I really enjoyed this interview because I've never found WD's point of view convincing. I still don't but it was great to hear more about how he formed his views.
I'll make a few points.
1) If you write an article or give lectures with a certain well-defined and well articulated point of view, the positive responses you receive are of course going to be from people who can relate to that POV and largely agree with it. So taking that highly selective data as evidence of a general trend seems logically suspect, if not just wrong.
2) My personal experience with younger adults is not nearly as broad as WD's. But they run deep. I have three adult children (all Penn alums) who are 37, 35, and 31. Over the years I've gotten to know a few dozen of their friends from college and graduate school well. I don't recognize the distress WD speaks about. Most of the older ones, including my two older ones, have started families. They are living what they consider to be full lives.
I admit my view may be skewed by the fact that most of them live in Manhattan and most of them have achieved affluence or were born into affluence. But the affluent is who WD seems to think are the worst off. That runs counter to everything I've experienced.
3) Show me a modern time or place in the developed world when affluent or powerful parents were not keenly invested in maximizing the chances that their children would also be affluent or powerful. To want to see your children prosper is one of the most natural human urges I can think of. When hasn't there been an hereditary elite? To eliminate that, you'd need to eliminate what comes naturally to parents.
The worry I have is that when our current gilded age reverts to the mean it will be through some mechanism that will make everyone worse off. We're in desperate need of economic reform, and instead we have increasing inequality. Our dangers and our solutions lurk in prosaic issues like how do we make housing and childcare and healthcare more affordable.
This is true: "students can usually find their way to a genuine education—but only if they are determined to." It's also true that only the smallest minority of college students are determined to get that education. I certainly blew my opportunity in college. So many wise, soulful, and intelligent teachers were willing to mentor those who really applied themselves, but I just did enough to get by. I wasn't even an excellent sheep; I was a decent, passable one. Thankfully, a genuine education can come with books alone. I was fortunate to discover, after college, that books written by artists spoke loud and clear to me.
As far as teaching English, I totally agree that "[t]he discipline should not think of itself as knowledge work at all. It is, or should be, soul work, however moist or naïvely humanistic that may sound."
I do not teach English at an elite institution, far from it, but if I succeed at the soul work, I connect, and students at least leave my class with an idea of how reading might one day change and fulfill them.
Thanks for this interview, for the depth of the questions and of the replies.
Also notes the irony that Columbia got their biggest freshman class ever. You would think that prestige-seeking students would avoid these universities once they were under threat but all the controversy may have reminded prospective students of what was great about them.
Part of my annoyance with Tablet is the assumption that the readers' children will attend the Ivy schools by default. That was true for neither myself or sibling and sibling who has job in government affairs for Alliance for Automotive Innovation has hardly suffered thereby.
Thank you. An amazing conversation so very enjoyable and at times challenging to listen in on. I will read more into his work and keep better track of your Substack presence
At least for me the obvious thing to say is that any exposure to the meaning of learning in Jewish culture will imply that secular learning will be held to an equal standard of spirituality. I will be very interested to see what the Jewish memoir says and it may even be able to get a fair review someplace. (Jewish Review of Books is sufficiently non-ideological that I am hoping for them)(Tablet will probably be receptive to some of the things in the book but I am at the point with them where I will only read anything they publish if someone else has vouched for it and a print magazine is emphatically the right thing for them--but I will just as emphatically not pay to subscribe to it)
This post feeds into the earlier post about bullshit jobs and how these people's working lives are all tending the machine or the people who tend the machine for possible high status in return.
It took me until last year to read "The Problem Of Slavery In The Age Of Revolution" because it is 50 years old but David Waldstreicher said flatly that it is still the best book and David Brion Davis is indeed a real one. It comforted me a lot that in the 1970s he was able to see that the figure of the perfect victim symbolized all that had been lost to massive social and economic change. Certainly more privileged people who are late to the knowledge that they are challenged simply to stay human would look to others who seem to have always known that they have that challenge due to marginalization of various sorts.
Some things from the CS/AI world that no one here may have seen
Ben Recht of UC-Berkeley is coming out with a book in 2026 called "The Irrational Decision" about how we came to think that reason itself meant thinking like a computer
https://arxiv.org/html/2506.14652 is a preprint paper by Microsoft Research and Stanford authors among others about how the notion of "rigor" in AI is entirely too narrow and methodological and there are other notions of rigor about whether the researchers are even asking the right question/if the magic of "AI" is being asked to do something impossible or amoral. The central example is that physiognomy as a science has been thoroughly discredited but no one bothered to tell the AI researchers who claim to tell all kinds of things from reading faces. These missing kinds of rigor are the kind of thing that the humanities done well can really do.
I really enjoyed this interview because I've never found WD's point of view convincing. I still don't but it was great to hear more about how he formed his views.
I'll make a few points.
