131. To Think, or Not to Think - The Sad Trajectory of Liberal Arts in Universities and UTulsa's Honors College : Jennifer A. Frey (Former Dean of UTulsa's Honors College)

This interview is a bit different from other episodes. I sit down with Dr. Jennifer A. Frey, the former Dean of the University of Tulsa’s Honors College. If you’ve been following the Lessons for Interesting People podcast on Substack, you will know I wrote an article about Tulsa’s honors college recently. I committed to UTulsa because the university seemed to have accomplished the impossible: combine a computer science college filled with research opportunities with an Honors College whose mission was to analyze and debate the great works of the Western tradition in a vibrant community of professors and peers.

That’s why I was distressed, when seven weeks before school was set to begin, UTulsa decided to “restructure their program” without any clear information on what exactly this meant. 

In this interview, Dr. Frey discusses the purpose of higher education. 

Is it simply to equip you for the workplace? Or, is it to teach you the habits of mind to think freely? Then, we dive into the truth about why programs like UTulsa’s Honors College are not being supported by their universities. According to Dr. Frey, it’s not the cost. 

Topics:

• The State of Higher Education: What is the Purpose of the University?
• What is a Liberal Education?
• The Honors College of the University of Tulsa: the Dream, its Present, and its Precarious Future
• "What books have had an impact on you?"
• "What advice do you have for teenagers?"

Bio:

Dr. Jennifer A. Frey is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tulsa. She previously served as the inaugural Dean of the Honors College at the University of Tulsa. Before coming to the University of Tulsa, she was an Associate Professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina, where she was also a Peter and Bonnie McCausland Faculty Fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences. Prior to her tenure at Carolina, she was a Collegiate Assistant Professor the Humanities at the University of Chicago, and a junior fellow of the Society for the Liberal Arts

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Transcript

Speaker 0:01

This interview is a bit different from other episodes. I sat down with Dr. Jen Frey, the former Dean of University of Tulsa's Honors College. If you've been following the podcast Substack, Lessons from Interesting People, you will know that I wrote an article about Tulsa's Honors College recently. I committed to U Tulsa because the university seemed to have accomplished the impossible. Combine a computer science college filled with research opportunities with an honors college whose mission was to analyze and debate the great works of the Western tradition in a vibrant community of professors and peers. That's why I was distressed when seven weeks before school began, U Tulsa decided to restructure their program without any clear information on what exactly this meant. This is the Aiming for the Moon podcast, and I'm your host, Taylor Bledsoe. On this podcast, I interview interesting people from a teenage perspective. In this interview, Dr. Frey discusses the purpose of higher education. Is it simply to equip you for the workplace? Or is it to teach you the habits of mind to think freely? Then we dive into the truth about why programs like U Tulsa's Honors College are not being supported by the universities. According to Dr. Frey, it's not the cost of the programs that's the problem. Jennifer A. Frey is a professor of philosophy at the University of Tulsa. She previously served as the inaugural dean of the Honors College at the University of Tulsa. Before coming to the University of Tulsa, she was an associate professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina, where she was also a Peter and Bonnie McClausland Faculty Fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences. Prior to her tenure at Carolina, she was a Collegian Assistant Professor of Humanities at the University of Chicago and a junior fellow of the Society for the Liberal Arts. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate the podcast and subscribe. You can follow us at Aiming the Number Four Moon on all the socials. You can see our episode notes for links to our website, AimingFortHemoon.com and our podcast Substack, Lessons from Interesting People. Alright, with that, sit back, relax, and listen in. Thanks again to Paxton Page for this incredible music and Jess Grimes, another University of Tulsa Honors College student, for helping with the editing. Thank you to the University of Tulsa Studio 151 for providing a space to record. Try it, enjoy. Say something real quick for me so I can. Hi. Great. Okay, we're we're live. Well, thank you, Dr. Frey, for joining me on Aiming for the Moon.

Speaker 1 2:39

Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here.

