| College Symposium:
You’re an editor for Microsoft’s encyclopedia Encarta. How, if at all, did your Shimer education prepare you for this kind of work?
I think it did, definitely. Shimer’s broad education in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences was ideal preparation for working on an encyclopedia. After all, the term, encyclopedia, comes from the Greek words enkyklios paideia, meaning “comprehensive education” and Shimer’s general education program was wonderfully comprehensive.
Shimer’s insistence on going to original sources and studying original texts in depth was quite useful. For several years I was in charge of a feature that we called Sidebars. We found original text in the public domain, or we licensed text from certain publishers, such as Scientific American, Penguin, Random House, and others, so that readers could go beyond the basic, fundamental introduction to a subject that a typical encyclopedia article provides. For example, if you go to the Encarta article on Jane Austen, you can also read excerpts from several of her novels, or if you look up Michael Faraday, you can also read his delightful lecture for children on the “Chemical History of a Candle.”
We were fairly systematic about pursuing this effort, so that just about all of the so-called “Great Books” are represented. In some ways, I felt like I was building a Shimer list of readings on a wide variety of subjects. Our “History of U.S. Foreign Policy” article, for example, is replete with historical documents that give students the opportunity to read the actual texts involved in the development of those policies, from James Monroe’s speech to Congress outlining the Monroe doctrine, to George Kennan’s original Foreign Affairs article on “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” that articulated the U.S. Cold War policy of containment.
What did you do right after Shimer?
I moved to New York City after graduating from Shimer because a lot of the friends I made at Shimer were from the East Coast. I happened to mention to
my friend, Ken Olwig (Class of 1967), who had also just graduated, that I was interested in a career in journalism. Ken’s father, it turned out, was the sports editor of The Staten Island Advance, a daily newspaper on Staten Island. So I got my first “real” job after college as a result of Shimer networking.
I was hired as a general assignment reporter, which meant that you had no “beat” and could be given a different assignment every day. The Advance was an interesting experience, and looking back on it, I think it helped me realize I was better suited to being an editor than a reporter. The paper had a daily circulation of 250,000, but it was really a small-town newspaper oriented to the “local angle.” The Advance’s page one was almost entirely local news, and just about every story developed by its reporters had to have a local angle. The Harvard Lampoon once satirized this kind of small-town, local angle newspaper when it produced an edition of the make-believe Smithfield Gazette. The Lampoon’s Gazette had a banner headline that read “Three Smithfield Women Die in Giant Tsunami.” Below it, the subhead read: “Japan Also Destroyed.”
Another time, on a day when I wasn’t working, my friend, Bruce Kupelnick (Class of 1987), another Shimer student, told me about a music festival in upstate New York and suggested that we go. Bruce thought we might run into other people from Shimer. This wasn’t as far-fetched as it might sound today. In the 1960s, the Time magazine article on Shimer attracted a lot of people from the East Coast, and we seemed to have the uncanny ability to run into each other in places like Grand Central Station or the Rheingold beer music festivals in Central Park. So we drove up to this farm outside Woodstock, New York, where the festival was being held. We had to park our car on a country road about two miles from the entrance. We hadn’t brought any food or water, just ourselves and this amorphous idea that we were going to hear some good music and run into people from Shimer. I have no idea what Bruce thought, but I thought Woodstock was a drag. It had rained the day before, and the field was nothing but mud. It was so crowded that you couldn’t get near the stage and you could barely hear the music. Most depressing of all, we didn’t see a single person from Shimer. Hungry, tired, and wet, we left after only a few hours. Driving back to the city, we were on an overpass, and looking south, we could see that the New York State Thruway was a parking lot for as far as you could see. People were still traveling to the Woodstock Music Festival.
Did it occur to me that I had just attended a signal event of the 1960s counterculture? No, not really. But even so, I was sure there was no Staten Island angle to justify filing a story. The local angle might have been, “Staten Island Residents Inconvenienced by Thruway Traffic Jam.” The next day I came into work only to find that the Woodstock festival was a page one story, written by a staff reporter who hadn’t even been there. That’s about the time I began questioning my career in journalism.
What career advice would you give Shimer students today?
It feels kind of presumptuous to offer any kind of advice. I would say, try to pursue work or a career that you find meaningful, challenging, or fun. Don’t do it for the money. When I left Shimer, I believed strongly that your work is your life. At least eight hours of your day or 40 hours of your week—the better part of your time--will be spent at work so it’s important to enjoy it or take satisfaction from it. We tend to fall into the trap of believing that we can pursue our real interests in our leisure time, but in reality work takes so much of your energy and time that it’s difficult to pursue your other interests unless you’re really committed.
I’d also tell Shimer students that they’re probably getting the best preparation they can from their education at Shimer. Things are changing so rapidly that it’s hard to predict what skills will be needed. Globalization means that if you want job security you’ll have to find a position that can’t be outsourced, that somehow is uniquely local. A broad liberal arts education that can prepare you for a variety of jobs is more necessary than ever. People who specialize too narrowly may find their specialty has been outsourced to another country or eliminated by a technological advance. Having some basic grounding in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities prepares you for many possibilities.
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