1) If you write an article or give lectures with a certain well-defined and well articulated point of view, the positive responses you receive are of course going to be from people who can relate to that POV and largely agree with it. So taking that highly selective data as evidence of a general trend seems logically suspect, if not just wrong.
2) My personal experience with younger adults is not nearly as broad as WD's. But they run deep. I have three adult children (all Penn alums) who are 37, 35, and 31. Over the years I've gotten to know a few dozen of their friends from college and graduate school well. I don't recognize the distress WD speaks about. Most of the older ones, including my two older ones, have started families. They are living what they consider to be full lives.
I admit my view may be skewed by the fact that most of them live in Manhattan and most of them have achieved affluence or were born into affluence. But the affluent is who WD seems to think are the worst off. That runs counter to everything I've experienced.
3) Show me a modern time or place in the developed world when affluent or powerful parents were not keenly invested in maximizing the chances that their children would also be affluent or powerful. To want to see your children prosper is one of the most natural human urges I can think of. When hasn't there been an hereditary elite? To eliminate that, you'd need to eliminate what comes naturally to parents.
The worry I have is that when our current gilded age reverts to the mean it will be through some mechanism that will make everyone worse off. We're in desperate need of economic reform, and instead we have increasing inequality. Our dangers and our solutions lurk in prosaic issues like how do we make housing and childcare and healthcare more affordable.
This is true: "students can usually find their way to a genuine education—but only if they are determined to." It's also true that only the smallest minority of college students are determined to get that education. I certainly blew my opportunity in college. So many wise, soulful, and intelligent teachers were willing to mentor those who really applied themselves, but I just did enough to get by. I wasn't even an excellent sheep; I was a decent, passable one. Thankfully, a genuine education can come with books alone. I was fortunate to discover, after college, that books written by artists spoke loud and clear to me.
As far as teaching English, I totally agree that "[t]he discipline should not think of itself as knowledge work at all. It is, or should be, soul work, however moist or naïvely humanistic that may sound."
I do not teach English at an elite institution, far from it, but if I succeed at the soul work, I connect, and students at least leave my class with an idea of how reading might one day change and fulfill them.
Thanks for this interview, for the depth of the questions and of the replies.
What an excellent read. Thank you so much for this
Great, probing questions (and enlightening answers) in this interview.
"One of the things I came to admire about academia is the way it manages to screw everyone in a slightly different way." I've seen this many times.
It's not clear to me that academia is unique in this respect. Ever worked in business?
Feels obligated to share David Deming's address at the Harvard convocation yesterday https://forklightning.substack.com/p/shorting-the-ai-jobs-apocalypse
Also notes the irony that Columbia got their biggest freshman class ever. You would think that prestige-seeking students would avoid these universities once they were under threat but all the controversy may have reminded prospective students of what was great about them.
Part of my annoyance with Tablet is the assumption that the readers' children will attend the Ivy schools by default. That was true for neither myself or sibling and sibling who has job in government affairs for Alliance for Automotive Innovation has hardly suffered thereby.
Thank you. An amazing conversation so very enjoyable and at times challenging to listen in on. I will read more into his work and keep better track of your Substack presence
At least for me the obvious thing to say is that any exposure to the meaning of learning in Jewish culture will imply that secular learning will be held to an equal standard of spirituality. I will be very interested to see what the Jewish memoir says and it may even be able to get a fair review someplace. (Jewish Review of Books is sufficiently non-ideological that I am hoping for them)(Tablet will probably be receptive to some of the things in the book but I am at the point with them where I will only read anything they publish if someone else has vouched for it and a print magazine is emphatically the right thing for them--but I will just as emphatically not pay to subscribe to it)
This post feeds into the earlier post about bullshit jobs and how these people's working lives are all tending the machine or the people who tend the machine for possible high status in return.
It took me until last year to read "The Problem Of Slavery In The Age Of Revolution" because it is 50 years old but David Waldstreicher said flatly that it is still the best book and David Brion Davis is indeed a real one. It comforted me a lot that in the 1970s he was able to see that the figure of the perfect victim symbolized all that had been lost to massive social and economic change. Certainly more privileged people who are late to the knowledge that they are challenged simply to stay human would look to others who seem to have always known that they have that challenge due to marginalization of various sorts.
Some things from the CS/AI world that no one here may have seen
Ben Recht of UC-Berkeley is coming out with a book in 2026 called "The Irrational Decision" about how we came to think that reason itself meant thinking like a computer
https://arxiv.org/html/2506.14652 is a preprint paper by Microsoft Research and Stanford authors among others about how the notion of "rigor" in AI is entirely too narrow and methodological and there are other notions of rigor about whether the researchers are even asking the right question/if the magic of "AI" is being asked to do something impossible or amoral. The central example is that physiognomy as a science has been thoroughly discredited but no one bothered to tell the AI researchers who claim to tell all kinds of things from reading faces. These missing kinds of rigor are the kind of thing that the humanities done well can really do.