Speaker 2:42

So uh how do we want to jump into this conversation? Um so you've been talking for a long time now, pretty much all summer, and before this as well, about the state of higher education, specifically the state of liberal arts education. And to kind of dive into this topic, uh what is the bird's eye view and as well as the boots on the ground view? So what do you think is the future of liberal arts education and what are you seeing in the moment as a professor?

Speaker 1 3:11

Okay, so let's start with the present because that's easier um than trying to forecast the future. Um I think that um the main point that I try to get across when I talk to people about this issue is that we've reached a point um in the history of higher education in this country in which it's becoming very difficult to distinguish between a university and a trade school. And um there's a long and complicated and fascinating history of higher education in this country. Uh, I'll be teaching a class about it this spring. Um, so if anyone is interested in taking that class, uh you should sign up for it. Um, but basically, um, you know, every university in this country started out as a small liberal arts college. Um at some point in the late 19th century, uh, most of them made the transition from college to university. Uh, and that was really a transition culturally from a kind of British Oxbridge model to a German research university model. Um, and a couple of things happened in that transition. The first is that all of the emphasis and incentives uh go towards new knowledge production or research. And that's measured both in terms of research dollars coming into the university and also in terms of like outputs going out. So, how many publications uh do you have as a professor and what is their impact? What is your citation count? Things like this. Um, if that is, if all of the incentives are around producing research, then you have very little incentive as a professor to care about or devote any time to undergraduate teaching. Uh, so that's kind of the problem, right? Um insofar as there's a division of labor within the contemporary university in this country, we have sort of um general education. So those classes that we think that all undergrads need to take. Um, and we've kind of um passed that off under uh onto what I like to call a kind of academic underclass, right? So graduate students, adjunct lecturers, uh, people who are not uh don't need to be research active. That's who's by and large teaching general education. Um and then when it comes to being a high-powered researcher, uh, your focus is by and large on your graduate students, right? And because that's where your research legacy is, uh, that's where your research help is. Um, and and quite literally, that's where the money is and the prestige. And so uh this is an institutional problem. Uh, the second thing is that research is highly specialized, right? So when you are training uh as a graduate student, you are narrowing and narrowing and narrowing and narrowing. Uh, because again, the goal is to produce new knowledge. And uh it turns out to do that, you kind of have to read everything in your field and like make a move in some debate, right? And so that that's a that's a kind of narrowing of of knowledge and also of your own mind. And, you know, liberal learning doesn't really get a good grip in that scenario. It doesn't, um, it doesn't get a good grip in general education because general education has become an afterthought by and large. Um, no one's really rewarded or incentivized to contribute to general education. Um and then, you know, on the research side, again, it's not liberal because liberal education is supposed to be the education that broadens the mind, that makes a person free in a general way uh to live a flourishing life. Now, nobody thinks that research is doing that for you. I don't know a soul who would try to make that case. Um, so really, when we look at the contemporary university, we don't really see a place for liberal arts education to flourish. And so non-accidentally, it's not flourishing. Um, we also see at the same time, uh, and again, I think most of this is institutional, we see a kind of rebranding or uh a kind of um re-imagining of the liberal arts. So I'll just give one recent example, although there's so many examples to give, but Brandeis