The most enriching experience Albert Barnes had during the war years, however, was meeting John Dewey. The “common sense” philosopher became a public intellectual of enormous influence with the publication of his Democracy and Education in 1916. Dewey wrote that far from being confined to "technical and merely physical matters,” the experimental method “holds equally to the forming and testing of ideas in social and moral matters." Dewey had been born in Vermont in 1859, the year Darwin published his Origin of the Species, and at fifty-eight, he spoke slowly, with little emphasis, and often with long pauses between sentences, his eyes seemingly focused on something outside the classroom window. Dewey, among the first members of a new occupational class of higher education professionals, had chaired philosophy departments at the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago before joining the Columbia faculty in 1904.