message.

Let's go. Does everyone remember the movie Wally? Have you seen that one, the Pixar movie? It starts out with a cute robot all by itself on the ground of a desolated, unpopulated Earth post-apocalypse, presumably, falls in love with a satellite robot that he meets a much more advanced model. But there's a couple of scenes later in the movie that made a big impact on people that caused a lot of conversations.

We meet that there are human beings still around living in the satellites in space stations, and they've all kind of gone to seed, right? They're kind of happy, but they're unhealthily happy. They're all overweight and they can't walk anymore. They're riding around on these high-tech scooters that take them around by floating, levitation somehow. It's never really explained. You know, eating their fast food, et cetera.

And so this is a dystopian version of the future of humanity. I don't think it's the right dystopian version. after all, in fact, as someone pointed out, between OZempic and plastic surgery and various improvements in biotechnology, what we expect, maybe, is that even without exercising in the thousand-year future, everyone will look great. We can just, if we have enough money and technological wherewithal to do it, it shouldn't be that hard to give everyone quite toned and fit bodies if that's what we want. What I'm worried about is the intellectual version of that, that rather than using our technology to let us physically go to seed, will all look like Greek goddesses and goddesses, but we will not be able to think like good human beings anymore. That's a worry.

Maybe it's a slightly alarmist thing, but you can kind of see where that worry comes from. I mentioned some of the attacks on academia before. How are universities responding to some of these attacks? Many of them are cutting programs in the liberal arts and sciences, as useful as physics and economics and statistics programs at certain places, for example. There's a push in certain universities to make AI do as much as it possibly can. You know my views on AI. I'm for it in some ways.

I have contrarian views about it in other ways. But in particular, the idea that you should let AI do your work for you, I think is highly problematic. Actually, Jennifer, my wife, as who, as you know, is a science writer, she recently gave a guest lecture for a class led by a physicist, a friend of mine, friend of ours, at Johns Hopkins. And it was a class on communicating and writing and things like that, so it makes perfect sense. and the time that the class perked up, she said, was when they started talking about AI. And one of the students said, you know, she's not a native speaker of English, and she'll basically come up with the ideas and let AI do the writing. And the professor chimed in and said, yeah, I think that's fine.

What's important are the ideas, why not let the AI do your writing for you? And Jennifer, as a professional writer, you know, was struggling to contain her outrage at this. The point being that writing is a skill that you develop by doing it. You're not going to get in better physical fitness by letting AI lift weights for you. And it's not just a matter of learning to write better and learning to have that ability, but the process of writing helps you think. Anyone who's ever written something, an article or a book or whatever, knows that you go into it with great ideas,

and sometimes you come out of it with great ideas, but they're not articulated in exactly the same way, the process of struggling with it, of grasping those ideas, thinking about what you really mean, learning how to articulate them, that's part of the process of intellectually coming to understand

what you yourself are trying to say. And if you outsource that task to either another person or an artificial agent, you are missing out on the ability to grow in that way. So I'm kind of worried that that is the way that we're going as a society, or at least that's one possible dystopian root we might end up taking. So I want to warn against that, and I want to, like I said, in the intro, defend the ideals of a liberal education. This idea of a liberal education. It's an old one. You know, as we say when we talk about liberal democracy, it's not the word liberal in the sense of liberals versus conservatives in contemporary political discourse.

It's a more old-fashioned use of the word liberal. In fact, in this case, liberal arts and sciences or liberal education, education in particular, it refers to the idea that a liberal education is the education that is appropriate for a free person, a responsible adult, someone who is capable of participating thoughtfully in civic, intellectual, and moral public life. So it's something that goes way beyond being taught a trade, right? It goes way beyond vocational education. And I know that this is an over simplistic dichotomy because, you know, if you think that physics is part of the liberal arts and sciences,

which it simply surely is, when I took physics classes, I was both getting a liberal education, but also being trained from my profession. So they clearly bleed into each other. But I'm just saying that there is more to it than vocation. And by the way, there's nothing wrong with vocational education. We all need it in some ways. Perhaps for some people, a vocational education, that is to say, one that is laser focused on getting them prepared for a particular job that they want to hold in the future, maybe that's particularly appropriate for them. I'm open to that possibility. I just want to argue that for many, many, many people, for more than we give credit to, the idea of a broad-based arts and science.