University um has just reimagined the liberal arts so that it's job training. And so at Brandeis, uh, you will now get two transcripts. Uh, one that just says, like, this is what I did, this is the grade I got. The second one breaks down how whatever you did, whether it was study abroad or uh learning Greek, or probably nobody's doing that, but whatever it was that you did, uh can show demonstrable quantifiable job skills. Right. So it's it's totally uh it's it's it's rebranding a liberal arts education as servo, you know, and uh that's ironic, that's a contradiction term. Exactly. Exactly. It's like we're rebranding it by saying it's the opposite of what it's supposed to be. And so it's, you know, I kind of am interested in starting a conversation or really participating in a conversation because it's this this problem has been going on for a long time. And I'm far from alone from noticing the problem. Um, however, I think that we're reaching a point where it's becoming especially dire, right? So if you look into various measures of the health of traditional modes of liberal learning, and that will include some humanities disciplines like philosophy and literature and history, but it's also going to include, you know, math and uh some of the natural sciences that are not applied. And they're not doing very well either. And I think, again, the reason for this is uh people are taught to approach their college degree as a means of certifying them for a high-paying job. And it's just unclear how just doing a lot of math is going to do that for you. Yeah, you need to know math for all kinds of professions, but you're gonna learn that math in engineering or computer science or whatever the professional track is. Uh, but why would you just study math? Right? Like nobody really has an answer to that question anymore because nobody really has a vision um of the value and the point of a liberal education. What is the value and point of a liberal education? Well, I sort of take a very old-fashioned uh stance on this, right? It's liberal in the sense of liberalis, or uh, you know, the education befitting a f a free person and citizen. You know, that's its historical context. And historically, the way that we kind of understand or articulate what that means has changed. You know, it's taken different cultural forms. And uh one's ideas about the exact curriculum or mode of study have also changed in various ways. But what you notice when you look at this history is that there's more continuity than there is change. Uh and it's it's it's a pretty simple idea, I think. It's that um a liberal education is the cultivation of certain habits of mind, habits of mind that you need to be a free person. Like let's talk about what those habits of mind are. And first and foremost, among them are wisdom. And wisdom is really the opposite of narrow specialization and expertise, right? Um, you can be an expert epidemiologist, and so you're gonna know a lot about contagious diseases, and that's really awesome. Um, but it doesn't mean that you can set public policy. And we made the mistake, I think, uh in 2020 with a global pandemic of giving up what Aristotle would call political prudence to the experts, to the epidemiologists. They don't have a mind for political prudence, and that's fine. Uh, the trouble was that we expected them to, right? We we um what we ought to have done um is right, rip remain uh resolute in our duties, um at both as democratic citizens and as elected leaders, uh, to making the hard decisions based on whatever knowledge we were getting from the experts. Um, but again, expertise is not um is not well suited of its very nature to make these um broader kinds of judgment that we need for political leadership, because those kinds of judgments uh have to do with uh deliberations about advancing the common good. You don't learn that when you become an appeal when you become an expert in contagious diseases, right? That's just not that's just not what you're doing. And so again, when we think about a liberal education, we're thinking about a kind of education that allows you to have forms of wisdom, whether it's prudence, uh, the prudence of wise leadership and governance, uh, or whether it's wisdom and the sense of understanding how the different forms of expertise or disciplinary knowledge form a kind of holistic vision of what's real.

