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Who Teaches Baby Greek? And Who Should?

January 22, 2023 in Uncategorized | Permalink

Mabel Lang taught at Bryn Mawr from 1943 until 1988, and for nearly every semester of those forty-five years she taught elementary Greek. The course became so popular that she often taught two sections, one at eight o’clock in the morning and the other at nine. You can read about her here.

Prof. Mabel Lang teaching, seated at a desk in front of a blackboard.

I thought of Mabel the other day when this essay by Blake Smith appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  It has to do with the writing centers that feature on nearly every college campus these days, and by extension with the teaching of writing generally. In the writer’s view, college writing centers are ineffective, jargon-infested hives of neo-liberal practice, like the assertion that a good essay “delivers value” to its reader, and of progressive theory about race and capitalism. (Quite how neo-liberalism and woke piety manage to sit in the same room goes unexplained.) They fail in their plain duty, to teach students how to write.

I know little about teaching English composition, and the merits of writing centers are not my concern here. I want to think instead about a two-fold assumption that receives only passing attention in Smith’s essay: that the actual delivery of instruction in composition is in the hands of graduate students, adjuncts, and other dwellers on the lower rungs of the academic hierarchy that culminates in tenured full professors, and that instructors of composition and other elementary subjects wish they were somewhere else. As Smith puts it, “instructors at writing centers, chafing at their low status within their institutions and fields, and resenting that they are often called upon to bring students up to speed rather than to do what is perceived as more serious intellectual work, try to give some gravitas to their positions by charging the simple but difficult work of writing with a complicated new conceptual vocabulary or pompous assertions of their own social importance.”

This hierarchical dynamic certainly holds true for my own field. In most colleges and universities, including Bryn Mawr, tenured faculty do not teach the early stages of Greek and Latin, and most would be horrified, I think, at the thought that they should. Recently I suggested to one of my senior colleagues, a retired full professor, that it would be good if people like her brought their accumulated wisdom to the teaching of elementary or intermediate languages. She opined that she didn’t want to take a job away from the graduate students to whom it rightfully belonged. A few years ago, I interviewed at a large, midwestern state university for a job overseeing and guiding the graduate students who taught elementary and intermediate languages. During the interview, I suggested that one of my goals would be to have every member of the department, including senior faculty, teach intermediate Greek or Latin at least once every five years. The learned men and women sat in stunned silence before moving on to the next question.

Many senior college and university classicists, I suspect, have stopped thinking of themselves as language teachers. Their calling, they argue, is a higher one: to convey to students the complex ideas and critical theories that constitute the conversation of the humanities in modern universities. They have spent a lifetime, they might argue, becoming expert in Plato’s metaphysics or ancient religions or Roman political theory, and in the modern ideas, from Althusser to Žižek, that shape those topics. Why should they waste their time with the ablative absolute?

I can think of three reasons: first, to show that they care about the ablative absolute; that is, that they care about the close, analytical reading that lies at the heart of classical studies. (Assuming, of course, that they do believe that—there are signs that the belief is not universal.) Second, to show that beginners and beginnings matter, and so that a first-year student beginning Greek is as important to them and to their professional ambition as a graduate student writing a dissertation on Pindar. (This was the message sent by Lionel Trilling every time he taught a section of the required freshman humanities course at Columbia.) Third, because to teach anything is to set your person before students as an example, and beginning students may need the example of senior scholars.

Is it a waste of time and talent for tenured full professors at the height of their scholarly prowess to teach Greek 101?  Mabel Lang didn’t think so.

~Lee T. Pearcy

 

Update 2/8/2023:  Above I wondered “how neo-liberalism and woke piety manage to sit in the same room ”  A hint of an answer appeared in this essay, also from the Chronicle of Higher Education:

DEI Inc. is a logic, a lingo, and a set of administrative policies and practices. The logic is as follows: Education is a product, students are consumers, and campus diversity is a customer-service issue that needs to be administered from the top down. (“Chief diversity officers,” according to an article in Diversity Officer Magazine, “are best defined as ‘change-management specialists.’”) DEI Inc. purveys a safety-and-security model of learning that is highly attuned to harm and that conflates respect for minority students with unwavering affirmation and validation.