liberal education is also very valuable. So what do I mean by that? The arts and science is the broadly based idea of what you should know to be a responsible participant in society and the moral life of the country and the community. You know what they include. The humanities, history, English, things like that. The natural sciences, physics, chemistry, astronomy, biology, biology. The social sciences, economics, sociology, psychology, things like that, mathematics and logical thinking, the fine arts, both visual arts and other arts. These are the traditional categories, and I'm again totally open for them to be expanded or contracted over time.

But you get the feeling that what they're there for is to shape who you are as a human being, not to train you to do some particular task. And so I think it's a legitimate question in this day and age. Is there room to care about the liberal arts and sciences as much as I personally would like us to do? Or are we past that? Have people sort of given up on that ideal? Are we just going to leave it for a small few to care about those things while the others are just trying to earn a living and then have good leisure time the rest of the time? And I want to completely admit as part of this whole conversation that, you know, like everyone else, I have my own history and biases and preferences, and I try to be open to the fact that other people are going to prefer different things. But I definitely did have a broad-based liberal education, and I value it very much.

You know, my own experience, I was an undergraduate at Bilanova, which at the time anyway, had an old school curriculum like a lot of Catholic schools do. we were required to take, you know, two semesters of science, two semesters of math, which I easily did, but then also three semesters of social sciences, three semesters of English, two semesters of history, three semesters of philosophy, three semesters of religious studies, two semesters of a foreign language. It was a little absurd in some ways to do all that and then also do a physics degree, but people did it all the time, and we were not broken by it. I think it's very, very doable. Hey, everyone, it's Cal Penn.

I'm the host of Earsay, the Audible and I Heart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I'm sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook Project Hail Mary, massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science, and what happens when you wake up alone very far from Earth? I really had to make a decision because I caught myself. getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections. And it's like, okay, yo, yeah, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it.

I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story. If I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me and I left it on the mic. That's great. Because it served the story. People will say like, oh my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and IHeart Audio Book Club on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Visit farmhousefresh skincare.com and use code radio for a free starter routine with any purchase. There's a lot of debate in academic circles about the extent to which we should require things of our students. Shouldn't, after all, we let our students make choices about what to take, etc. And I can absolutely see both sides about that. All I will say is I was absolutely required to take a bunch of things. things that I would not have taken. Sometimes those were a waste of time depending on the course, but also especially just depending on the professor. Not every professor is equally good. But many times I was exposed to things and learned things that were incredibly valuable

and eye-opening to me, things that I would not have chosen for myself. I do think that the thing about this period in your life, right, from years from about 18 to about 22, you know, the traditional four-year college curriculum. And again, I'm bracketing the fact that that's not appropriate for some people. That's fine. But that's what I'm talking about here. These are the perfect years to really be exposed to and think hard about a wide variety of ideas. because you know enough to really appreciate what you're learning about and to really dig your fingers into it and get into some of the details, really understand what it's like to grapple with some of the great ideas and thoughts that have been thought over the last several thousand years. But you don't know enough to really be sure what is perfect for you and what you don't need. You're still at a stage where you can really be surprised.

by being exposed to something new like that. So I'm in favor of at the undergraduate level pretty broad-based requirements to learn all sorts of things. As opposed to at the graduate level, graduate school really is vocational in a very real sense. You're supposed to learn how to become the practitioner of something if you're getting a master's degree or a scholar in something. If you're getting a PhD, that's fine. The requirements for distribution should be much, much less there. But this undergraduate experience is the romantic part. That's the last chance for a lot of people to really focus as their primary job on learning new things and thinking about them.