Speaker 13:50

It's very interesting. There's a problem I've noticed just in general from across all different types of issues. Um it's this idea that scientific well, let me frame it like this philosophical problems are framed as scientific problems and then answered by scientists or people in tech, which I find very interesting. So I'm computer science pre-med at the moment. Um, and we're of course we do a whole bunch of like stuff in math and and science, everything else. But um because I think our culture doesn't have a language of philosophy, we just find every we we try to basically we hit every nail with a hammer of like the scientific reality or something. When all we actually are doing is taking uh philosophical worldviews and branding them as uh scientific to answer answer things. I find that very interesting. It's you have people, I mean, this is like um a a bipartisan thing that that a lot of people do. It's it's this is the scientific answer. It's like, no, actually, we could you can make a scientific argument and have evidence for that, but that's not that's a philosophical take on a particular issue.

Speaker 1 15:04

Yes, and well, and this comes down to, you know, a lot of um look, every epistemic claim that anyone makes is is made from a certain kind of social positionality, right? So, and the thing is, you know, the scientist has a lot of authority in contemporary society, despite the fact of how often they've been wrong. Uh you know, uh they still have this um, you know, pretty significant. I mean, people will defer to the scientist. Um, and nobody defers to the philosopher. Maybe people don't even know what that is. I didn't know what a philosopher was until I met a few. And I was like, huh, I didn't know that, I didn't know that was a thing anymore, you know? Uh and so it's it's sort of frustrating. Um, you know, it's it's it's the it's the great frustration of the contemporary philosopher's life um that we might have thought very deeply um about a problem and uh somehow it carries with it no weight because it's not backed by science, right? TM. And um, you know, so so there's that problem, but I I I kind of also um think that it goes back to how we educate in this country. Um you know, I for many years ran a large interdisciplinary project um with a bunch of social scientists of various kinds from behavioral economists to personality psychologists to neuroscientists. Um, but we also had theologians and scholars of religion and a bunch of philosophers on this project. So it was just really fun and fascinating. And the topic was measures of self-transcendence. Um, so a lot of work in personality psychology, um, and that's where, you know, so-called positive psychology comes out of, um, where people are measuring well-being or happiness or something like this. Um, and they are operationalizing these concepts in ways that are philosophically um suspicious, right? And um and there's a there's a different methodology with social science also, because they're rigorously trying to avoid any kind of value judgment, but they're talking about human well-being and happiness. And it's like, friends, you can't, you can't avoid normativity in that space, right? Because you're talking about a condition that we all think is good, right? But it turns out that when you scratch the surface, what you'll find is either an especially crude form of hedonism, right? Which is not philosophically uh well respected, or you'll find um some other form of kind of radical subjectivism. So maybe it's not just that you are happy if overall you have a balance of positive um pleasure versus pain states. Like if we just we just do the math, you've got more pleasure than pain. Maybe it's like slightly more sophisticated where like you also kind of have to think your life is going well. But like lots of people think their life is going well, and it's not like objectively, it's just not um because they're self-deluded, because they're right, um, they're not even incapable uh for a variety of complicated social factors of like making a good judgment. Um just think of like the the like the battered housewife who's like, my husband's great. But it's like, well, is he? Yeah. I mean to reconsider. You know, it's like maybe you've actually been literally beaten into submission. Yeah. Um, and so if we don't have any kind of objectivity in this space, um then it's really questionable. Like we're we're we're measuring kind of how you feel, and that's interesting. That's good data. Actually, it's not good data. We could get into why self-reports are terrible. But like it's interesting. I'm not saying don't collect that, but I am saying that if you're just gonna spit out a theory of happiness from that, um, you know, that's deeply, deeply questionable. And my point is that there are all of these disputed philosophical questions at the heart of this that are just being taken for granted. And then you say these things and it's like, but science says. And it's like, well, I mean, but maybe it's wrong, or maybe like there's a nuance in how we interpret that, or maybe you're making inferences that just frankly aren't licit from the data you've collected. So I've found that interdisciplinary work um incredibly rich and rewarding. And I think most of the social scientists on that project would also say that they found that interdisciplinary work at least very challenging and rewarding. Um, but what's noteworthy is how hard it is to do work like that in the university. And I'll give you one example, although I could give you so many. Um, you're doing a big, somebody gives you millions of dollars for a research project, and they're gonna want what they call outputs, right? They're gonna want things that they can count where they can say, oh, look, our money, you know, went to these things and these things are good. And the obvious, the most obvious kind of output is gonna be journal articles. Well, the journals, right, are not set up for interdisciplinary work. The journals are set up for very narrow kinds of work. And so we really had to think in a creative way about how we could even publish anything from this project. Uh, and we just decided, well, like we'll do an edited volume. But then it was difficult to find a press, right? Because, again, the presses are balkanized, you know, in the ways that the university is. And it was very eye-opening for me. This was very early in my career. Um, it had never occurred to me uh how much institutional structures uh actually mold what kind of knowledge gets produced in the first place. Um, and I started to be pretty worried about it, you know. Um, it's it's it's not it's it's not all freedom of inquiry the way that we c kind of make it seem.