(Anna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder, “Yes, DEI Can Erode Academic Freedom,” Chronicle of Higher Education 2/6/2023.)

 

 

 

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The Ghost in the Machine is a Sophomore

December 17, 2022 in Uncategorized | Permalink

ChatGPT, a natural language processing tool that draws on a ginormous pool of online text to produce answers to prompts that sometimes pass the Turing Test, has been generating a lot of buzz lately, mostly of the “I’m a journalist—will this put me out of business?” variety. I gave it a run (it’s available here) and came away with the impression that it is one of those polymorphous technologies that human beings have created, adapted, and used to realize new possibilities in human nature. In that it resembles two other mimetic technologies: alphabetic writing and photography.

I started by giving ChatGPT a prompt based on one of my current projects: “Write a 2000-word essay on ‘Time, Texts, and Fate in the Aeneid’.” The answer was astonishingly good, about what an able undergraduate might produce given the same prompt on an examination—with one exception. It was exactly 2000 words long and ended in the middle of a sentence. That truncation is significant. It shows that ChatGPT lacks phenomenological sense. Most human writers have a mental image of their completed work before they start—what genre it belongs to, how long it needs to be, what reading it will feel like. But unlike a human writer, ChatGPT can’t form an idea of its completed essay—or anything else. (I’ll append ChatGPT’s 2000 words at the end of this post.)

Then I resorted to the modern equivalent of Googling yourself: “Tell me what you know about Lee Pearcy.” The answer was reassuring: “I’m sorry, but I don’t have any information about a person named Lee Pearcy. Could you provide more context or background information about the person you are asking about?”

All right, ChatGP—let’s see how you are with languages other than English. “Dove si trova la chiesa di Santa Maria sopra Minerva?”

La chiesa di Santa Maria sopra Minerva si trova a Roma, in Italia. Si trova nei pressi della piazza del Pantheon e della piazza della Minerva, nel quartiere romano di Campo de’ Fiori. La chiesa è considerata uno dei principali esempi di architettura gotica a Roma e ospita alcune opere d’arte di grande importanza, come il monumento funebre di Maria Christina di Sassonia, realizzato da Antonio Canova.

Not bad at all, but ChatGPT commits the same error that many students make: giving more information than the question asks, and so risking that the information supplied will be incorrect. As far as I know, Santa Maria sopra Minerva contains no tomb by Canova, whose monument to Maria Christina of Austria (not Saxony) is in a church in Vienna.

How about Latin, and staying in the same neighborhood?  “Ubi est templum ‘Pantheon’ nominatum, et a quo aedificatum est?”

The Pantheon was a temple located in Rome, Italy. It was named after the gods of ancient Rome, and was dedicated to all the gods of the pantheon. The Pantheon was built by the Roman Emperor Hadrian and was completed in 126 AD. It was originally built as a temple to honor the gods, but it was later converted into a Christian church.

Not so good. The prompt is unambiguously Latin, but ChatGPT failed to recognize the language and homed in on the word “Pantheon” to produce an answer out of a not very well-informed guidebook for tourists.

I tried again but moved away from buildings in Rome: “Quando mortuus est Vergilius poeta, et ubi sepultus?”

Vergilius, qui fuit poeta Romanus celeberrimus, mortuus est die 21 Septembris anno 19 a.C. in Neapoli. Sepultus est in campus Martius Romae, ubi tumulus ei a Caesaris imperatore factus est.

Vergilius est auctor carminum epicorum “Aeneis” et “Eclogarum”, qui adhuc hodie in universis mundi partibus leguntur et venerantur. In Aeneide, Vergilius historiam Troianae urbis et Aeneae, qui fuit Troianus princeps, narrat, qui post Troianam destructionem ad Italiam profugit et ibi Romanam gentem condidit. Eclogae vero sunt carmina pastoralia, quae de amore, amicitia, et rusticis vitae aspectibus agunt.

Vergilius est etiam poeta didacticus, qui in “Georgicis” de agris colendis et de animalium cura scripsit. Opus eius maximum et optima notum est “Aeneis”, in qua Vergilius heroicos mores et virtutes Romanorum describit et glorificat.