And there's an absolute delight in being nudged to learn something more than what you already knew you wanted to know. So I do think that the broadest possible conception of what the liberal arts and sciences are is really important. for the idea of a university. Why is it good? And so here is where it gets a little difficult because I'm not exaggerating when I say that to some extent we may have lost the ability to defend these values because we kind of take them for granted or at least we give lip service to them. But now they're truly under attack and we have to be better at saying why it is important. So I'm going to try my best to at least quickly and informally explain to you how I think about why it's important, and you will not be surprised that I'm going to start

by thinking about it from a complex systems perspective. You know, you hear me say the same things over and over again. I'm getting stuck in my ways. What can I say? What do I mean by a complex systems perspective? Human beings, think about human beings, right? The thing that strikes me for a long time about human beings as compared to other animals or plants or whatever inanimate objects is that we live lives of overwhelming choice, overwhelming possibility, right? Like right now, I predict right now you're listening to my podcast. I don't know what else you're doing. You might be doing other things as well, but you're listening to this podcast. But if you think about the space of possibilities for what you could do, your actions, right?

Over the next half hour, let's say, what could you do over the next half hour, all possibilities included? It's absolutely mind-boggling. It's an extraordinary variety of things you could do. It's practically, it's effectively infinite. I mean, you could just sit down and listen to the podcast. I encourage that. That's a perfectly good choice.

You could wander into a local coffee shop and propose marriage to somebody. You could buy a plane ticket and fly to Madagascar, right? you could run down the street shouting political slogans of whatever form you wanted. There's a million different things you could do. You could start writing that novel, okay? I mean, a million is a huge under estimate of the number of things you could effectively do. And that's overwhelming. Like, if we, at every moment of our lives, try to sift through all the possible things we could do

and try to, in a responsible way, decide which one would. be the best for us at that moment of time, there's just no way, right? You can't effectively do that. That's just not a strategy for getting through the day. Maybe there should be sometimes in your life where you sit back, take a breath, reflect, try to think about the choices you're making, but you can't do it constantly, right? The space of possibilities is too enormous. And also, importantly, human beings do have the mental capacities to somewhat appreciate the space of possibilities, right? Remember the podcast we did with Adam Bully, who talked about mental time travel as the central thing that makes us human. That is to say, the ability to put ourselves imaginatively into hypothetical future situations and think about what it would be like.

other animals don't have that same capacity, at least not to the extent that we do. You know, look, I have cats, as you've often heard me talk about. They have their ups and downs. They're happy sometimes. They're unhappy other times. But they don't really get embarrassed at their mistakes. They don't really worry about making a bad first impression with somebody. Certainly not.

They don't worry about choosing the wrong job or whatever. They basically go through the day on the basis of a, relatively small number of urges and responses. It's completely unsurprising to me that human beings tend to be anxious neurotic messes a lot of the time. I'm kind of surprised that they're not much worse. It's, again, overwhelming the number of things that we can think about, the number of choices we can make. How do we negotiate this enormous space of possibilities? This is a very traditional complex systems question. How does a complex system sift through the actions, space of what it can do and what the ramifications and consequences would be. You're never going to get

the perfect answer to that. You're not Laplace's demon, right? You need some heuristics. You need some strategies. You need some rules of thumb, some algorithms, some way to narrow down the choices to the realistic ones, the ones that you're going to take seriously. And then you can think carefully about what those would actually entail. So that's fine. That's good. But this narrowing down of the space of possibilities often goes unarticulated, and I think that could be a mistake in some ways. We can go too far in narrowing down the space of options that we will consider realistically. You know, there are norms, there are customs, there are social expectations, and all of these are double-edged swords, right? There's real reasons why we have these customs and norms. They

help us get through the day. Like there's certain natural things to do. If you're meeting, somebody for the first time. There's certain things that you could imagine saying that would be polite and appropriate. There are other things that you just shouldn't say upon beating people for the first time, and that's good. That gives us a set of shared expectations to work with. But if you take it too far, it can push you in a direction of either cultural or personal conservatism, a reaction against people and opportunities that are not within your personal personal space of acceptable options. And also sometimes what becomes customary and conventional can also be harmful to yourself or to other people and needs to be overturned and fighting

