No thinking, please, we’re a university, and besides, what good is it?

I have no childhood memory of a grownup ever saying to me, “For heaven’s sake, get your nose out of that book and go outside and play with your friends.”

Now there’s a blessing.

From the magical moment at the breakfast table when my 6-year-old self gazed at a cereal box and suddenly the words organized themselves into communiqués from Sugar Pops, I read anything and everything I wanted, with little adult supervision or interference. My school tested me in the 4th grade and found I was reading at the 11th grade level. Most days, for an hour or more, I would shut the door to my bedroom and read a book or magazine in solitary rapture, and my parents never objected. The only stricture on my budding literary life was no books at the dinner table. I could live with that.

Thousands of hours behind closed doors with texts primed me for Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life by Zena Hitz. The author is a tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. (Professors at St. John’s are known as tutors.) The book’s subtitle undermines the seriousness of its contents. Hitz did not write a lightweight volume extolling the fun of thoughtful reading to people who already know it. She had something more serious in mind.

The fundamental question of adult life is, “How should I live?” Most of us never explicitly pose this question to ourselves, but we pursue it all the time in the identities we assume, the people we choose to hang with, the brands we embrace, the jobs we do and how we do them. We join or exit religious communities, we choose a neighborhood, we adopt a child, we get a divorce. All relate to that big question. We never arrive at a final answer, but we are better for the question.

For being such a big question, it is easily subverted by, “How do I want to live?” That’s not the same thing. Not even close, though it seems close. The second query feels deep, but it lacks the moral component that gives the first one its profound meaning. The difference between “want” and “should” is substantial. We can answer the “want” question with a credit card or an impulsive decision, for better or worse. There’s no way to answer the “should” question unless we get serious and think it through, at the least during moments of crisis or transition.

As you might expect from a humanities scholar and proponent of the liberal arts, Zena Hitz believes the path to defining a meaningful life lies in finding enough quiet and solitude to read profound books and then apply our stimulated minds to figuring out our own paths to meaning. A path not determined by an algorithm, a marketing campaign, an influencer, a demagogue, a guru, or a mob. The only means to the agency, autonomy, and dignity that is our birthright is to arrive at our personal conclusion about meaning in the privacy of our own minds. At least, as Hitz sees it.

Her prescription of intellectual engagement through thoughtful reading doesn’t pay mind to the millions of people who never read books but still find meaning in their day-to-day existence. She’s preaching to a self-selected congregation. But her ideas rhyme to a lifelong bookworm like me. What most got my attention, though, was her analysis of how our society has diminished our culture by pushing even thoughtful people away from serious reading and thinking. Especially in the academy.

To her disillusionment, her years in higher education showed her that universities make it hard to think these days. In a tidy bit of circularity, she began her academic training as an undergraduate at her present employer, St. John’s, followed by graduate work at a trio of academic powerhouses: the University of Cambridge, the University of Chicago, and Princeton, where she obtained a PhD in philosophy. She dutifully trod the academic path meant to culminate in tenure and a rich, meaningful life of inquiry in academia, but soon soured on her workplace. In Lost in Thought, she wrote,

…the shallowness of my academic life became gradually more obvious. Either I sought approval or status by performing well at the expense of others, or, in small groups, my fellow academics and I explained to one another our own superiority—our difference from the dumb, the wrong, the bad, and the ugly.

“The dumb, the wrong, the bad, and the ugly” would be the rest of us.

After all those years of training her mind, she was shocked by how fast that organ atrophied at a university, which rewarded compliance more than creativity or independence.

I had lost much of the ability to think freely and openly on a topic, concerned lest I lose my hard-won position in the academic social hierarchy. I worked busily on narrow research projects and did not allow myself the time to read and reflect broadly.

So a university turned out to be a bad place to think.

Hitz argues that in these blaring, glaring modern United States, it’s impossible to learn or think, even on campus, until one finds a way to hide from the siren song of brain-dead mass culture and the 24-hour demands of the economy. Campus is no longer a retreat from the imposition of that economy’s “realities.” In an irony at the heart of Hitz’s book, to really think, she believes, one may have to renounce contemporary American higher education, where learning, especially learning to read and write and discern and question, has given way to expensive vocational training in science and engineering, and to checkbox certification required to pursue money and status (which our culture equates) upon graduation. In a 2020 essay published by The New Statesman, Hitz plucks a quote from the United Kingdom’s then Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson: “We must never forget that the purpose of education is to give people the skills they need to get a good and meaningful job.”

In other words, don’t expect public support for anything that is not utilitarian and in the service of capitalism.