Well, that’s better—but cue John Cleese’s schoolmasterly centurion in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”:

“In Neapoli?  In Neapoli?? Neapolis is the name of a city, town, or small island, you ignorant twit!  Case?  Case?

“Uh, abl—no, no, locative.  Locative!”

And so on. Here, too, ChatGPT writes about as well as a fairly able student. Wobbly Latin—“in campus” for in campo and “by the emperor of Caesar”—is nothing, however, next to the surprising information that Vergil was buried in a tomb built by Augustus on the Campus Martius and the suggestion that the Bucolics are among Vergil’s epic poems. From what fragment of online Latin did ChatGPT generate those bits of information? (In fairness, later in the paragraph ChatGPT does get the genre of the Bucolics right.)

All this was great fun, but it set me to wondering. Do human beings consistently underestimate or undervalue our capacity for creativity and playfulness? And as a result, do mimetic technologies—those that imitate our distinctively human characteristics, like language or image-making—generate anxieties that, so far at least, have proved groundless?

The most notorious such anxiety, which has come up more than once in articles about artificial intelligence in general and ChatGPT in particular, is Plato’s worry about the technology of writing, which he feared would destroy men’s power to remember ideas and arguments and so produce an illusion of wisdom. In the Phaedrus, he has Socrates invent a conversation between two Egyptian gods, whom he calls Thamus and Theuth. Theuth, the ibis-headed god better known as Thoth, has invented writing and brings his new toy to Thamus.

“This invention, O king,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.”

But Thamus replied, “Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.”

                                                                         Phaedrus 274e–275b

Socrates was, in a way, right. Greek culture changed with its adoption of alphabetic writing, and perhaps Greeks no longer used their memories in the same way as they had. But they used them in new ways: to create texts that were hard to remember, like prose histories—and Plato’s dialogues.

Similarly the invention of photography led to predictions of the death of painting, because painting was, by the doom-sayers at least, thought to be equivalent to making an exact likeness. But once again, under the pressure of a technology that seemed to imitate one of our characteristic practices, human beings imagined new ways of putting paint on surfaces and new ways of thinking about what it meant to do so. And one Cézanne is worth a dozen pictures of Napoleon and his troops, accurate down to the last epaulette and button, by Mesonnier.

ChatGPT and its less sophomoric successors may mean the automation of some kinds of writing, and some teachers of writing may have to rethink what they do. But teachers of writing, and writing itself, will last a while yet, and I, for one, will not regret the demise of the five-paragraph essay.

~Lee T. Pearcy

 

Update 12/21/2022:  See now this account from the Wall Street Journal of ChatGPT in an AP English class.

Appendix: Chat GPT’s response to “Write a 2000-word essay on ‘Time, Texts, and Fate in the Aeneid’.”

The concept of time, and its relationship to fate, plays a central role in Virgil’s epic poem “The Aeneid.” Throughout the poem, Virgil uses various textual devices to illustrate the ways in which time and fate intersect and shape the lives of the characters. At the same time, the poem itself serves as a kind of text, a written record of the events and characters that it describes. In this essay, I will explore how time, texts, and fate are interconnected in “The Aeneid,” examining the ways in which they influence and reflect upon one another.

One of the central themes of “The Aeneid” is the role of fate in shaping the lives of the characters. From the very beginning of the poem, Virgil makes it clear that the events that transpire are predetermined by the gods. The Trojans, for example, are destined to found a new city in Italy, a fate that is foretold by the prophecy of the Cumaean Sibyl. Similarly, the fate of the Trojan hero Aeneas is determined by the gods, who ensure that he will eventually become the founder of Rome.

The concept of fate is closely tied to the passage of time in “The Aeneid.” As the poem progresses, we see that the fates of the characters are often connected to the passage of time, whether it is the passage of years, or the fleeting moments of a single day. For example, Aeneas’s journey to Italy is marked by the passage of time, as he travels from place to place, encountering various challenges and obstacles along the way. Similarly, the fates of the characters are often linked to the passage of time, with certain events being foretold or predestined to happen at a specific moment.