against that impulse just for the sake of sticking with customs or just because you're afraid of difference or things that you're not used to would be bad. So on the one hand, we need these strategies for cutting down and making realistic subsets of the space of options. On the other hand, we also need to be open to expanding those spaces into really taking seriously new possibilities. And I do, the punchline of this is not going to be a surprise. I think that this is one of the things that a liberal education equips us to do in a better way. Let me give one another sort of background thought about this. I already mentioned the complexity thing. The other thing I'm going to mention, because it's just me talking, I'm allowed to talk about whatever I want

during the holiday message, is natural philosophy. Okay, what do I mean by that? You know, Jan Ismail and I, as you know, former Minescape guest, have started this natural philosophy forum at Johns Hopkins, bringing together scientists and philosophers, talking about questions of common interest. But it always raises the question. What do you mean by natural philosophy? And I have my own sort of pat answers. They're pretty simplistic and obvious. Jananne, with her more finely tuned philosophical mind, has thought through it more deeply. So we're contemplating writing a manifesto, a manifesto for natural philosophy, saying what it is and why we think it's valuable.

And she said more than just methodology. You know, in other words, there's a methodological component to natural philosophy, which is get the philosophers and scientists together in the room, get them thinking about the questions they both care about. But in her conception, there's also a substantive component to what natural philosophy is that can be summarized by the motto of, there are no essences. I know that may or may not make a big impression upon you, depending on how you think about these. What do you mean?

There really are no essences to things. So what she means is what we study in natural philosophy is what things do. And to some extent what they are, that's okay, but that's a little bit dicey or what you mean by that. I remember back in the day when I was writing blog posts about how the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood. I got the pushback, you know, many different kinds of pushback to that. But one of them was like, what do you mean? You don't understand gravity. And I would say, I'm a little confused by why you would say that.

Like, surely we don't understand everything about gravity. We don't understand black holes, information. We don't understand what happened in the Big Bang, but there's a lot we understand about gravity. We understand the orbits of the planets and things like that. And the response was, no, no, no. You have equations that tell you how gravity behaves, but you don't really understand gravity, man. Like, you don't really get it. And that was honestly educational for me because I had never thought of that attitude as a possible attitude to have.

That is the opposite of the attitude of natural philosophy in Janine as males. a conception, which I think is a good conception to have. Once you understand what it does, that's it. That's what you understand. There's nothing more to know than how this thing behaves in the world, how to model it, what actually happens in the world. When she says there's no essences, when you think about a human being and you, well, forget about, let's get to human beings in a second. Think about the ship of Theseus, right, which we talk about all the time. famous puzzle. Thesias had this ship. It's been around a long time. At some point, every single board or piece of equipment on the ship has been replaced. There's no atoms in the ship of Theseus

that were there when it was first made. Is it still the ship of Theseus? You know, yes, it is the ship of Theseus because how couldn't it be? The reason why you might have suspected it's not the ship of Theseus anymore is because you thought that there was some essence of the ship of Theseus. that exists through time, right, and is embodied or instantiated in these particular atoms or something like that, as opposed to a view where the ship of Theseus is a pattern that persists through time. And, you know, maybe it gets damaged and it becomes less like what it used to be. But that's inevitable. That's okay.

And maybe it becomes not very useful anymore to refer to it as the ship of Theseus anymore. That's fine. You can have that argument. But there wasn't any essence that was traveling through time that was attached to these particular boards that made it the ship of Theseus. And that's also true for human beings. The ship of Theseus at 6 a.m. one morning is not the exact same thing as it is at 7 a.m. the same morning, even if you didn't replace any bits. It's aged a little bit. People have walked on the decks. Maybe it's in a different location. Okay. It's a process in a very real sense unfolding through time. rather than an essence that accumulates and instantiates itself in some physical way. It may be easy to wrap our minds around in the case of a ship, in the case of a human being, we have to be nudged towards thinking of it that way, but that's exactly what I am trying to get at. We should be treating people as processes, as things that unfold over time, rather than, you know, your friends in high school just have a thing who they are, and somehow that has been changed or damaged or misplaced when they went to college,

that's the wrong way to think about it, I think. I would rather focus on the becoming rather than the being. Less parmenides, more heraclitus. This is an old lesson. I got no claim to priority here. Various aspects of Buddhism or Taoism would have told you the same thing. It's okay to change over time. And not only is it okay, but we become who we become.

