The End of Universities? | EP 185
Came out of North Korea, then you went to university in South Korea, so you got to see that culture as an outsider, and then you came to the United States and you got to see Columbia University. So what did you conclude about your time in Columbia University? What were your impressions? What do you have to say to people about what you saw?
I knew—oh my gosh—so that four years from 2016 to 2020, um, it was complete madness. I became very pessimistic about the Western world after university because—like so literally in these humanity classes, even the economics—I was studying economics for two years and later human rights. The professor would send me, like, emails, "Oh, this this class we're gonna cover this, this, if it triggers you, you don't have to come to the class or don't even do the reading." I'm a rape survivor, I'm a slave, I went through so many things, and they say, "Oh, this can trigger the rape, this can trigger this." And then, like, they—every before the class they say, "Let's go through what do you want to be called, your pronouns?" My English is not that good; I sometimes mistakenly call him or she, like, and then they start asking me to say they, and then I don't know how to incorporate in my English that pronoun properly. It makes me so nervous to talk in the classroom.
One day, I got into a fight with my professor; she was saying, "You know the fact that you're letting men hold doors for you is you are giving in to their overpowering you." And I was like, "Isn't it kindness? It's decency. I open the door for people too. It's not like I'm trying to signal that I'm more powerful than you." And she was like, "You're still brainwashed from North Korea." Like, and I was—scenario of course, my GPA is gonna be affected. It's like, okay I gotta really shut up; I gotta try to do my best to get a good GPA. So that four years, I learned to censor myself all over again. It became ridiculous; like, I literally—exactly—I originally risked my life to say what I think is right, and now I'm, like, in a country where four years of time try how to be creative, safe space, and be sensitive enough. So—and like where am I? It gave me a lot of chaos; like did I become free? Where am I? Is there any truly free place in this world right now?
Well, okay, so you were in this university in Korea and Korean universities are intense. So how would you contrast the quality of the education that you received and their very Western influence—the South Korean university? So they're a product of the Western university system. So how would you contrast your experience at the South Korean university with Columbia, which is in principle one of the great Western American institutions, educational institutions?
It's so—I do think South Korea is way more technical. They are way more into trying to teach you the skill set, like giving you actual knowledge. But, okay, I think Americans are very obsessed—that was my impression. Columbia, we're really trying to help you how to think, but almost like you would shape how you think. They are very into shaping your minds, how you think about something. In South Korean study programs, it was more like oh this is a fact, this is what happened in history, this is what we're gonna do, this is a model we're gonna apply to solve this criminal case. Like, you know, this is how things work.
But lately though, when it comes to sociology, it's been very influenced by the Western—like the mainstream education, so a lot of anti-Western sentiments were definitely there. I have been somewhat oppositional; I'm not exactly like a "Mr. Go along and get along" guy with this stuff, that I don't always have the best reality check on my own behavior. And so, I'm— you know, I was just saying, well okay, if I did cause offense, then you know, I feel like it's okay to apologize, and there probably was a better way for me to do this. Some of my comments, you know were leaked or made or transmitted to other people that weren't in the meetings—people that were in the BIPOC meeting, you know particularly my—my mice is black and Indigenous people of color, so they were having their separate meeting of faculty and students where they received different content.
And why was it separate? Curiosity—the rationale as I could understand it is so that the groups that had been marginalized won't be exposed to, you know, they'll have their own thing, so that they're not exposed to the—I think the insensitivity of the oppressors; that's the best I can understand the rationale. Um, but it wound up happening anyway because I suppose it would be rude of me to point out that that's somewhat paternalistic, you know, just as yeah, you know observation that's a good one. Um, yeah I mean, yeah totally, well I guess that is a characteristic of white supremacy culture though, paternalism.
