I would like to start by describing what I like to call the Intellectual's Youthful Dream. What is this dream? It is that when he comes to college, he will at last find a community of like minded souls with whom he can share his interests, without fear of disfavor. It is the dream of a land of avid historians, free thinkers and poets, of budding classicists, of those striving to understand nothing less than the entire universe.
The young fellow soon learns to learn that college is, by and large, nothing like his grand imaginings. It is a wasteland strewn with drone-like careerists, narrow minded political and religious ideologues, and devotees of drink and the flesh -- half whorehouse and half trade school. The young intellectual learns that he is a member of a beleaguered and distrusted minority, and that his interests are best served by keeping his enthusiasms to himself. He learns, in short, that life isn't very different from the way it was in high school.
There is something very disturbing, something smacking of falsehood, in the way that even the very best colleges promise the dream only to hand out a dreary reality. Where are those places where the life of the mind takes pride of place? Where are the students seeking enlightenment like hungry men seek to eat? Whither those for whom "For lust of knowing what should not be known/We take the Golden Road to Samarkand" seems fitting? I shall be generous and say there are perhaps ten such students on our entire campus, and that perhaps one in ten thousand of the general populace would qualify.
My numbers should indicate that I am not speaking merely of the studious, or of those with high GPA's. For my purposes such conventional measures are irrelevant. What I am talking about is a certain level of mental functioning not assessed by such criteria as GPA's and study hours. I am speaking about those who have a genuine interest not just in achieving certain career goals, but in learning in all its forms. Such people know that the world is a unity, and see no reason to compartmentalize their mental lives. They are not merely scientists, would-be professionals or humanists, but pursuers of the true and the beautiful wherever these may be found.
Concomitant with this broad range of interests is both a willingness and an ability to function at high levels in whatever one attempts -- I am not interested in the dilettante who takes a survey course in philosophy or economics, but the student who will also go on, out of sheer interest, to study the foundations of logic or the theory of rational expectations, even when his major and career are entirely unrelated to these things. The kind of student I am describing might even have no need of survey courses, preferring to learn background material himself, wading in at a higher level, where interactions with professors would be more fruitful.
Another, and particularly crucial, character trait of the truly reflective is an ability to transfer material learned in an one setting to other arenas. It is astounding how few students even at Dartmouth are truly capable of this -- one has so-called economics majors being unable to make a connection between the their lectures on wage-theory and the degree of structural employment in America, of mathematics majors who confuse causation and correlation, of psychology majors unable to appreciate the powerful influences of proximity and familiarity on who they end up being best friends with -- assuming they're even genuinely interested in their studies at all.
It is nothing less than optimistic to ask students incapable of this little to appreciate the importance of more esoteric matters such as the relationship of mathematical knowledge to reality, the philosophic implications of the second law of thermodynamics and the value of Hubble's constant, or even the influence of traditional Japanese architecture on modern home designs. It is especially optimistic to believe them able and willing to think about such things in a precise and empirical fashion, on their own initiative, with the sole aim in view of determining the truth.
It is true enough that these qualities are not necessary to achieve a moderate level of success in life, if by success all one means is prestige and financial security. Such qualities are only important if one wishes to "Bestride the world like a Colossus"-- which unfortunately most Dartmouth students do not. The irony is that those who have achieved the greatest success in matters such as material accumulation have tended disproportionately to be of the type I have described -- the world offers mediocrity no true refuge.
