ABSTRACT
People write such nonsense about higher education. So often they talk as though it were a matter of certain courses or majors, of an occasional intellectual challenge—of the steady accumulation of knowledge and skills that will provide the basis of a life fruitfully lived. But formulations with so little human resonance have to be wrong. My own experience of university life was in the fifties—unlike the sixties, to be sure, but I suspect very much like times before and after. And that experience seems to me now both inspiriting and destructive. Nor can I see how, given the time and place and person, it could have been significantly other.
