The Three Best Classes I Took in My Interminable University Career

A few professors expected me to do stupidly hard things. They show the way forward for higher ed

The 2020s are shaping up to be a once-in-a-century extreme weather event for higher education. Shrinking cohorts of graduating high-school cohorts are bleeding universities of applicants. Outrageous student loan debt levels and ballooning administrative expenses increasingly make degrees look like a bad investment. Young men in particular are dropping the idea of college like a mold-encrusted potato. And the Trump administration has declared war on once-untouchable elite schools from Harvard to Johns Hopkins, cutting off federal funding and trying to dam up the all-important flow of full freight–paying foreign students.

Don’t think I’m exactly here to defend the universities. You can’t alienate half the population forever without consequences, much less while peddling a product of declining quality.

But I’m not here to gloat, either. Universities are an invaluable treasure, the brilliant gem not just America but of an entire idea of civilization. We should be pulling for them to get their act together, find a business model that isn’t essentially a Ponzi scheme, and start functioning again. If that fails, we might need to fall back on a 21st-century version of the medieval guilds of private scholars and students from which universities originally evolved.

Whichever way things break, we’ll need a clear picture of what university life can look like, what it’s capable of being. What universities are for.

In that spirit, let me tell you about the three best classes I ever took. These classes and professors changed me forever, and I still think about each one of them regularly — nearly daily, in fact — years and decades later. They showed what makes higher education worth all the trouble and frustration. Anyone hoping to rehabilitate a college or build a new one would benefit from time-traveling to the seminar rooms and lecture halls where these incredible courses first captivated my imagination.

1. German Literature, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Like many 18-year-old freshmen, I arrived on campus as ignorant as a lobotomized chinchilla. But I knew one thing: I wanted to learn German. By the time I was an upperclassman, I’d been to Heidelberg twice for intensive summer language camps and could hold a pretty good conversation in Hochdeutsch. It was time to move on to the heavy stuff.

By which I mean Goethe.

The professor was Sabine Groß, a deceptively warm and approachable theater veteran of unflappable disposition and iron will. Dr. Groß did not mess around. She expected you read Goethe and Lessing and Brecht in the original, and she did not expect, or put up with, complaints. Class conversations were, of course, entirely in German. Papers and assignments were in German. Your dreams at night were in German. Your life, so far as she had anything to do with it, was in German.

Have you ever read Goethe?

It was like chewing rocks. I wasn’t prepared. A young Kurt Vonnegut addict, I liked my leisure reading simple, intuitive, and easily digestible. My English literature classes were gradually curing me of this literary infantilism by spooning me Spenser and Milton, but it was slow going. This course was a different level entirely, a quantum leap in taking literature seriously. You had to focus. The sentences would melt into nonsense otherwise, the ever-elusive final German verb dangling at the end of interminable subclauses, the author’s meaning not snapping into shape until you’d reached the final period. (Which could take pages.)

So I focused. I dug in. I read for hours and hours each week, my forehead scrunched with concentration in a back corner of one of Madison’s coffee shops or on the secondhand couch in my apartment.

The effort paid off. You know it was a good literature class when you still find yourself reciting bits of what you read from memory decades later. To this day, I still love rattling off the opening lines of Faust’s first speech in all its iambic glory:

Habe nun, ach! Philosophie,
Juristerei und Medizin,
Und leider auch Theologie
Durchaus studiert mit heißem Bemühn.
Da steh ich nun, ich armer Tor!
Und bin so klug als wie zuvor…¹

I’ll admit this isn’t exactly a salable skill. But the point of this class wasn’t its practicality. It wasn’t preparing us for corporate life or law school. It wasn’t about social justice or activism or saving the world, either. Groß wasn’t trying to get us to solve any problem. Her classroom wasn’t captive to what Josef Pieper called the culture of “total work,” the ruthless drive toward inhuman efficiency. Our professor loved theater, and theater is about life, not practicality.

Theater also has common origins with liturgy, the same genius for creating a world. Goethe called a universe into being with his tragedy as surely as the Mass opens the door to the physical presence of the divine. Decades later, my own world is much richer — more real — because I struggled through layers-deep tetrameter verse about an archetypal man’s striving for power and mastery written by one of history’s greatest geniuses. Faust lost his soul in the play, but mine grew larger in an unassuming classroom on the shores of Lake Mendota.²

2. “Plants and Man,” UW-Madison

The word “epic” is overused. A good party is epic. Movie franchises like the Avengers are supposedly epic when in fact they are warmed-over comic book sludge with no vitality or internally credible character motivations. Presumably a really good omelette can be epic.

But Timothy F.H. Allen’s spectacularly erudite barnstormer of a survey course on the ever-evolving relationship between humans and plants across history was so sweeping, so transformative, so utterly gargantuan in its promises — and its ability to make good on those ludicrous promises — that “epic” is the only epithet that even vaguely encompasses its triumph.

