Offshore Core
- sofiapbaker
- Mar 24, 2021
- 1 min read
Imagine you are a teenager newly arrived at college. You’ve had a couple inspiring teachers of literature or philosophy in high school and you’re eager to read some of the books that have come up in conversation with them and seem to be reference points: Plato, say, or Shakespeare, Voltaire or Thomas Aquinas. You are uncertain about the best way to live your life and would like to ponder your choices carefully under the guidance of great thinkers. You hope you can find a teacher or two at college who knows about all those famous authors and is willing to teach you. You wish you could find other students with similar interests whom you could trust to respond in a friendly way as your ideas unfold and mature. You want to use some of your time in college to go further down the road of finding out who you are and what you believe.
If you are looking for this at an elite university these days, you are going to be out of luck. Things have changed since I was a young teacher at Columbia in the early 1980s…