Yeah, so I—there I guess it's, as long as it's in a good cause, then I guess it's forgivable. Yeah, I found it so interesting because the day after the meeting there was an email that was released that said healing resources, you know, healing resources that will help you come to terms with what happened. And the first healing resource on the list was a CNN interview with a poet named Damon Young. And, um, Damon Young, you know in this interview said things like, you know, we need to get rid of all of capitalism, we will have to do a carpet bombing, not a carpet cleansing of society. And it was incredibly radical statements that were I would imagine would be frightening to many people, and that was listed as a healing resource. As well as long as the carpet bombing only targets the malevolent people?
Well, yeah, I guess, and then things—there was a Robin DiAngelo article that said, you know, what white people need to be made or kept uncomfortable. How can we become more uncomfortable? Um, also, you know, really kind of I would just say racist characterizations of white people in these links. Um, things like, you know, white people have never had to be guests in this country, and like the Irish for example, they weren't really white to begin with though. So, yeah, yeah.
Um, and so I found this very ironic—the idea that especially when post-modernism and the reconstruction and all those attendant pseudo-philosophies, uh, you read Milton to find out if he mistreated his daughters, not this miracle that we call Paradise Lost or Samson Agonistes. You read Homer to find out, you know, if he's a blood worshiper. This whole game of taking the great documents of Western civilization as a hunting ground for moral woke offense—well first of all, it's catastrophically stupid. If you have the 48th Symphony of Mozart or Beethoven's Fifth, and the only reason you're playing it is to find out if either Mozart or Beethoven had a sexist attitude, you're out of your mind. Self-stop this!
And the idea that one of the great propulsions of a certain segment of Western society is simple envy and resentment of its success, even as those who are envious and resentful are basically being fed and kept by it. They go into these institutions with some sort of childish, immature animosity towards, what you know, if you think of it, the rise of thought is the greatest thing we have, and at the richest part of the world, the most prosperous—the highest institution.
Have you been reading some of these "whiteness" things—the new rules, and these are like the ones the federal government is using to train your civil servants? You mean, yes, the epidemic of anti-racism, which is a kind of racism—diversity, which is monosyllabic. If you don't have our ideas, you don't have any, or you're a racist, or you're this, or you're that. I don't know how a free people have succumbed so easily and so lethargically to a kind of—it's not physical, but it's a metaphysical restraint and the cowardice about some of these—these universities that apologize for some professor, the New York Times guy, 49 years columnist, and in an explanatory conversation using that "N-word," editor said no, there's nothing wrong with him, but then he fired him.
The universities damned them were the place that this—this other pandemic began, and while we're living through COVID, we should also understand that the intellectual pandemic—this goes to our heart and core—we are displacing ourselves by allowing charlatans to wreck the intellectual standards of the Western world.
What I've read is that you made some claim that Canada wasn't systemically racist. That wasn't the right way of looking at the country, and is there—so, and to me that means—now is that the case now that at a university, if I stand up and say that I don't believe that the lens of systemic racism is the proper way to analyze Canada, especially compared to other countries—that now I'm so reprehensible that I deserve to be suspended if a couple of people object? Is that the situation that we're looking at, or am I being too hard on the university?
I have to admit I may be wrong, but there may have been a flavor for that during that month. So, like, it was like—I don't know, my story was sort of a scapegoat for something that is much bigger than a deer—a simple deer—a silly deer. Sometimes we're not allowed to write serious things or silly things or be wrong or change our mind. Your situation is also particularly peculiar, I might say, because you don't seem to be the right sort of target for this sort of targeting. You know, because you're using the terminology that I don't appreciate in the least.
I mean you're female, you're an immigrant, you're—you're at least in principle part of the communities that the people who push this sort of nonsense are hypothetically trying to protect. So why is it because you are in one of these victimized categories and you dared to say something that wasn't in accordance with the necessary moral ideology that you've been targeted? Um, maybe they wanted—if you read the about of the Bambi's blog, you see that that deer does not want to fit in any group and say and put in a box. So I'm supposed to be racialized, you know, be a poor me, I don't have food, I don't—I don't like to be victimized personally in my life. Even now with what is happening to me, I think I'm a dignified person.