we are by the ways that we change over time, by how we act. It's not that we are a thing, and that thing behaves in certain ways under certain stimuli. We are defining what we are by the ways that we behave over time. My best skin ever at 45? Give me a theme song and a best skincare award, because it feels like this, right there. That's Farmhouse Fresh skin all right. I'm glowing and everyone asks how. The best skincare is Farmhouse Fresh and the award is you, your best you. Visit Farmhousefresh skincare.com and use code radio for a free starter routine with any purchase. And the connection is that a liberal education changes you, as I mentioned in the intro, and especially in the sense that it prepares you for the inevitable changes.

to come. It helps you figure out who you are and who you want to be by giving you the tools to better articulate those choices about who you are. One very down-to-earth way, I put it recently. I think I've mentioned this story maybe on the podcast before, but I was recently filmed by Johns Hopkins. They're making a marketing video for the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, where I am a professor. And so they're trying to tell prospective students how awesome Johns Hopkins is, et cetera. And I don't know, I was just talking into a camera for a while. And I mentioned, look, you all want training.

You all want to be prepared for the world. But think about what it would mean to learn how to surf, to learn how to be a good surfer, right? You would not be well educated as a surfer if your surfing instructor said, okay, once you start, three seconds after you start, tilt to the left, and then two seconds after that, tilt to the right, and then tilt back a couple seconds after that, as if you could predict exactly what the waves were going to do. That's not the point of learning to be a good surfer. Rather, you want to accumulate a set of techniques, a set of responses, a set of capacities, a set of capacities to deal with situations that are not perfectly predictable themselves. That's the ultimate goal of a liberal education. You don't know who you're going to be 10 years after you graduate from college, 20, 30, 40 years.

You can't just prepare for your next or first job. You have to prepare to be a person. And over the course of human history, there's no better way to do that than the traditional liberal education. This is very different than a more or less short-sighted view of like, what good is this for me kind of thing? thing. There's a cartoon. There was a Saturday morning breakfast cereal cartoon. You know, Saturday morning breakfast cereal is the web comic by Zach Wienersmith, a former Minescape guest. And the cartoon, a young kid clearly like in high school or something like that, taking an algebra class. They were learning some formulas. I don't know what it was, the quadratic formula or whatever.

The kid raises his hand and asks the teacher, when will I ever use something like this? Is this going to be useful to me? And the teacher says, oh, no, it's not going to be useful to you. It might be useful to some of the smart kids, but not to you, which is hilarious as a joke, but also a little unfair. It's not really true. Because I think a lot of the reason why people get resistant to the lesson or the claim that a liberal arts and sciences education is useful to how they live in their lives is that it becomes very, very difficult to precisely connect what you learn during your education to specific things you end up knowing later on in life. We can learn things, we can absorb lessons without articulating 20 years later. Oh, yes, I learned how to deal with this in my history class when I was a sophomore or something like that.

That's not how it ever has worked or is supposed to work. Because again, what this education in the broad-based ways of thinking about our social and moral and natural worlds is supposed to do is introduce us to possibilities and ways of dealing with them. And if it goes well, we internalize those lessons. We don't carry them in a filing cabinet and look them up in the appropriate moment. We have them with us at all times and they affect at a subconscious level how we deal with them. things. If you take an art history class, you might say, like, I want to be a computer programmer. What good is an art history class to me? The point is that the art history class is not about going to museums and recognizing a certain artist or a certain technique or whatever. Art history

is about seeing. It's about experiencing. It's about feeling. It's about understanding at a more detailed level, the role played by shadows or perspective or composition. And these are lessons that transcend looking at a painting in a museum. They're much broader than that if they are done well. You don't take a poetry class because you're necessarily going to be reading or writing a lot of poetry later in life. It's to appreciate the rhythms of language. The richness of imagery and simile and metaphor.