One of the key textual devices that Virgil uses to illustrate the relationship between time and fate is the use of prophecy. Throughout “The Aeneid,” we see that various characters are given prophecies about their future, which shape their actions and decisions. The most notable example of this is the prophecy of the Cumaean Sibyl, which foretells the future of the Trojans, and serves as a guiding force for Aeneas and his companions. Other examples of prophecy in the poem include the predictions made by the Trojan seer Helenus, and the prophecies of the gods themselves, who frequently intervene in the lives of the characters to shape their fates.

Another important aspect of time in “The Aeneid” is the way in which it is connected to the concept of history. Throughout the poem, we see that the events and characters are situated within a larger historical context, with Virgil using various textual devices to situate the events within a specific time period. For example, the poem is set against the backdrop of the Trojan War, and many of the characters and events are directly connected to this conflict. At the same time, the events of the poem are also shaped by the larger context of Roman history, with the eventual founding of Rome serving as a key event in the story.

The concept of history is closely tied to the idea of text in “The Aeneid.” Throughout the poem, we see that the written word plays a central role in shaping the events and characters. For example, the prophecy of the Cumaean Sibyl is written down and passed on from generation to generation, serving as a guiding force for the Trojans. Similarly, the deeds of the Trojan hero Aeneas are recorded and passed down through the ages, becoming the stuff of legend and myth. In this way, the written word serves as a kind of text, a record of the events and characters that it describes, and a

 

 

 

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Outtakes on the Fourth

June 30, 2022 in Uncategorized | Permalink

The following paragraphs were originally part of an effort to explain the complexities and multiple viewpoints of the Aeneid. I thought they might find a place in Aeneas (University of Michigan Press 2021), but as often happens, the book took a different direction. I offer them here as a thought for the Fourth of July.

~Lee T. Pearcy
July 4, 2022

 

What if you tried to write a story—a poem, a novel—that would explain to us, to Americans in the 21st century, who we are and how we came to be.  Which story would you tell?

You might tell a story of triumph:  how small groups of Europeans braved the Atlantic crossing to find religious and civil liberty; how thirteen British colonies patched together a fragile coalition and separated from mother England; how we tested that coalition in a great civil war and emerged from it as a unified nation, rapidly expanding across a continent; how we fought and survived and prospered in the terrible world wars of the twentieth century.  The names of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Lee, of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt would figure large in your story.  It would explain some of the things we value:  liberty, the rule of law, tolerance.

That story has been told.

Or you might tell a story of decline:  how a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” lost sight of its founding ideals and their grounding in Judeo-Christian ideals; how an agrarian republic became an industrial power, and how the forces of capital triumphed in our Civil War and replaced chattel slavery with wage slavery; how growing prosperity brought with it a culture of self-indulgence and celebrity; how scientific advance and economic prosperity enabled moral and spiritual decline; how we became a fading imperial state with a broken educational system, a debased underclass, and a middle class deprived of hope.  This story would explain the daily headlines.  Once past Lincoln, there would be few heroes.

That story has been told.

Or you might tell a third story, a story of genocide, oppression, and struggle:  how Europeans at first displaced, betrayed, and then slaughtered the indigenous population of North America; how a small cadre of English bourgeois and third-tier aristocrats so objected to the relatively light economic contribution asked by the mother country that they separated from it and constructed a federal republic in their own interests; how that republic was from its beginning, and before its beginning, stained by inequality and racism; how we fought a war of imperial conquest under the pretext of liberating Texas from Mexico and a civil war to promote the interests of northeastern industrialists; how our history has been shaped by the forces of empire, racism, and greed; and on the other hand, how from Shay’s Rebellion through the Abolitionists to the civil rights movement, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter, some have been in continual struggle against them.  The names of Lincoln, John Brown, Nat Turner, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King would figure large in your story.

That story also has been told.