Speaker 21:57

Let's go to uh perhaps some of the solutions. That are being tried, were being tried, uh, such as the Honors College at the University of Tulsa was an idea. It was an idea. It was it was a great idea. And if you uh there are listeners from all over the world here, not just who are at at Tulsa. And so I wrote a recent Substack article about this over the summer. And I'm sure you can Google the University of Tulsa Honors College. It's a great program. Um some of this might be edited, but we'll see. It it was a lovely program. It is currently being restructured by the university. And what precisely restructured mean actually has not been laid out to either students or families or anything else. Nothing official and nothing consistent. And so to kind of talk about the situation just a little bit at least. Sure. What was the what was the dream? Um, now that we've set the stage for higher education, what was the mission here?

Speaker 1 23:00

The dream was to build an Oxbridge-style residential college within an R2 research university, right? It was a simple dream. Uh and, you know, we were making a lot of progress on that. Why a residential college? Um, because it works. You know, the the simple truth is that the learning is not really rocket science. It's actually most of it's on the level of common sense. And so why did we want a shared basis of learning? Why did we want a set curriculum? Um, and why did we want an actual living learning community? Because we know um that students learn more from one another than from their teachers. It's a fact. You know, professors don't like to hear this, but like you know, you're important, but you're you're actually not the most important thing. It's the it's the same thing with parents. Actually, there's a lot of data on this. You know, parents think um that they really control their children, but it's a total illusion. Uh again, you're more shaped by your siblings and by your friends. Um, and you know, mom and dad are important. They're important. I'm not saying they're not important. And I'm not saying that professors aren't important, but I'm saying you have like a radically incomplete understanding of learning, of how it actually happens. Um, if you just think, well, it's it's what I have on my syllabus and it's what I do in the classroom. No. Um, and we've done a bad job in our universities, uh, for some of the reasons that I uh outlined at the start. We've done a bad job of creating community around learning. Most of the intentional community that we try to create in our universities has nothing to do with learning. It has to do with sports or it has to do with extracurricular clubs or even getting a job, right? Uh, but it, but we're we've we've dropped the ball on creating community around learning. And that's really strange because historically, right, that was the Oxbridge model. Why did you have these residential colleges, all these different residential colleges? Because they understood on a very common sense level that that's where the learning happens. And the residential colleges were not just communities of students, but you know, the um the tutors were there as well. Um, and this is still how Oxford is today. Um, you know, they eat meals with their students. Um, they uh are part of the college life. And so what we were trying to do with Dr. Walden's role as faculty and residents was to begin to make that very serious investment in a community of learners with a common end, namely wisdom rather than just uh disciplinary knowledge. Because we were trying to take this idea of liberal learning seriously. And I think that if you take it seriously, it's more than just a syllabus, it's more than just a seminar. Those things are really important. Um, but it really is uh it really is a community, kind of a way of life. Um, and so that's what we were trying to do.

Speaker 26:24

As a current student in the Honors College, the residential part of the college is highly important. It's it's very interesting because you would assume um from the outside perspective that again, like you were saying, the majority of the learning, the majority of the discussion happens in the classroom. But I would actually argue the minority of the discussion happens in the classroom, actually. Yeah. Um you only have an hour 15, hour 20, maybe. Uh that's if you have like a Tuesday, Thursday schedule. Uh, let's say an hour. You're meeting three hours a week in a classroom. Right. Um, no, I I talk to my friends about philosophical theological ideas. Gosh, over 20 hours a week outside. Love that. Love that for you. It's but here's the thing about this that's um I want to highlight though, is the importance of this because you can't quantify this, right? Um, it is it honestly, it just looks like a a huge expense on the budget. Like, okay, wait, you have a residential scholar uh uh college, like what's what's happening here? Um and the I I think it's it's an enriching experience from an educational perspective, one of which is if you want to talk about the pragmatic benefits of it, um, you're putting people from a variety of different backgrounds, philosophical backgrounds, into a place and saying, discuss the deepest questions of humanity. Yeah. And also you're gonna see this guy in the hallway in like 30 minutes. Yeah. So you can't do the Twitter thing of like lighting him on fire and saying, oh, everything else, you're gonna see this guy in 30 minutes. Exactly. So how can you discuss the deepest questions in a cordial manner, disagree, and then have lunch all together in 10 minutes or something?