So, so in that sense, um, I like the term invisible minority, visible minority. You know the terms that used to be used in Quebec my time when I immigrated, I see myself more in them than like—like put us, divided into your this group, that group, and—um, you know, sectarianism or or not like Canada, right? So you're supposed to be, first of all, you're female, so hypothetically you're oppressed because you're female even though the evidence for suppression of females in academia is very, very—it's actually females dominate over males in terms of numerical proportion in most disciplines. It's not the case in the STEM fields, but everywhere else it's the case, not only especially in terms of graduates produced. It might not be the case at the highest levels of distinction in the academic hierarchy, although that's changing pretty rapidly.
So you should actually fit into at least two oppressed categories: female and an immigrant, right? And so—and so the rule here is that if you're in both of those categories, victimized by the intersection between those two categories, that there's a particular political view you better have or else. And "or else" in your case is everywhere else you get suspended because a few people complain. It's what the hell is going on with the administration? I don't understand what they're doing. I really don't understand. I can't understand why they didn't have the courtesy—actually I can understand why they didn't have the courtesy to call you because the sad truth is, is that as soon as a few people complain, everyone who isn't directly involved runs scared and looks for someone to sacrifice.
No, but let me tell you something: what happened at Mount Allison University and is happening elsewhere, but particularly here, is a symptom of what is happening in our country or maybe beyond, actually. So I take it like that; it's a symptom that we do have a serious problem. As you said, like tenured professors not being able to express ideas, debate ideas, challenge students with ideas—we do have a big problem. You're a citizen of a free country; you have the right to express yourself any way that you see fit. Second of all, you're a tenured professor, and your thoughts actually protected to a fair degree.
And it's protected broadly so that you can think broadly. And the fact that this has happened despite your tenure—well, I guess part of the question that people who are watching might be asking is why the hell should they care about this? And the reason I believe that people should care about this, first of all, is that what happens in the universities ends up happening everywhere else very, very rapidly. And if it can happen to someone like you it seems to me that it can happen to anyone at any time and any place; and this—this unbelievable cowardice that our institutions show in the face of unwarranted allegations, as long as they're the right flavor, is something that should be tremendously worrisome to everyone.
We haven't got to the bad stuff yet. Um, but it started to become apparent to me—I sort of had the realization that this was really going the wrong direction when we had a professional development meeting and they passed out the, you—I’m sure you’ve seen it—the pyramid of racism, also known as the pyramid of white supremacy. And it had this—schema, it was a schema arranged in the form of a pyramid with genocide at the top of the pyramid and then various layers that had categorical names like overt racism, covert racism, minimization, indifference, and then various—there must have been about 50 or 60 things sprinkled on the pyramid at various levels. Some of the things on the pyramid, um, I actually thought were—you know, in many cases, virtues.
So things like being apolitical or things like, you know, um, you know there are two sides to every story. Um, things that were contradictory like, um, you know, not believing POC, but also thinking "well my black friend said dot dot dot." So the idea that these two things were next to each other seemed interesting to me. Um, also, things that were just—you know, political party plat—you know, platforms—minimization. We all belong to the human race, right? Right, that was—that was post-racial society. Why can't we all just get along? Prioritizing intentions over impact—that's a nice one. Yeah, yes, we could—we could talk about that for about three weeks. Yeah, not believing experiences of people of color—two sides to every story, right?
Yeah, well it's very interesting when you look very carefully at the words that are lumped in with the other words, let's say—right—guilt by association. Okay, so you had this pyramid of white supremacy, and I was asked, you know, what do you think about this, and I just—I said I think this is an extremely destructive and horrible schema to put in front of a child, and I will never do it. And then what's the problem with that? Exactly. So the kids stick with the list—why—why is that bothering you?