Those are the American stories of triumph, decline, and struggle.  There may be other American stories to tell.  What has not been told, and perhaps cannot be told, is a harder story:  how these are all the same story, and how all of them are true:  how our love of liberty and our history of inequality are, as Burke suggested, inextricably intertwined, and each necessary to the other and impossible without the other;[1] how racism and intolerance are so much part of our American self that we must continually invent new forms of them, and ways to oppose them; how rising standards of living and the development of a diverse, multicultural society made income inequality and a declining middle class inevitable.[2]

In the Aeneid, Vergil tries to tell that kind of hard story about Rome.  Rome’s triumph is inevitable, as Jupiter confirms early in the poem.  But that triumph can only happen at the cost of immense struggle, labor.  The forces opposing it—furor, both divine and human—are also those that make it possible.

[1] Burke, On Conciliation: Southerners valued liberty “with a higher and more stubborn spirit” than other Americans. “Such will be all masters of slaves, who are not slaves themselves. … In such a people, the haughtiness of domination combines with the spirit of freedom, fortifies it, and renders it invincible.”

[2] As argued for France by Christophe Guilluy: http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/elections/2017/05/french-fracture

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Philology as Decolonization

April 9, 2022 in Uncategorized | Permalink

A few words in a book I’m reading set me to thinking. In The Solitary Sphere in the Age of Virgil (2021), Aaron Kachuck writes, “To reintroduce the solitary sphere to antiquity, therefore, is one way of ‘decolonizing antiquity’” (p. 22). The context is a discussion of ways of reading in the Greco-Roman world, and how our assumptions about them reflect a distinctly modern, post-Enlightenment, and European idea of the ancient world. Kachuck wants us to pay attention to what the ancient world tells us about itself—to center their voices, not ours. It’s a good idea with at least one surprising implication.

Nowadays, “decolonizing” some academic field usually means helping those in it to recognize that their view of “the other” is grounded in whiteness, Eurocentrism, racism, the patriarchy, and other bad cooties that cling to us as we trudge through this vale of woe, to repent of these sins, and to set out to do better by “centering the voices” of the formerly subaltern, colonized folks. Classics has been a prime candidate for this reformation because of its entanglement with European and American colonization and imperialism. (Way back in the 1960s, one of my teachers used to say, only half in jest, that the best answer to the question, “What is classics good for?” was “Governing India.”)

Calls to “decolonize classics” often include two elements: changing the name of the field, and deemphasizing or eliminating entirely the study of Greek and Latin. (See for example this article from the now-defunct but still influential online journal Eidolon.) Princeton’s recent decision that its undergraduate classics majors don’t have to know either language, which has its defenders and critics, seems to have come at least in part from the same impulse.

Kachuck’s aside, though, suggests a more radical approach to decolonizing classics. First, though, we have to find the country that needs decolonization. That turns out to be less easy than one might think. Most people, I suspect, would agree with Wikipedia’s tautological definition: “Classics or classical studies is the study of classical antiquity,” which in the western world is defined as ancient Greece and Rome. The more one looks at this thing called “classics,” though, the more it looks like art or pornography. Everyone knows it when they see it, but no one can say exactly what it is, or where its boundaries are. Ancient Greek cities, with agoras, theaters, and gymnasia, can be found in Europe, Africa, and Asia and from Sicily to Afghanistan; ancient Romans, speaking Latin and quoting Vergil, ranged from Britain to Libya and Iran. We lump these two cultures together, but on examination they, and their two languages that inhabit a single academic department, prove to be very different. Only by pruning and shaping this jungle of culture can we get to the idea of “classics” that animates curriculum in schools and universities: a culture, European and western (it was not entirely either), that established the foundations of science and philosophy and left an legacy of imperishable art and literature that can form and educate a human being. But that ideal, cherry-picked “classics” is a creation of the people who use it. We have made it in our own images—and if we have, can we then study it as though it was something separate from us, about which we can have objective knowledge? Classics, like God, often seems in danger of becoming a necessary illusion.

On the first page of his History of Classical Scholarship, Wilamowitz tries to get around this problem by turning his focus from the subject to its object, which he defines as “Greco-Roman civilization in its essence and in every facet of its existence.”[i] That definition begs at least two questions: does “Greco-Roman civilization” exist (and why is it “Greco-Roman”); and does a civilization have an essence? Wilamowitz then pivots back to the subject, the person doing classics, and suggests that classical studies has an aim that transcends a mere desire to know what was going in Athens, say, in 403 BC: “In this as in every department of knowledge—or to put it in the Greek way, in all philosophy—a feeling of wonder in the presence of something we do not understand is the starting-point, the goal was pure, beatific contemplation of something we have come to understand in all its truth and beauty.” Searching for the essence of Greco-Roman civilization, then, ends with the searcher standing before an almost Platonic ideal of truth and beauty.

