What were your favorite courses in college?

The course that I enjoyed most was “Analysis of the New Testament” – a course offered in the Divinity Graduate School. For reasons I covered in detail in “Dear Children” I enjoyed the subject-matter as well as my fellow classmates – all of whom were either priests, ministers, or nuns. Perhaps I received the top grade in the class because I was unencumbered by the bias of faith; accordingly, my mind was open to the detailed scholarship required by Professor Stendahl. While I was very familiar with the New Testament – as were all my classmates – I enthusiastically welcomed the extensive reading list beyond the Bible. Most of you have read “Dear Children” so I will not repeat the material related to the course covered therein.

           I came to Harvard as a math major. I had won a national scholarship in math in high school which led to my spending a summer at Vanderbilt before my senior year in high school. I quickly discovered that I was in the wrong major; indeed, that I was less than a neophyte in the subject.

         Harvard held sherry parties for people in different majors early in our freshman year. There I met Joe Kendler and Mike Harris. I was taking (and struggling with) the second level of calculus – called Math 10. Kendler was taking Math 100,000 and Harris was taking Math One Million. I inquired as to when they had studied the subject covered in Math 10. They could not recall if it was second or third grade. I was accepted by Harvard because I was reasonably intelligent. Acting on that intelligence and my powers of observation, I switched my major the next day to “uncommitted.”

           I ended up majoring in Government and all my courses, except the Divinity School course, in my last two years were Government courses – none of which qualifies as one of my favorites. The course that does qualify is Humanities 5 – a philosophy course I took freshman year. There we studied an array of philosophers, but three caught my particular attention and led to my choice of Government as a major.

          First, Plato’s The Republic resulted in my first oral participation in a class. While my classmates appeared to love the idea of a society governed by a Philosopher King, I was quite offended by the idea. I grew up in a small town with the children of farmers, car mechanics, plumbers, electricians, factory workers, and many other undertakings whose parents had not gone to college and nor would they. Based on that experience, I believed that the ideas regarding appropriate social interaction and reactions to important events that came from the less educated were as valuable as the ideas flowing from the educated. You needed education to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or an engineer. But you did not need a special education to know how to live and interact with your neighbor. Part of why I loved the American system of government was that the vote of an uneducated farmer was equal to the vote of the most educated person in the country. Therein lay the initial spark leading to the choice of Government as a major.

          Next, I was exposed to two theorems, both called The Social Contract. Hobbes and Locke each undertook the explanation of functioning social governance and reached different conclusions as to the ideal. Their different choice of ideal arose from their different view of the human race. Hobbes believed than people were at their core too self-interested and greedy to be trusted to govern themselves. Locke believed the opposite. My background drew me naturally to Locke and greater freedom for the masses to decide the direction of governance.

         I came to love the compromise our founding fathers reached. We would have a Congress to enact our laws comprised of a House of Representatives that would be egalitarian and a Senate that would more likely be from the elite. The House would be filled according to the population of each state and its occupants be subject to being kicked out with elections every two years. The Senate would have the same number from each state regardless of the population and stand for election only every six years. If Locke’s masses represented in the House became too carried away by some passing fancy, Hobbes’ Senate was there to restrain. If both got carried away and inappropriately trampled on the rights of the individual, the Supreme Court (with Justices appointed for life) was there to protect individual liberty.

        It was the balancing of individual freedom with protection of the common welfare that made Government an attractive major. It did not hurt that John Kennedy was President and drew four of my Government professors as advisors to his Presidency. Their tendency to look for big government to solve social issues was nice fodder for my opposing view that for most issues I prefer the solution to arise from the ashes of debate among the populace rather than the debate among the elite few in D.C. and our top-rated colleges. Presenting my side in class against the opposition of the teacher and most of the students prepared me for the courtroom where I would spend 44-years.

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