Speaker 1 28:06

Well, I think one thing that was so impressive to me is how well the students did with that. You know, everybody says, oh, it's impossible, or kids these days, or blah, blah, blah. I mean, I honestly think most of the things that people say about young people are just it's like a weird fantasy. It's just like, do you ever interact with young people? I mean, I'm getting the sense that you don't. Um, it's like you read a book about them or something, but it was like from a hundred years ago. And um, and you know, I mean, I was very impressed with uh what I'll just call the results, uh, in in in a very short amount of time. Um, and I think a lot of that comes down to the fact that we had professors in the honors college who like really disagreed about stuff, but we all really uh actually loved one another um and had a great time together, you know. I think it was the other day, um, yeah, I was talking to some students who came, came up to the conference at Notre Dame, which was amazing because they did that on their own dime. Um, and and somebody was talking about um wanting to study philosophy. And I was like, oh yeah, I should totally do that. They were like, Well, Dr. Walden told me I shouldn't. And I was like, Well, you know, Dr. Walden and I um disagree about almost everything. So that doesn't surprise me. But here's why I'm correct. And uh, but I think that, you know, students know that Dr. Walden and I disagree about so much, but that we're also so close, you know, just genuine friends, and that the intellectual friction between us actually strengthens our friendship for the simple reason that we like arguing with each other, you know, but we also love like the same set of books and we love what we do and we're so passionate about honors. Um and I think that witness of finding common ground is important. Um, it's not, you know, I would say it's necessary, but not sufficient. And I think the problem is that a lot of that isn't being modeled well. Um and and that should change, you know, we should really create spaces where undergraduates can meaningfully interact with their professors and see that their professors are grown-ups, right, who know how to dialogue across differences. And insofar as the academy has failed to do that, um, it has really failed its mission in a in a pretty catastrophic way, in my opinion.

Speaker 30:54

Are these programs sustainable? Um, from a sense of if I'm if I'm an administrator or someone who is looking at universities and writing grants or something, and I'm like, okay, this sounds like a great idea, but like, is this something that is financially sustainable?

Speaker 1 31:11

Of course it's sustainable. Um, the University of Tulsa has a $1.5 billion endowment. Um, and um, you know, let's look at where we lose millions of dollars every year. Um, you know, uh it's football uh and not just football. Um and and yet we will keep throwing money at that because we've made a decision that we value it. Right. Um and you know doing philosophy by contrast is very cheap. Uh it's very cheap. Um and and yet the university will consistently say, yeah, you know, we're just not not very interested in that. Um and and of course the University of Tulsa decided in 2019 that it would um that it would completely undermine philosophy as a department. Now Brad Carson came along and reinstated it, but we don't know that philosophy has uh a secure future here. Uh and just looking at the evidence, you know, we have a lot of reason to be worried. And so um, when people say, oh, it's just not sustainable, um, they're lying. What they should say is we don't support it. And I would respect that. I would disagree with it, um, but I would at least respect it for being honest.

Speaker 32:42

State what you actually end up valuing. Yeah.

Speaker 1 32:44

And be honest about what your priorities are and let the chips fall where they may. What I have disgust for is people who tell lies that are not even noble.

Speaker 32:58

It's it's that same thing we were talking about at the beginning, um, or at least stems from I think that same thing, that idea that you can every single problem out there is just a scientific thing. Just that's the main that the product that we can quantify is the most important thing here.

Speaker 1 33:14

Yeah. Well, and for universities, you know, it comes down to like really boring stuff, like your budget model and what you what revenue streams are coming in and and what uh are not. And all of that, of course, is very important. You know, as a as an administrator, you have to learn how to keep the lights on and to keep the whole thing going. Um, you know, and that's why it's important for um humanities to, to a certain extent, learn how to play the game, you know, and we understood that in honors. We were bringing in millions of dollars, you know. I mean, it's not like we weren't doing our part. Um, but but at the end of the day, you simply do have to be supported by opera administration um who are making those larger decisions about the budget. And that includes, of course, the Board of Trustees.