Well, it's because it means that, you know, events—the multiplicity of possible reasons for things—that change that are different depending on the actual incident get reduced to this script of explanations. And only those explanations, you know, fit the paradigm and only those explanations will be considered, and that means that you're not making sense of the world for yourself, you're following a script.
You may know the name—she is a she escaped from North Korea. Yes, and she wrote a book called "In Order to Live," which is an amazing book, and the book ends in 2015. But after 2015, she enrolled in Columbia University, which was a dream of hers and a dream of her father's that she be an educated person. She studied humanities at Columbia, and I asked her what that was like, and she said that it was a complete waste of time and money, and that she felt that she was completely unable to utter an opinion that was genuine the whole time she was there.
And it shocked me, you know, and so I asked her very specifically. I said, "Come on, come on, you're not going to tell me that the entire time you spent in Columbia you didn't have at least one professor, or two professors who stood out who really taught you?" Now she had told me during the interview that she had encountered George Orwell's work when she was in South Korea, particularly "Animal Farm," and that was what partly influenced her to start speaking in writing. And so—and she had read a lot when she was educating herself in South Korea prior to going to South Korean university and then to Columbia. So it's not like she was unfamiliar with the potential impact of, let's say, the classics on her life, on her philosophy.
Um, but when I pressed her, the best she could do was to identify a single biology class, which dealt with evolution, which was a complete mystery to her given her background because history sort of started when her dynastic totalitarians were born. Um, but she said even that took a wicked turn to the politically correct direction by the time she was done.
Universities now, at the humanities level from everything I read, are a disgrace. The treason of the clerks; it is—they are so suffocated by these arch and empty philosophies that have no logic and are punitive. I would now—I’m a person that was so taken by the university; I almost worshipped it, and now I tell people that have younger people, younger children, 20, 21, 22: don't go to the damn university unless you're taking science. Go to a trades college or just go out on your own. It's the saddest thing that has happened in the Western world that we've allowed second-rate minds—political agents propagandization as instruction—we have decimated the soul of the university.
I mean look at what Joe—look what "Animal Farm" did for you! That's what reading great books does for people, you know? It illuminates their soul. It's not optional, and I'm so appalled that that was your experience at Columbia. It's so awful that you went through all that and managed to get to this great university, and you know, and that—and that you had to shut yourself down, and that your basic conclusion was that it was a waste of time. Now did you have courses where that wasn't the case? Did you have courses that were worth it?
I mean, so one class I remember in my senior—it was called "Western Civilization: The Music Art." One of the core that Columbia had is the Western art, and she has still not—for long—but then I was excited to learn about, but I thought at the end of the day, this east or the west—America is in the west, right? It'll be funny if you want to study Eastern music at the end of the—in the core, and professors like, "Who has a problem with calling the Western civilization art?" And then every single one of them all lifting their hands because they were saying there are so many artists who are greater than, better than Mozart—we silence them, erase them all, and that's why we have to now end up studying these, like, bigots, you know, who are racist.
And I'm like—and then they were looking at me: "Why are you not putting your hands up?" Somebody who doesn't have the problem with talking about Western civilization. So that's like I was like, "Do I even have to do this to graduate?" And that was of course necessary to do that course to graduate, so every class had an element of being politically correct and shaping you how you think, and I learned how to censor myself. So right after Columbia, and then I was freaked out one day, like, "What am I doing? This is how I escaped!" You know, it just—and so I'm so ashamed of that.
That's so awful; I can't believe it. You know, it's no picnic to watch these great institutions hang themselves. Yeah, it's—I literally felt like it's a suicide of civilization. Like we are killing ourselves here, and—and that's why—like what I mean, that's what scares me is that when I was so grateful to going to South Korea was after them of North Korea, there was at least a place that was left to be free. And all these people obsessed fighting for, you know, climate change, animal rights, gender equality, transgender, whatever—all these things people are fighting for, wonderful.
