Hope

I attended college reunion festivities at the University of Chicago in Hyde Park recently, and had a grand time.  I began showing up regularly about 8 or 9 years ago and always run into old friends and make new ones that are doing interesting things.  The presentations are quite good—it’s electrifying to hear a lecture by a Nobel Prize winner and to be around so many intellectually engaged people.

But in this crazy, upside down, rancorous election year, I got something more important out of it---hope for the future.   It’s easy to be pretty morose about the times we are in.  We have had an economy that has been performing   below trend line for years.  International threats seem to be multiplying.  Race relations have gotten worse, not better.  No matter how you cut it, our two expected nominees are deeply flawed. 

Sure, it was fun to catch up with old classmates and listen to lectures.  But this year, there seemed to be more students mingling at the cocktail parties, perhaps because they have been told to start networking early.  This year, I also spent a little more time talking to them.  And what a treat it was.  I found them to be interesting, engaging, and of course, very, very bright.

Three of them caught my attention.

The first one was a gangly young man, sitting alone at a table in the beer garden, working at his laptop.  I was standing next to him, and he nudged me and asked, “Excuse me, sir, can I bother you for a few moments to show you the app I am developing?”   I sat down and he walked me through an impressive piece of work.  The young man studied the Great Books as an undergrad, and developed an app around them.  The app is designed to disseminate the Great Books through readings, games, and quotes.    There are quotes from Euripides, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Thoreau—in short, the great writers and thinkers that make up The Canon.   Those that scholars like Harold Bloom have determined are vital to our very humanity, and, sadly, the same ones that the PC-crazed students at Yale want to have removed from the curriculum for being “too white.”   But at The University of Chicago, not only are they still taught and revered,  a student has taken up the task of connecting these great works to modern technology to make them more accessible to others.  I marveled at his genuine passion for his work.

The second student I conversed with was a vivacious woman that was graduating.  She was forward to the start of her PhD program in neuroscience and bubbled over with enthusiasm over her impending stint at a Polish university where she planned to research in cat and dog reaction to anxiety and depression.  She went on and on about her academic work, and how excited she was to get to the next level.  In the midst of our conversation, her smile suddenly ran off her face and she grew very serious, lowered her voice and confided, “I’m really afraid to leave here.  I’m afraid that I will never find a place that I will love as much, as intellectually rich and be living with so many bright people.”  I paused, struggling to find the right response to her, “You are right to feel that way.  This university is a very special place.  You will likely not find a place with such a concentration of people that are as devoted to intellectual life.  As you get on in life, you will need to find other avenues, other ways to fill that need, but it will always be there.  And don’t forget to return for reunion weekend.” 

Finally, there was young woman presented her thesis on education in India.   She presented compelling evidence to show that merely having separate bathrooms for boys and girls (many schools have no bathrooms at all) raises the proportion of girls that stay in school by a statistically significant amount.  This effect is pronounced as girls hit puberty and begin menstruating.  Often, girls simply drop out of school rather than endure a lack of privacy.  Assuring safety, security and privacy turn out to be pivotal factors in keeping girls in school.  This young woman will be taking her results to organizations like the WTO to argue for an adjustment in spending priorities based on her research.

There were others, of course.  I just cited a couple of examples.  But it was terribly stimulating to connect with this next generation of brilliant, engaging minds,-young people that are consumed with the acquisition of new knowledge, of looking at the world in a new way, forming new connections, of making some contribution that advances our understanding of the world, and, indeed changes it.   The young man that was working on the app for the Classics –marrying the wisdom of the ancients to the digital age (instead of jumping on the bandwagon of those that would discard it)  is exactly the kind of young person that Chicago attracts, develops, grows, and then lets loose on the world.

Amidst this sometimes grim economic and political climate, those young scholars gave me reason to hope.