Dean of the Faculty
Speeches & Articles
"What's Interesting" Linfield College Convocation
September 2005
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So, what’s interesting? Well, my brief answer is that everything is interesting and that, in principle, everything is interesting to everyone, though everyone might not know it. Now the notion that everything is interesting is perhaps a kind of sad cliché; but I think I can give it some substance, and let me try to do so by taking a risk and telling a story about myself. This is risky because usually the worst thing you can do in a lecture like this is to talk about yourself. You’re always really, really interested in your own life, but other people are usually bored by your own life, especially when you’re not a great person but only an OK person. Remember, though, everything’s really interesting, at least in principle; and I’ll try to keep it brief.
The time was 1971. I had graduated from college, an indifferent student. These were also not especially easy times to be 22 years old. An unpopular war was raging; unlike today there was a draft; we were enduring the upheavals of an anti-war movement and a counter-culture. I myself, a kind of professional cynic, was a strong adherent of neither side. True believers of any ilk turned me off. Of course, as a cynic, I also didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, and that was vaguely painful. I was in fact driving a taxicab in NY City to pay the bills; but beyond that, I had no direction. For lack of anything better to do, I decided to enroll in a Master’s Program in Political Science at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I had graduated from college. On the first day, I had to go to the department chair to get my schedule approved. He was a large, garrulous, jovial fellow named Remec, a Czech émigré and a nice enough guy. He looked over the proposed course schedule that I had written down. He said yes this is fine, no you can’t do that now, yes this will work, and oh yes, you have to take a course in political philosophy. I remember very distinctly sitting there in his office and saying to myself: Now how am I going to endure an entire semester of political philosophy? The thought depressed me. Really so. If I was interested in anything at that time, it was city politics. I loved New York, and I wanted to learn about how things really worked – how decisions are made, who has the power, what explains why this happened rather than that. I wanted to study living, tangible political reality; and the thought of spending hours reading these old, musty, obsolete, turgid, boring texts filled me with real dread. But I could see there would be no arguing the point with Remec. So I took the class. Fourth floor, Dealy Hall, sitting in the back row where cynics usually sit. The professor was a Jesuit priest, a fine teacher – not a great teacher, not a performer – but a very good teacher who evinced, among other things, a deep commitment to the material. And I remember one day sitting there about halfway through the semester; and I remember, very distinctly, suddenly saying to myself – this is it. This is what I want to do. Political philosophy. This is what I want to spend my life doing. And I’ve been doing it ever since. To say that it’s been a joy is to understate the case; for me, it’s almost like saying breathing is a joy – which, in one sense it obviously is, it really beats the alternative, but in another sense it’s obviously much more than that. Being a political philosopher is, for better or worst, a fundamental part of who I am; I honestly cannot imagine myself any other way. So here was my epiphany. I can’t fully explain why this happened; it had something to do with great ideas and great books and helping to keep such things alive. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is the fact that this occurred.
So now today, a student – an advisee – might come to see me and say something like, well, I could take a psychology class, it would fill a requirement, but I really don’t want to because I’m just not interested in psychology, and when I hear something like that I’m likely to become a little obnoxious. I’ll say something like, so exactly what is it about psychology that you’re not interested in. What are the uninteresting features of psychology? I’ll rarely get a good response; usually a non-response, something like, well I’m more interested in literature or history. And then I’ll ask, so how many psychology courses at Reed have you taken; and the usual response will be, well I haven’t taken any. At which point I’ll exhibit puzzlement – part feigned, part real – and I’ll say, well if you haven’t taken any psychology, how can you possibly know whether or not it’s interesting? If you haven’t experienced something, how can you know what the experience will really be like? Now I suppose the student could say, well I haven’t experienced a broken jaw but I know pretty darn well that I wouldn’t like it. But I don’t think the analogy holds very well; and I think the story of my own epiphany is a lot more telling. With respect to courses and subject matters and intellectual endeavor, you really don’t know what something is until you start doing it. And when you start doing it, if you’re reasonably serious and give it a chance and let yourself get into, it’s hard to imagine that you wouldn’t find it interesting. Moreover, I can prove that everything is interesting; or at least, I have very strong evidence to that effect. At Reed College, we have 18 departments. Each of them is composed of professors whom I personally know to be extremely intelligent, lively, active, engaged and, in most cases, non-crazy people who are, each and every one them, passionately interested in his or her subject matter. If, for example, physics professor David Griffiths is interested in physics – which he is, passionately, intensely – then physics is interesting, case closed. If Dan Reisberg is interested in psychology, then psychology is interesting; and so on.