You walked into class the first day to an unforgettable sight: three full projector screens spanning the shadowed lecture hall stage, each rotating through a different series of inscrutable images. Farm fields. Beer vats. Power stations. A ripe, rounded peach that gave way to the similar image of a tastefully nude woman’s shadowed buttocks, highlighting the biological conjunctions between human bodies and the world of growing things. (It’s not a coincidence that a peach is the attractive cushion for a seed.) More images of agriculture, of civilization.

The lecture hall remained dark and silent otherwise. The start of the hour came and went, yet no professor seemed to appear. Where were we? Was this a class or some kind of MIT art installation?

Finally the lights went up and Dr. Allen bounded onstage, aged 60 but zipping with restless energy. The students were confused but soon hooked. And we stayed hooked for the rest of that whirlwind semester. Each class period was a visual feast, with three RAs manually swapping slides on one of the three projectors from the rear of the hall to illustrate Allen’s galloping transdisciplinary insights into, it seemed, practically everything: the accidental origins of agriculture, the evolution of biological systems, the mathematical likelihood of a 21st-century energy crisis, the biochemistry of beer brewing. The lectures were all delivered in a growling Surrey British accent that managed to sound equally hardscrabble and patrician, welcoming and arrogant.

It was, in sum, a pedagogical tour de force about exactly what it promised: plants and man, a relationship that spans biochemistry and ecology, geography and history.³ Accordingly, Allen taught us to think in terms of complexity and levels of analysis, introducing us to what he called hierarchy theory as a mode of interpreting the nested, nonlinear relationships that define biological systems.

It wasn’t an easy “A” course. The class was listed in botany. I was an English major. There were weekly discussion sections with the RAs just to consolidate the 4,234 facts Allen had regaled you with over the preceding two lectures and expected all the students to remember. The course was marked with a kind of seriousness and rigor that seemed exceptional even at a university known for high standards.⁴

For the final oral exam, you sat with Allen in his office answering questions about chemistry, evolution, fossil fuels, and complexity. My goal wasn’t merely to get the “A.” Sitting there on my chair, I wanted to show Allen I’d really learned my stuff, because I respected (and was terrified of) him. He’d challenged us like grownups. That respect deserved respect in return. “Plants and Man” opened a door onto a vast new terrain, glowing with rich possibilities and perils, full of promise. I was never on the same old path again.⁵

“Science Literacy,” Boston University

In graduate school I pursued the most absurdly quixotic PhD ever conceived by the vainglorious mind of man: the “Science, Philosophy, and Religion” track in religious studies at Boston University.

Yes, you read that right: I earned, essentially, a doctorate in everything.

The aim was to train you to work at the interface between faith and science. It was extremely demanding; among the requirements were 200 hours of lab placement work and qualifying exams in the philosophy and history of science. But you also had to read theology and get trained in religious studies, which means anthropology, sociology, and theory of religion. Plus there was instruction in statistics on the side.

Most of the students had humanities backgrounds, so we needed boning up on the basics of science before we could move on to our dissertations. Meeting this need in the most efficient yet dramatic way possible, the program’s director (and my advisor), Wesley Wildman, a mathematician-cum-theologian with an Australian drawl and an apparent knowledge of every field known to modern scholarship, subjected us to the most intensive, sweeping, ridiculously ambitious yearlong course and information bombardment ever taught in any American university.⁶

Called, simply, “Science Literacy,” the class met for two straight semesters. The three-hour seminars alternated between science on Wednesdays and mathematics on Thursdays. For both science and math, we began at the beginning, the ground floor. No, even lower — the basement.

It’s hard to describe the simplicity at which the classes got going. In math, Dr. Wildman — who taught the class along with several TAs — started in September by introducing the basic axioms of arithmetic and simple logical notation. If you don’t know what this means, imagine starting a graduate-level humanities survey course by slowly introducing the letters of the alphabet. We couldn’t even use basic arithmetic operators yet, because we hadn’t proved that they worked.

But we made short work of the axioms and built up smoothly and rapidly from there. Axioms gave way to functions, functions to calculus. We were already calculating integrals by week 6, exploring vector spaces by week 8. Come the spring semester, we were mastering Einsteinian subscript summation notation and tensors.

Yes, it was absurd. We couldn’t possibly master the material at such a galloping pace. I can’t really calculate a differential today by hand. But the point wasn’t to get us to do mathematics. It was to get us to understand mathematics.

And boy, it worked. I’d taken calculus in college. I’d watched the professor scribble differential equations and sigmas on the chalkboard. I mostly solved the problems on quizzes and passed the exams. I think I might have even gotten an “A” thanks to a generous curve. But listen: I had no idea what any of it meant.