Speaker 34:10

Do you think this is a cultural issue in the sense of um philosophy just in in America, for instance, philosophy isn't just is just not valued. And we have plenty of honestly, you look at the US, we have a a lot of money all over the place. And uh we could invest or make it a cultural priority if we really wanted to. Is this is this part of the problem?

Speaker 1 34:34

What is I think part of it's cultural, sure. I think that um, and a huge part of that, you know, how how is culture created and passed on? Uh well, first and foremost, through our systems of education. Um and so we always need to kind of look there first, and that includes, you know, K through 12. That includes uh a lot more than just our colleges and universities and professional schools. Um I think, yeah, it's obvious that philosophy isn't valued. I mean, most people don't know what it is, right? Um, but you know, liberal learning is is broader than philosophy, and that is not valued either. And um, the kind of narrow vocationalism that I have a problem with starts very early, you know, um, and and it's enforced uh through federal legislation, through state legislation. You know, there's a lot of cultural forces here at work that explain, you know, everybody thinks that like their value judgments are kind of these beautiful creations of their self. And it's like, well, I mean, yes and no. Like we also have to look at all of these things that are like shaping your desires without you really even understanding the ways that it's shaping your desires. And the fact that that's obviously the case and will always be the case, just shows how important a liberal education is, right? Because it allows you to take the time to, as it were, step outside of it and kind of look at it and be like, hmm, do we like this? Is this good? Might it be different? You know, and if we are just on that hamster wheel from kindergarten to the grave, right? Or to retirement, we're just too tired to do anything anymore. If we're just on that hamster wheel and we never step back and ask ourselves, is this the right wheel? Like, where am I going anywhere? Like, am I happy? You know, liberal education is where you do that work. And if as a society we say, well, I mean, that's nice, but we've got more serious things to do or more important things to do. Um yeah, I think I think we have a question about are we really a free society or free in any kind of interesting sense? Uh, liberal learning is much older than democracy. And of course, it's much older than this particular democracy. Um, but it seems especially important in a democracy that students have some modicum of reflection and space to really think in a deep and serious and disciplined way about what's even going on and why and what's good and uh what's beautiful and what's worth um critiquing and what's worth preserving. That seems to me to be really, really important.

Speaker 37:48

I think philosophy and culture will always be passed down. It's just whether it'll be passed down and noticed or not. And that's I think we have the unnoticed philosophy passing down at the moment. They're not thinking as much about it.

Speaker 1 38:03

Yeah, I mean, I'm you know, I'm big into conserving things, at least the things that are good. And um, like I like I honestly think that we have a duty to do that. Um and I worry a lot about all of the forces that are just kind of destroying the things that I think are so good and and worthy of handing on to my children and that I want, you know, for my grandchildren, etc. Um, yeah. Yeah, I would agree.

Speaker 38:38

Well, wrapping up um on that depressing note, with the question. Yeah, let's say something.

Speaker 1 38:42

Let's can we say something like positive?

Speaker 38:45

Well, hey, yeah, we can we could go positive here. Um what books have had an impact on you?

