It is too soon to know where COVID-19 will have its most lasting impact on American life, but surely institutions of higher education are one candidate. Having experienced at least part of a semester conducting classes online, liberal-arts colleges must now think about what makes on-campus, face-to-face education truly distinctive. Parents must confront the question of whether it makes sense to pay exorbitant amounts of money in the midst of a massive economic downturn.
Although Zena Hitz’s new book Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of the Intellectual Life is not primarily about institutions of higher learning, everyone who cares about colleges and universities and their place in American life should read it. The book confronts familiar and abiding questions about intellectual inquiry in an utterly engaging and profound way. With a doctorate in philosophy and as a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., Hitz follows the twists and turns of philosophical arguments with fullness and exactitude. But the book is no dry treatise—Hitz uses her own biography and figures such as Malcolm X, Einstein, St. Augustine, Primo Levi, Dorothy Day, the Virgin Mary, and even Steve Martin to illuminate a slippery phenomenon: What do genuine learning and intellectual life, at their core, look like? How might we distinguish them from vocational training or the mere transmission of information? What are the persistent threats to intellectual inquiry?
Comments