Now, for the first time in my life — really — I actually started to get it. There were clearly explained relationships between the different concepts. You got derivatives by taking the slope tangents of plotted functions. Integrals were the sums of areas under the curve subdivided to the limit of infinity. I finally, finally knew what calculus was about.

Each week expanded our knowledge base just a little further. In biology, we covered the basics of cellular function and evolutionary theory and then delved deep into cognitive neuroscience, paying particular attention to the dopamine system. In physics, we tackled Maxwell’s electrodynamic equations, Einstein’s relativity theory, and quantum cosmology. We learned about the particle zoo, the difference between hadrons — subatomic particles made of quarks with partial charge — and leptons: particles such as electrons that have integer charge.

An expert in physics or neuroscience might chuckle at the superficiality of our rapid-fire introduction to concept after concept. But anyone other than a professional-level expert would be bowled over by the depth and breadth of the material. To do the painstaking research our PhD program required, we needed to be able to read scientific literature — including peer-reviewed papers in fields far removed from our own — without getting lost. We needed to be able to grasp what was at stake in scientific debates.

We needed, in other words, to become extraordinarily scientifically literate.

Let me tell you a little story to illustrate how successfully the class accomplished this.

At a complex systems conference in Amsterdam a few years later, I found myself in a crowded bar with some physicists. Like many physicists these days, they were working in data science. One mentioned that his research involved inferring causality in cross-sectional datasets with algorithms based on Minkowski space, which is what relativity theory usually uses to capture spacetime relationships. Essentially, he was treating data as having the equivalent of a “time” dimension. This is exactly what you’d need if you wanted to discover whether some variable was actually causing change in another variable, rather than just being correlated with it.

I didn’t understand the math. But I got the concepts. I wasn’t lost. That was the vindication of everything I’d gone through in those two desperate semesters in Science Literacy. The point wasn’t to turn us into mathematicians; it was to turn us into people who didn’t easily get lost. Now here I was, a religious studies PhD hobnobbing with physicists in a darkened bar off an Amsterdam canal, holding my own because I’d learned the mathematical concepts behind special relativity.

These days, I make my living working as an editor in biotech, helping shepherd drug submissions through the labyrinthine FDA approval process. I got the job because, in addition to my English undergrad degree, I had the scientific chops to follow page after page of dense text about T-cells, ATP, and study design. I’m definitely the only one among my colleagues whose PhD is in religion. And I owe it all to a fantastically overambitious, agonizingly in-depth, unrepentantly challenging year-long course on all of science.

Takeaways

Higher education is in rough shape right now, but it can be an amazing gift. These three classes illustrate very different yet equally compelling instances of this gift in my own career. None was in the same subject, but they had some things in common.

By far the most important of these was:

1. They were extremely rigorous.

Nothing makes education so enjoyable as a worthy challenge. You want to be nervously unsure whether you actually have what it takes to finish the class, master the material. You want to be stretched just beyond your capacities, made to grow in difficult and painful new ways. Otherwise, why not just play video games?

I tried to avoid the really cheesy, easy-A classes in college, but many of my classes nevertheless blended together into a kind of monotonous passable soup. The professors didn’t always treat us like grownups who could handle extremely difficult subject matter and responsibilities. When I encountered the ones who did, it was like a breath of April wind blowing the cobwebs from hell.

Along with the maturity and challenge came another important element:

2. They convinced us — and showed us why — the subject matter was important.

I took other challenging classes in my seven million year–long jaunt in higher education. Symbolic logic at UW-Madison, for example, was no joke. But I didn’t get why it mattered. I was moving a bunch of symbols around on a page just to fulfill a math requirement in the most humanities-friendly way I could find.

But Groß’s German literature class demonstrated that to know Goethe was to know, in a way, the narrative foundations for modernity, and so for myself. It was relevant precisely by being old and difficult. Like a young boy being brought out into the bush for an initiation, I was finally being inducted into the arcane knowledge of my own tribe after a lifetime of hearing half-indifferent elders mock the former myths. To say this was refreshing would be an understatement.

As for Allen’s “Plants and Man”: diminishing marginal returns in energy production, the American origins of vegetables like tomatoes and potatoes, the brewing of beer — it wasn’t hard to grasp why the subject matter, well, mattered. And Wildman’s masterful dance with the concepts of science and mathematics brought together an entire web of knowledge, showing clearly why, say, the calculus works, why it’s so important, why Newton and Leibniz would have fought over who invented it. Maybe this sounds a little more abstruse, but I dunno. It would have been a lot harder to send the Apollo craft to the moon without calculus.