the artistry of speech in sound and connotation. And these are things that can be with you. No matter what your job is, we all use words and sentences. It might not be writing poetry, but the lessons are deeper than that. Taking a history class is not about memorizing names and dates. It's about being exposed to an extraordinary variety of human experiences throughout the world. If you learn that China used to have a giant fleet pre-Columbus that could have sailed the world and conquered lots of different places, but they chose to dismantle it, that changes maybe how you think about the world. If you learn about pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas, that might change your view of our half of the world here in the Western Hemisphere.

For those of you in the Western Hemisphere, if you learn about the Trail of Tears or the history of slavery in the U.S. or how we treated Navy. Americans, that might affect your views. If you learn about the history of the U.S. vis-a-vis how much of it was owned by Mexico and taken over, that might also affect your views. If you learn about ancient Egypt and Babylon and the beginnings of civilization, that might affect your views in some way. Even if you just learned that a lot of those scenes in Game of Thrones, where terrible things happen in royal courts, were actually just rewritten versions of things that really did happen in Royal Courts in medieval Europe, that might change your views as well. Again, in ways you might not be able to articulate later, but are inevitably there.

Taking science classes isn't about making new technology or even living with that technology. It's about appreciating, you know, the capacities and limitations in how we describe the natural world. and also about understanding why certain theories of how the natural world works are more acceptable than others. What are our standards for believing a scientific hypothesis and rejecting others? What does evidence mean? What does it mean to have error bars, right? What does it mean to analyze data in a fair and impartial way? Why should we do controlled trials?

Why can I just use the stories that my friends have told me on Facebook, right? science classes should be teaching you those things as well as a group of formulas. Math isn't about just solving equations. It's about understanding rigor and proof and for that matter the very notion of abstraction. Math and poetry and art history and biology are all very different from each other, but there are reasons why they are grouped together in the liberal arts and sciences. These are the things, the disciplines that are both intrinsically, scholarly interesting and teach us something substantive about the world, but also give us modes of thought

that we might not otherwise really master, and those modes of thoughts, who knows when they're going to be useful to us in our lives? I mean, more than anything, a liberal education nudges us to expand a worldview beyond ourselves and our most common experiences, to appreciate alternative modes of living and thinking and acting. And if there's anything that's true in the modern world where we're more connected to more people and to other places than we've ever been before, it's that ability that need to deal with things that are surprising and different and unfamiliar without just being scared or rejecting of them, but thinking them through, trying to understand what's going on in exactly a way that a liberal education is supposed to equip.

us to do. So the final thing, I guess, is I don't want it to be read as I'm saying that getting a good liberal education makes you a better person. I mean, maybe it does sometimes. That's absolutely possible. But there's also counter examples. I know plenty of people who've gotten a deep liberal education who turned out not to be great people. You can use these tools in all sorts of different ways. It's not exactly the same, but I always remember when I was in grad school, And there was this incident where this like terribly sexist thing was published by the student newspaper of the Harvard Law School, or one of the many student newspapers, I should say, or student publications. And Lawrence Tribe, who's a famous law professor at Harvard just in an interview, he lamented, he just said, what am I doing here? I think that I'm giving them tools to deal with the world.

I'm just sharpening their knives. And I think that that's a plausible thing. That is something that is absolutely there. I am not saying that liberal education makes you a better person. You can put it to wrong ends if you want to do that. But then again, vocational training doesn't necessarily make you a better person either. What liberal education does is it equips us to become better versions of who we choose to be, an ability to enhance ourselves in the way that is ultimately up to us.

And I think that that's the most we can ask for. That's more deep, more lasting, more profound, more important than just getting trained for a job as important as that may be. This ability to become who we are and then leaving it up to us to make that a good thing, that is a value worth defending. So thank you for listening to my little rant about the romance of the university. And happy holidays to everyone. happy end of 2025. Here we go.

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