But then imagine when nobody is freeing this world, who's gonna fight for us? And that's like what terror for me is like; imagine all of us became enslaved, like North Koreans, all of us did in that system—there's no one can stand up for any of us. And I guess because I'm always—I always knew that it was guaranteed, like when I go camping with my friends, my friends somehow always have a confidence that they're gonna find food even though when they're going to the remote area. Not me; I always pack this, like, energy bars, blah blah always with me because I know you can end up not having ever order food.
So maybe this is a mentality that in the West, freedom was always there somehow; people think it's gonna be miraculous they're gonna be always there. And for me, it's like no, it can be not there. That's you know—that's why we were supposed to be educating young people. We were supposed to be teaching them that no, it's not always there; it's fragile, and you better take care of it because the default condition is authoritarian starvation, and if that isn't happening, it's a bloody miracle!
Yeah, well I've seen this over and over in the universities too, you know? It was often the case that it was my psychology classes where the students learned about what happened in Stalinist Soviet Union, in Mao's China. They hadn't been taught at all; they hadn't been taught that tens of millions of people died in China; they hadn't been taught about what happened in North Korea; they hadn't been taught about what happened in Russia. It was like that never existed, even though the Cold War was all about that. And it's appalling, and I think you see exactly the same thing while you're pointing out exactly the same thing.
I've been thinking about the question of the meaning of life, and the first objection I suppose I wrote that arose in my mind was an objection to the question itself, because there might not be a meaning in life. There are places where people derive meaning, and you can list them, and it's useful practically if people are thinking about how to organize their life, if they're unhappy and they want to know how things might be better. I mean my observation—and obviously not only mine—is that people generally need to have a career or a job to keep the wolf from the door, but also to engage them productively with others, which is a primary source of meaning for conscientious people and for creative people alike.
You need to pursue your education to flesh out your intellectual capacity; you have to take care of your health, physical and mental. You need an intimate relationship; you need a family; you need friends; you need intelligent use of your leisure time; you have to regulate your susceptibility to the temptations that might lead you astray—drugs and alcohol and perhaps pornography and those sorts of things. But then there is a core to all that around which these more practical endeavors arrange themselves, and that's something like attention to the spiritual or the philosophical domain or the religious domain.
I think you can in some sense put all those together, and—and that might be—well it might be that the attempt to answer explicitly or at least to address the question of, well what is all of that practical life in service of? And you said, for example, that when you were working with the inner-city kids in Halifax, you were trying to help them realize that they were meant for the higher things. And vice versa, and someone might ask, well what’s the—why bother with that when you can just bother with the skills? And it seems to me that the answer is something like, well, we all have to make decisions about how we're going to behave in life and how we're going to act ethically.
And if you help people understand their relationship to what's ultimately noble, then you can help them fortify their resolution to do good in the world instead of to do harm. It's—it's—it's it seems to me to be—I mean I think we’re always deciding with every decision that we make whether we’re going to do good or do harm by action or by inaction, and whether we should do good or harm or nothing at all I think depends to some degree on who we think we are and what we're capable of.
And it seems to me that the humanities, when they're properly taught, are the study of who we could be, each of us as individuals, and we need to know that, because otherwise we’ll be much less than we are, and that’s not a—that’s not a trivial problem, it’s a cataclysmic problem. I did a talk at Harvard four years ago, and I pointed out two things to the students in the audience. One was that a tremendous amount of civilization and effort had gone into producing the institution that they were now part of, and that everyone who was part of that institution was hoping that they would come there and learn everything they possibly could that was relevant and important, and that they would be the best possible people they could be, and they would go out in the world and do as much good as they possibly could—that was the essential mission of the enterprise, and that was really the case.
And also that learning to write in particular was going to make them more powerful than they could imagine. And a number of students came up to me afterward and said, "I really wish someone would have said that to us when we first came here." If you were going to recommend to a young person what they should study to prepare to be a research, a psychological researcher, a clinical psychological researcher of your type, what should they do at the bachelor's level? Let's say, what’s the right preparation? And then let’s walk through the process: bachelor, masters, PhD, postdoc, because people don't know that. And so, what do you look for in a student at the BA if you're looking for a master's level student? What should they have done in their bachelor's degree?