American colleges still enroll thousands of English majors, philosophy majors, and kids studying French Restoration comedy or poetry or the Modernists. An earnest student in 2025 can obtain a fine education based on the writings of the finest minds of the last four millennia—such a thing is out there if you look. But that’s not where the money is, and each day American universities bear less resemblance to temples of learning and more resemblance to corporatized revenue generators with a side hustle in teaching—teaching whatever best feeds the economy’s maw.

Hitz spares no words in her opposition to Williamson’s thinking and her defense of studying the liberal arts. In The New Statesman, she wrote, “To call education ‘job training’ is, quite simply, to call it ‘learning how to follow someone else’s orders.’” She added, “Liberal learning assumes individuals to be authors of their destinies, shaping the future by thinking, imagining and choosing, rather than simply fitting into a pre-ordained ladder of achievements.”

Which reminded me of David Mamet:

Do not internalize the industrial model. You are not one of the myriad of interchangeable pieces, but a unique human being, and if you’ve got something to say, say it, and think well of yourself while you’re learning to say it better.

So why did universities internalize the industrial model?

Oh, that’s a big one. A full answer would be book-length. But I can offer a few ideas.

Start with economic capture. An economy is an improvised, kludgy, ramshackle system for distributing goods, services, and wealth. A system under the influence—verging on control when it’s out of whack—of oligarchs, corporate executives, vulture capitalists, and kleptocrats who do what they can to rig the game. Those of us among the hoi and the polloi benefit, too, billions of us all over the world in the last century. But the bargain we struck, or so we thought, was that in exchange for our ideas, our entrepreneurial energy, and of course our labor, we would be provided with life’s necessities, with some left over for stuff we don’t need but is still nice, like cashmere, gin, or football tickets. Plus, we could stockpile excess earnings to benefit our children.

Not part of the bargain was surrender of the liberty to decide our own meaning, our own answer to, “How should I live?” But that sort of independent thinking and autonomy causes problems for those who control capital, so our culture, which has been captured by the economy, does not encourage it, starting in first grade and going all through grad school. We are under immense pressure to shut up, go to work, spend all of our money, and hand our agency over to marketers, brands, and algorithms.

One bulwark against this should be college, which ought to train those of us fortunate enough to attend to read and ponder and ask prickly questions, while affording us a few years and some shelter to develop the habit. But the cold economic reality of consumer capitalism has, to a large extent, captured the academy. In my 26 years at Johns Hopkins University, I watched it happen. Enrollments in humanities departments shrank as social and economic pressure forced students to turn away from any discipline that didn’t promise substantial paychecks 20 years down the road. (Factor in student debt from extortionate tuition, which elite and even not-so-elite academies levy with no remorse because the market will bear it. Why a school with Harvard’s massive endowment even charges tuition is a discussion worth having.)

As more and more schools loaded their boards of trustees with wealthy business executives and entrepreneurs—in no small part because the schools were after a piece of their wealth—I noticed how university presidents now were measured by the same benchmarks as corporate CEOs. Nary a word about improving the quality of teaching, or fostering a rich intellectual environment, or keeping the library shipshape. The praise songs were all for “growing the institution”—all the new buildings, the burgeoning endowment, the school’s local economic impact, and the enhanced national standing in those bullshit US News rankings.

Model a university on a corporation and you start to make decisions dictated by the bottom line and whatever serves the economy—economic capture. All learning becomes subject to the soulless question, What is it good for? “Good” always defined in economic terms, of course.

(To step back from the elitist drift of this essay for a moment, ordinary Americans used to participate in worker’s reading groups, attend lectures by noted authors and intellectuals, read more than one newspaper a day, and by the millions watch Leonard Bernstein’s Sunday TV lectures on classical music. Annual bestseller lists of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s included dozens of sophisticated novels and nonfiction titles. Now Donald Trump wants to confer Kennedy Center honors on KISS. The last term you could apply to contemporary American culture is “thoughtful.”)

When a system discourages even college professors from thinking freely, someone—a lot of someones—needs to start throwing spanners into the gears. I’m picturing barricades manned by pissed off white people waving rolled up copies of The Atlantic. Should do the trick.

I remember, as a teenager, laughing at a cartoon. A caveman has just invented the wheel and proudly shows it to a fellow caveman, who responds, puzzled, “If you can’t eat it or screw it, what good is it?”

Exactly.

Zena Hitz in The New Statesman: “Why rebranding higher education as “job training” is an offense to humanism”

Zena Hitz in The Imaginative Conservative: “The crisis of intellectual life”

Lost in Thought, from my Bookshop.org store