Quotation of the Day
4th June 2026
The premise that everyone wants and is owed a Princeton seminar is itself a fiction. An educated, literate public is a fiction. Most of human history, including the history that produced most of the literature and music and political theory we still draw on, took place in societies where the deep reading of difficult texts was the practice of a small, privileged minority. The first novels were written for an audience that, by our standards, barely existed.
In a perfect world, the world I hope for for my children, the university will get smaller, weirder, more expensive and – if can you excuse my elitism – probably much better. It will look more like Oxford in 1890 than Stanford in 2025. In 1890, universities such as Oxford and Harvard had fewer than 3,000 enrolled students. In those days, undergraduates spent a few years studying Greek and Latin philology followed by Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Tacitus, Kant, Hegel, Hume, and Mill. They read an essay aloud once a week to their tutor and defended it in conversation. That model is what the university will rediscover, by necessity, over the next decade – that is, the life of the mind. The life of the mind that so few of us really need, or frankly want access to. (Embarrassingly, I include myself in this.)