I guess they have to be passionate and at the same time ready to work very hard to clarify how you go about understanding what you want to understand. So you need—it's both of those; you need the interest and the discipline. I guess it's like that in every discipline, even a hockey player or a football player; it is if you want to be successful.
Yeah, yeah, right. You need to be interested because you have to want to, yeah, and at the same time, you have to take the time and like investing yourself. So is it fair to say that you taught yourself to read and you got your GED equivalent—you did that in one year—and so you were ready to go to university at the age of how? In the world did you do that? How much time were you spending every day studying?
Uh, I didn't—so that was a funny story. I ended up in the ER, and then like they were saying, you're—managed because I didn't have time to eat; I forgot to eat. So even when I was sleeping, I would have turned on the—like a TED Talks or NPR so I can like listen. My brain just kept working, and even when I was sleeping, I would put the books behind my pillow so the, like, knowledge really going to me. I was obsessed; I was crazy!
You were obsessed with—yeah, I was—I was completely obsessed with the learning! So you're completely obsessed with studying to the point where you're not even eating. And we should also just stress here it is definitely the case that the education process is unbelievably competitive in South Korea, as you've already pointed out, far and above what people in North America can imagine, or in Europe for that matter. And so you were facing very, very heavy competition, so, but you got obsessed to the point where you weren't even eating. That's amazing because you—I would have thought that you would be more motivated to eat after what you did—virtually, but you were hungrier for knowledge than for food, despite—and you had been starved of both. Exactly, I was—I was working at these two—I don't know you know something called—so it’s like a one dollar store in South Korea, the Japanese branch. So I was working there as a part-time job, and I was minor, so my mom had to give the, like, authorization that should let me work. And then I was working this wedding—horse like serving food as a waitress, so I was working, and then my mom was also doing the dishes and helping me, and I was living in these rooms in Seoul because I was studying where underground, I didn't even have a window.
And I still remember those times; I was so happy because I had a goal. Like, I was—you know, like this tiny room where you can just stretch your feet—like barely—I’m like five times tiny in that room. I was like living there, all I had was books with me and a dream.
Yeah, well a room full of books isn’t small. Exactly, it was—it was large, yeah, right, absolutely, absolutely. So you got your GED and then you applied to university for in a competitive program, and there was still trouble with you getting in, but you managed it. How did you manage it, and how did you decide what you were going to do?
I was going to study criminal justice. It was—I saw so much injustice, and even in salsa, I saw so much of it. I really wanted to understand how that worked, you know? How—what this thing is called justice. So I'm grateful they gave me all the opportunities to study that program, and but now, I—it's just such a—like, I don't know how I was going through all of that, but somehow back then, I had a drive that I never even knew I had.
But your experience at university—go into that a little bit more detail. Well I’m glad you elaborated that as you did, and I suppose—not—I suppose I know I brought up that university experience in the hope that—and we’ll do it now down the road in this conversation. I think outside of family—that is always principle and will never be superseded—outside of family if there’s anything that contributed to the way that I look at things and have given me lasting benefit.
Okay, you may be familiar with Samuel Johnson's remark about literature—it applies to all the arts—that it exists better to help us enjoy life or to enjoy it, uh, it fixes the mind. And when you have a real university, you get these things. My—the professor I mentioned, for example, when he found a book, it was one of our other Kesslers; I won’t bother to name it. He actually walked to my house on a Saturday afternoon; I was just a kid in all of them, but he came to the little studio, or sorry, the student house and wanted me to have this book for a week so I could read.
I mean this kind of almost genuflection to the emergent or emerging mind of a young person is something that stays forever. So that long winded, again, the university experience was the strongest because the universities then had values they worshipped, and that’s a good word—not to be backed off from; they worshipped the best creations, the best fashions, the best styles of thought, the best scientific finesse, and they made you—not made you; they induced you—entities grateful to be grateful for what other first-rate minds have contributed to the temper of the entire human race.
