Upon graduating from Princeton in 1916, Edmund Wilson was asked by his father how he planned to support himself. Instead of naming a line of work he'd like to enter, or providing a list of job prospects in a chosen field, he proposed "to learn something about all the main departments of human thought."
To be ambitious concerning one's education but nonchalant about a career--now there is an extinct concept! I used to go to college basketball games at a Catholic, "liberal arts" institution near my home in the Twin Cities. They printed an elaborate program, complete with bios that gave the player's major field of study: "Public Relations," "Business," "Business," "Advertising," "Marketing," "Business," etc. Possibly the basketball players are not a cross section of the student population but I got the impression that I was on the campus of a white-collar trade school. I suppose that is what the market dictates. College-aged students are not interested in literature or philosophy or mathematics. They want to know what prospective employers want them to know so that they can land the job and start buying the things advertised on television during golf tournaments.
Wilson in his maturity remained on friendly terms with his old teachers, especially with Mr. Rolfe, his Greek (Greek!) master at the Hill School, where he was a prep student, and Christian Gauss, who taught literature at Princeton. Both men are the subject of appreciative essays composed by the critic at the height of his powers--"'Mr. Rolfe'" in The Triple Thinkers and "Christian Gauss as a Teacher of Literature," which serves as a Prologue to The Shores of Light. It is hard to imagine a Professor of Advertising being the subject of essays such as these.
My Christian Gauss, Gerald Thorson of St. Olaf College, died in 2001. You can tell from his obituary that he was of the Rolfe-Gauss-Wilson school. The numbers of the enrolled are declining but it is a worthy calling still.
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