When I was a student at Georgetown in the second half of the 1980s, it may have been Reagan’s America, but most of us were more interested in Hoya basketball and the city’s drinking age — 18 at the time — than in intellectual stimulation.
One of the few saving graces of my time on the Hilltop was my membership in the Lecture Fund, which I remember as the closest thing the school had to an intellectual forum at the time, though it did not allow for much intimate interaction. My most vivid memory of the Lecture Fund, in fact, was the visit to campus of William F. Buckley, Jr., probably in 1986 or 1987. As an organizer of the event, I got to sit in a green room with Buckley and a small group prior to his talk. I had never encountered someone so witty, let alone au courant on so many different topical issues. Sadly, it was all pearls before swine, and I still rue the fact that I was not mature nor intellectually dazzling enough to have attracted his attention, been brought into the NR fold way back in the late-’80s, and one day become Rich and Jonah’s boss.
But I digress. The point I was trying to make was that GU back in the day — especially its College and School of Foreign Service, in which I enrolled — had a fine tradition, but little organized intellectual opportunity outside the classroom, where one could exercise one’s passions or be exposed to entirely new fields of thought. Only after I had graduated did I sense I had missed something, though I never quite knew what until I arrived to teach at Yale in 2000. In New Haven, I found a flourishing extracurricular community, from the Yale Political Union with its political parties, to other societies and clubs. While at Yale, I was able to participate, from a different vantage point, in the types of activities that I had missed in my own undergraduate days.
I’m happy to say that times have changed at Georgetown, and for the better. Last month, I gave a talk to the Tocqueville Forum, whose mission is “to advance the study of America’s founding principles and their roots in the Western philosophical and religious traditions.” Sponsored, somewhat to my surprise, by the Government Department at GU, the Forum organizes lectures, colloquia, retreats and other activities, and publishes a journal, Utraque Unum. I found its undergraduate members to be just like the students I’d taught at Yale who were involved in similar groups: bright, intellectually curious, and passionate about thinking and exploring topics outside the formal classroom setting.
I decided to give my talk on Gertrude Himmelfarb’s wonderful The Roads to Modernity, which I had just finished, and which had piqued my interest in why the GOP fails to articulate a more socially-oriented message of compassion and opportunity, in place of its traditional focus on transactional goals like smaller government and lower taxes. I contrasted Himmelfarb’s approbation of the British “sociology of virtue” with Jonathan Israel’s A Revolution of the Mind, which argues that the “radical Enlightenment” was the true progenitor of modern democracy. Himmelfarb’s gentler and more humane British enlightenment I find both more congenial and more optimistic.
I don’t know how well the students liked the talk, but I enormously enjoyed sharing a meal with them at The Tombs beforehand, and discussing the relative merits of the Enlightenment afterwards. In a way, it was a small redemption for me, making up somewhat for my lack of intellectual engagement while I was a Hoya. The Tocqueville Forum is a worthy cause, not merely in the struggle for intellectual diversity in academia, but simply for the encouragement of the life of the mind. Anyone with a byline at National Review would be welcome, I’m sure, to see for themselves, and help continue the great debate in which the next generation of America’s leaders are engaged.