"All our courses are the same," a student offered, "We read things and discuss or listen to stuff." Hmmm.... that's what I've been trying to avoid, but what else is there? Education is reading, writing, listening, talking. Some of this is "doing", that is to say some of this is precisely what academics do and so to argue a historical point or to learn new information by reading or hearing it is experiential. But these are not scholars in training. They are would-be graduates of the state's safety net, the system for improving the workforce and ensuring a citizenry less apt to slope off toward tyranny of the mob or tyrant than they would otherwise be.

Yet it's not the scholarship as much as the thinking that I'd like to get them toward, the careful consideration with an open mind of a splattering of data points filtered, ideally through a set of understandings that rationalize, make more efficient, the thinking process. They should know enough that they are not reinventing the wheel when considering every social, economic, practical, technical, or cultural problem they confront. We're not really set up to do that as effectively as we might, and that is because the school serves many masters, but that's what I'm in for.