In this case, I have quoted Wilamowitz not because he was the greatest practitioner of classical scholarship in the first half of the twentieth century, but because his attempt to juggle two ideas is representative of people who try to work out what classics is. The tension between object and subject, between classics as a thing we do and as a thing that does something to us, is fundamental to the modern discipline.[ii] It sometimes looks like an opposition between a scientific, historical, or positivist approach on one side, and humanism or liberal arts on the other. It sometimes looks, as it did to F. A. Wolf, August Boeckh, and the other founders of modern classical scholarship (and as it did to Nietzsche), like a tension between Bildung, formation of character, and Altertumswissenschaft, the scientific study of antiquity. And sometimes, as it did for me during the years that I taught at the Episcopal Academy, it looks like a question that all teachers sooner or later confront: am I teaching a subject, or am I teaching students?

At the foundation of this subject, however, stand two cornerstones: Greek and Latin. Without exact knowledge of these languages, any connection between object and subject, between the scientific study of antiquity and the education of those who study it, becomes impossible. Just as language connects us as human beings to one another, so language makes the only connection that we can have to the human beings who created Greece and Rome, and it is the only tool that we have to see them, as best we can, in their own image, not in ours, and to center their voices—that is, to decolonize them. If we classicists want to decolonize our field, we might begin by renewing our commitment to life-long study of classical languages and to learning them as well as we can.[iii]

~Lee T. Pearcy
April 9, 2022

[i] U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, History of Classical Scholarship, tr. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 1.

[ii] Fundamental as well to the humanities in general, as argued by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon, Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2021).

[iii] This is not to say that the two languages are not subject to the same idealizing and systematizing impulse that created the entire discipline. Greek is not very like Latin and resembles it only because traditional grammars impose a resemblance, and Latin itself is “classical” because the Romans created an idealized form of it.

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Next Year at Hillsdale

February 12, 2022 in Uncategorized | Permalink

This link to an article on Bari Weiss’s Substack channel showed up on my “Arts and Letters Daily” feed from the Chronicle of Higher Education this morning, and on the off chance that it isn’t already on the breakfast table of everyone at Bryn Mawr, I offer it here: https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/last-year-i-was-a-bryn-mawr-girl.

The article seems to say that Bryn Mawr’s COVID mitigation policies led its author to withdraw from the College and transfer to Hillsdale College in Michigan. (My impression is that those policies may have contributed to her decision but were not the only reason for it.)  For my part, I have no quarrel with those policies or their implementation, but my position at Bryn Mawr is hardly representative—I come to campus once or twice a week and spend most of my time in the libraries or my office.  I do, though, want to call attention to three points in the article that, in my experience, tend to be underemphasized in Bryn Mawr’s internal conversations.

One is the importance of social class in shaping the author’s experience at Bryn Mawr.  I don’t know whether the author is correct in her impression that most of her classmates had second homes or frequented fitness classes in the Hamptons with Michelle Obama, but the impression itself is telling.

The second is a throw-away sentence at the end of the paragraph describing her first year at Bryn Mawr: “I had been nervous about not being able to keep up academically, but the calculus class I took that first year was easier than the one at ASU.”  That’s Arizona State University, where she went immediately after high school.  Again, this is one data point, and we all know not to pay much attention to that one negative review on Yelp or Amazon; even so, it feeds into my impression that paying more in tuition these days doesn’t mean that you actually learn more.

The third is this sentence: “I didn’t sit around with my friends all night arguing about big questions like I thought I would. It was assumed that we all agreed on the answers.”  If true, this is the most damning particular of all.  I hope that everyone at Bryn Mawr doesn’t agree on answers to big questions, or even to little ones—but if they do, I’m glad that Jane Kitchen has found a real college at last.

~Lee T. Pearcy
February 12, 2022

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