My undergraduate degree, I encountered people who were reading these texts and saying things about them that enabled me to understand the things that I had perhaps intuited when I was younger in a more self-conscious, rationally universal frame, which of course philosophy is. Ideas are the whole—are everything, you know? And there should be—you should be talking about ideas based on what makes ideas sound or unsound, not—not the person who's saying them.
What's your vision for Ralston College, architecturally speaking? You know, I would perhaps say just by introduction that you know our analysis and the need for founding new institutions is directly related to the things we've just been speaking about—the cultural, spiritual crisis, the upstream influence of the university over everything else, the fact that it is the epicenter of at very best unhelpful, at worst downright toxic forms of ideology that spread through anything and everything that isn't catastrophically beset with high costs, low value, and so on and so forth.
But our analysis is simply that, um, there is huge demand in young people for alternatives—people who are seeking alternatives to the indoctrination and activism and fraudulent low value of the academy. I mean I think your own work has shown this about as clearly as anything else historically ever has that it’s a mistake to concede the—to be you know your new book—you write about the need for creative dynamism in relation to our institutions, and it seems to me we’re in a—in a moment, not only which that is urgently necessary but also eminently possible if we have only the courage to—to do it.
Um, so what I would say is a few things. The first is that Ralston College has really four fundamental commitments. First, to seek the truth with courage. Second, to apprehend beauty in all of its forms. Third, to the freedom of speech and thought that are the conditions of those pursuits. And finally, to the friendship or even fellowship that is the context for all of these pursuits.
And you know what’s become clear to us, Jordan, over the years is it’s—it’s been a long runway; it’s not easy getting a college going. You know, anyone who thinks that you need to go off and fight in a war in order to undertake something really hard of value can call me up and we’ll have a talk about other things, other projects that may be very, very difficult to bring into the world, but are necessary and beautiful.
What’s become clear to us in these—that we’re sort of at the end of—is we now are launching our first programs, and the first degree is that Ralston College has a double vocation, both on the one hand to be a reinvention of the academy, a place for in-person degrees, a new model for the university that can, we hope, be pretty radically disruptive, not just because we’re going to change everything, but we hope that it will lead to many other people doing new and—and different and more beautiful and more adequate and perhaps cheaper and faster but above all just more important and higher value things in the space of higher education.
So on the one hand, it's the reinvention of the, uh, the academy—a reinvention and a revival of the academy, uh, but—and on that side, we’ve received our degree granting powers from the state of Georgia. We expect to launch our first degree this autumn in what—in what this first degree will be a Master’s in the Humanities. So it will be a pretty intensive boot camp in thinking about the big ideas, tracing them and their development through history, uh, which we think is important both as a revival of those forms of life and thought and culture but also because we think they are the, as it were, the key to opening up the depths of the self for the students themselves.
You know, it’s not that every human—if I can’t play the piano, it’s not that every human being should have to play the piano like Martha Argerich or Glenn Gould from your home, your current town of Toronto. Um, uh, 99.999 percent of human individuals couldn’t play the piano that way, but because Glenn Gould could and did, we can all hear the music, and in some level, I think what the high end of the academy is about is about playing the music so we can all hear it. And, and so on the one hand it’s the reinvention of the academy in—in a degree form, but on the other hand the second side of this double vocation is to be a kind of platform of humanistic inquiry for anyone, anywhere who wishes to engage with the riches of the humanistic tradition who wishes to seek the truth with courage, who is—who wishes to ask the fundamental human questions that—that every human being must face about truth and beauty and forgiveness and love and suffering.
To me, the universities are a key element in the conversation across the generations about just exactly what a human being is and—and that’s something that it’s not some abstract philosophical—it’s not merely some abstract philosophical concern; it’s the central issue that determines how you make all the decisions in your life.