Speaker 1 38:51

Yeah, that's a very dangerous question to ask me. Um, it really depends on kind of like the phase of my life. But since we're talking about college, you know, maybe it's important to talk about some books that really, really just kind of shaped and reshaped me when I was about 18 or 19. Um, so one of them is Augustine's Confessions. That one just blew my mind. So I was just like, how is this even real? And the reason I was so struck by the confessions is that I'd never read a book like that. And I mean, to be honest, I think the confessions is kind of sui generous. Like, there's only one. It can only be one. Many imitators, but you know, nobody really pulls it off like Augustine. And um, I think the thing that was so striking to me is that I was like a young woman who was an atheist. So, you know, I don't have a lot in common with Augustine like you'd think. And I was reading this and I was like, it's like I'm reading about me. It's like this is so unnerving. Um, because it's a story about somebody who was like really smart, always earning gold stars, like always kind of like really super ambitious, and but like was at the end of the day an anxious, overwrought mess of a person with no sense of like what he's really doing. And I kind of realized like oh yeah, that really resonates because that's basically me, you know. Um, and there is this interesting reality um that's pretty well documented um that people who are super successful, you know, on all the kind of measures, um, can still be absolutely miserable. Right, just absolutely miserable, anxious, like deeply anxious people. There's this moment in the confessions when Augustine like basically meets a homeless drunk and he's like, that guy's like better off than me. And he's just like, dang, like, how did that happen? And it's this, it's this like crazy moment where you just realize like something's just really gone off the rails. And I was kind of starting to wake up to that reality. Um, that that something in my life was not really on the right track, that I didn't know what it was. I just knew that it wasn't quite right. Um, and so the confessions was hugely important to me because um it just made me realize that there's something really stable about human nature. And it's not even gendered, it's not, you know, like Augustine and I kind of in a way have nothing in common, but like we have all the same problems and uh pathologies. Like, how? How is it possible? And I'm like, well, it could only be possible if there's just like something that we share, you know, there must be something that we share. And and then I was reading, you know, a lot of Aristotle and uh really into Aristotle. I'm still really into Aristotle, kind of more into Aristotle than Augustine at the end of the day. Sorry, Augustine. Um, because I think Aristotle gives us this account of human nature, kind of metaphysically, that I think like works. I'm like, yeah, that seems right. And I've I've listened at this point in my life to almost every argument or objection against it. I still think it's right. So uh so reading Aristotle, uh, super, super um important to me. Um I think um I can't just say philosophers, so um, let me also throw in there um reading um Globear's Madame Bovary. So it's the best novel ever written, just FYI. Um it's literally perfect. But I think it was so striking to me because the kind of upshot of that novel is like a really deep truth, which is that um you can get you can actually get caught up in a fantasy to such an extent that you cannot live an authentic life. And once you see that, you just can't unsee it. And I s I just I see it all the time. I'm just like, you need to live in reality. And you literally can't. Yeah, we have people now like marrying AI avatars, and I'm just like wow, like like through technology we can take this tendency that we have, you know, to get Lost in fantasy to such extremes where we're so alienated from anything real. Um, and I think that Flo Bear was the first one who really just like made that so clear to me. And it wasn't through philosophy, it wasn't an argument, it was a story. And that's when I realized like I need to be reading a lot of literature if I'm gonna be a half-decent philosopher, because there's a lot of truth in great novels, great stories, great epics. Um, it's a it's a it's a different mode of presentation, but it's like very powerful. Yeah, so that's what I would say.

Speaker 44:44

What advice do you have for teenagers?

Speaker 1 44:46

Get off your phone. That is like my main advice. I am so I've every day I'm so grateful that there was no internet and no cell phones growing up. Right. I mean there was TV, but like nobody, I didn't know anybody who was just like crapped out in front of the TV all day. We just we just had like a real childhood. We had real human interactions all the time. Like there was no mediation, right? And I feel sorry for young people now because everything is so mediated, and you can just tell that it's making them miserable. Um, that it has this kind of isolating, it it just supercharges this kind of like need to console yourself with fantasy. Um, I just think as much as you can get off your phone and live and like talk to a person, like actually talk to them, not text them. Don't do that. Talk to them. Um, be with them, like look in their eyes, right? A real person. Um because I think the extent to which we're not doing that is the extent to which we're we're really just kind of cheating ourselves uh out of a better life. And debate with them the deep questions of humanity. Yeah, get in their face and be like, Plato's wrong about the forms. Okay. This is really important. Prove me wrong. Prove me wrong otherwise. Like, prove me wrong sitting next to me. Yeah. Right. Uh, like as a like as a real person, um, I, you know, get out of your dorm room, get off your phone, get out in the world, and notice people and things and try to live a real life.

Speaker 46:43

Well, thank you, Dr. Frey, for coming on the podcast. It's been a lovely conversation.

Speaker 1 46:47

Yeah, super fun. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 46:51

That was fun.