But don’t get me wrong. These weren’t technical-skills classes. Instead…

3. They were essentially liberal-arts classes.

Neither Allen’s “Plants and Man” nor Wildman’s “Science Literacy” were truly science classes. They were humanistic approaches to topics in science. German literature, of course, was as humanities as it gets. Each of these classes, then, offered a deep draft of liberal education. Concerned with Bildung, not with technical training, they formed you as a person by giving you the space to explore reality from utterly new angles, guided by expert hands.

In Aristotle’s time, a “liberal” education was offered to young gentlemen, who were free — liberated — from the need to work. Our word “school” comes from a Greek root, scholé, that means leisure time. A fully rounded education, then, provides space and time to deal with ideas, with higher things, rather than merely forcing technical training down one’s craw.

These classes were all truly, deliciously leisurely in exactly that classical way. Their obscenely high standards and sweeping command of big-picture vistas left little space to worry about means and ends. These classes required — and offered — space.

Goodbye to the Credentialing Scheme

This leisurely attitude stood out like a sore thumb against the blurred background of contemporary university life, which is essentially a credentialing scheme. Universities provide the diplomas students need for lucrative careers as professionals, managers, and technocrats. But the managerial mindset this gauntlet cultivates runs almost completely contrary to classical liberal education. A liberal education centers on arts, poetry, storytelling, history — that is, the humanities. Traditionally, it worked by capturing students’ imagination.

You read The Iliad and are transported in your mind’s eye to the windy plains of Troy. You pore over military history, captivated by the narratives of great battles at Hastings and Agincourt, Waterloo and Gettysburg. You read poetry whose rhymes and rhythms sink their way into your memory.

The managerial university, by contrast, shuns passion, fears imagination, dislikes poetics. Your favorite subjects get deconstructed or reduced to power games. History is problematized or transmuted into activism. The “practical” disciplines get prioritized, the passionate ones don’t. Everything is “total work” in a rational, top-down mode. No wonder credentialed graduates churn out such unsatisfying culture and art.

The three classes I’ve recounted here bucked that trend. Of course they demanded sweat and labor. But the work felt like leisure. They created space in the imagination for contemplation, for enthusiasm, for passion. I became more human by striving to master something difficult, something tremendous and challenging, but not immediately practical. (Regular readers of this Substack will note that this sounds familiar.)

Yet they also turned out to be paradoxically useful. I mentioned that the Science Literacy class paved my way to working as a biotech editor. I also did some paid German-to-English translation work after college, and Allen’s introduction to complexity and hierarchy theory shaped the entire trajectory of my research, opening doors to professional collaborations with people from many fields.

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples to “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” Like so many scriptural gems, this passage applies fractally to all of life. Pursuing goals non-transactionally often results in greater gains than seeking only what will obviously pay off.

Universities that take a transactional stance toward education and “training” are in for a tough time in the coming years. The product they’re selling is losing value. The public is turning against them. And advanced AI is rapidly eroding the power of managers and technocrats, the social class with the highest stake in the modern credentialing game. Schools that double down on this game are building a house on sand.

But universities that take a Jesus-like attitude toward learning — an attitude that embraces leisure, that doesn’t angle for a quick return, that stokes rather than flattens the imagination — are building on solid rock. When the winds of change come blowing, it’s these colleges or equivalents that will stand through the gale. They might just have “all these things added” to them. Any one of the classes I’ve described here would fit in perfectly.

1. (Roughly):

“Now I’ve studied – ach! – philo-
Sophy, law, and medicine,
And sadly also theology,
thoroughly and with fervent efforts.
Now here I stand, I poor fool,
And am just as smart as I was before…”

Now that I think about it, this passage is pretty apropos for the topic of higher education today.

2. Faust gets his soul back in Faust Part II, but we didn’t read that.

3. Allen fought eloquently to preserve the old-fashioned title of the course “Plants and Man” against politically correct objections from deans. When I took his class, his efforts had so far remained successful. “‘Man’ is the biological designation for the species,” he harrumphed triumphantly from the lecture stage. “It’s not a statement about gender.” I don’t know if the deans ever won, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be in their shoes even if they did. And you have to admit “Plants and Man” has a far better ring, more fittingly elevated, more poetic, than “Plants and Humans” or — even worse — “Plants and People.”

4. One assignment involved pairing up with another student to brew real beer with real hops, malt, and yeast, bringing the origins of agriculture to life in your apartment closet. We handed over a dozen bottles to Allen and the RAs when the brew was mature. Our grade was partly dependent on what they thought of our finished product.

5. Sadly, Tim Allen died only last month. I found this out after Googling him for this post. He was an atheist, but I hope he’s exploring new levels of biological complexity in the Resurrection.

6. DISCLAIMER: This statement has not been verified by the Association of American Universities, the New England Association of Colleges and Schools, the American Association of University Professors, or anyone else. But it’s literally true nonetheless.