`Even Erudition is Possible Outside Academe'

For about half an hour I was tempted to pursue a Ph.D. in English. I had just earned my B.A. at age fifty, thirty years after dropping out at the end of my junior year from a state university in Ohio. My lack of a degree had never been held against me in all my years as a newspaper reporter. Naively exhilarated by the newly minted bachelor’s degree, my judgment was impaired. I was non compos mentis. Cooler heads, two of whom had Ph.D.’s, suggested a doctorate would be a waste of time. In my three-decade absence, the study of literature at the university level had degenerated. Professors no longer read or taught anything I would find of interest. The adviser who had overseen my senior thesis on Henry James said I would end up frustrated, bitter and probably unemployable. She laid the blame for the destruction of literary studies on her generation, the one slightly preceding mine. She called advanced degrees in English “a racket.”

My B.A. changed nothing. For three months I exclusively read books by and about Henry James, which is close to my idea of a vacation, and I took a class in human genomics. I don’t regret the money or effort invested, but neither do I think it sharpened my wits or made me any more marketable or cosmopolitan. I had a little fun and I now take added pleasure in Robert Conquest’s observations on a university education in Reflections on a Ravaged Century (2000):

“. . . people can be educated, cultured and so forth without having been to university at all—as with dozens from Benjamin Franklin to Winston Churchill, from Shakespeare to Einstein, to say nothing of the great women writers of the nineteenth century. Nor is this only a matter of genius. Even erudition is possible outside academe, a point illustrated perfectly by Gibbon himself [Conquest has just quoted Gibbon on the ineducability of Emperor Marcus Aurelius’ son and successor, Commodus], the greatest of historians, who did indeed attend Oxford briefly when fifteen years old, from which (as he tells it) he got nothing. What all of them had was, in the first place, reading. We all know dozens of people, especially from an older generation, who are as much at home in these worlds—except in special fields—as their Bachelored and Mastered and Doctored acquaintances.”