Whereas Taft discouraged the young Yale student from extracurricular reading, fearful it would detract from required courses, Roosevelt read widely yet managed to stand near the top of his class. The breath of his numerous...

Practical utility, however, is not the ultimate purpose of a liberal arts education. Its ultimate purpose is to help you learn to reflect in the widest and deepest sense, beyond the requirements of work and...

Liberal learning is that which underlies, that which gives purpose and direction to practical skills. It tries to distinguish between the more and the less important, between the grand and the trivial, and to concern...

Important insights ought never to be limited to the group from which may arise.

In a properly automated and educated world, then, machines may prove to be the true humanizing influence. It may be that machines will do the work that makes life possible and that human beings will...

It could be said that a liberal education has the nature of a bequest, in that it looks upon the student as the potential heir of a cultural birthright, whereas a practical education has the...

The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expense of it,” [John] Adams wrote. “There should not be a district of one mile...

Reading can break us out of the tunnel vision of the narrow specialty and lead us into many intriguing and important avenues of thought.

He turned the presidency – and the President’s House – into something it had not been before: a center of curiosity and inquiry, of vibrant institution that played informal but important roles in the broader...

One night I begged Robin, a scientist by training, to watch Arthur Miller’s ‘Death of a Salesman’ with me on PBS. He lasted about one act, then turned to me in horror: ‘This is how...

I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside of their special subject.

Why not spend that time on art: painting, sculpting, charcoal, pastel, oils? Are words or numbers more important than images? Who decides this? Does algebra move you to tears? Can plural possessives express the feelings...

So we might say that the most important thing one can acquire in college is a well-functioning bullshit meter.

Only those are called liberal or free which are concerned with knowledge; those which are concerned with utilitarian ends… are called servile…The question is… can man develop to the full as a functionary and a...

Give a poet a pen

Slowly, even though I thought it would never happen, New York lost its charm for me. I remember arriving in the city for the first time, passing with my parents through the First World’s Club...

It is no longer just engineers who dominate our technology leadership, because it is no longer the case that computers are so mysterious that only engineers can understand what they are capable of. There is...

Fortunately, our colleges and universities are fully cognizant of the problems I have been delineating and take concerted action to address them. Curricula are designed to give coherence to the educational experience and to challenge...