I went to Yale to study for four
years (and then to Wisconsin for four years for post-doc study under a Harvard scholar), after having completed a Ph.D. program elsewhere (and decades later I went to Harvard (including
auditing coursework at Yale for one term) for 1.5 years of continued study in
comparative theology and ethics, and independent research) because my education
at my first university, that of Kansas, was so bad; that university, run by sophomoric
Jayhawks, did not heed the value of retaining faculty financially once promoted from the assistant level, and the graduate students who
were teaching undergraduates were not trained in pedagogy. Significant to my unsatisfactory education at the
University of Kansas was my decision to switch to business administration and
accounting “mid-stream” without any regard to the opportunity cost of foregone
coursework in the humanities in the liberal arts. When I was teaching
accounting on the side while studying at Yale a decade later, I finally
received confirmation that I had indeed made a significant educational mistake
at KU, for when some Yale College students petitioned Dean Brodhead to create a
major in business, he replied in the Yale Daily News, “Let us educate
you first; then go out and get trained.” This priority and sequence are both
severely eclipsed at “state” or public, universities in virtually every U.S.
state, whereas the E.U. does a better job of distinguishing institutionally knowledge
from vocational skill. Even the teaching in the liberal arts at the
University of Kansas was lackluster, though I probably would have still made the
move to business had the teaching been good. In calculus, for example, the graduate-student
instructor did not think it necessary to explain that a derivative refers to
the changing rate of acceleration rather than to acceleration
itself; his exclusive orientation was to calculating so as to get us to arrive
at correct answers. We were like trained seals. The graduate-student instructor
of Physics, who could barely speak English (but that didn’t matter to the
department’s receptionist), also did not feel obliged to explain what the formulae
mean. Why does force equal mass times acceleration? Missing from E=MC2
was the point that energy can become mass (Higgs would not be discovered for
decades though). Whereas questions of physics have remained less than pressing
through my adult life, climate change has turbo-charged the significance of the
derivative, for the rate of acceleration of climate change, as evinced in the
heatwaves in the E.U. during the summer of 2026, had already been positive and
was increasing both as a number and in value qua significance. The melting
glaciers in the Alps indicated then that the pace of human-caused climate
change was much faster than previously expected. My inability to “see the
forest” instead of individual “trees” at Kansas regarding my own college
education can be likened to our species’ inability (and refusal) to grasp the
true significance of climate change as a threat to our species’ very survival,
and certainly comfort.
The full essay is at "On the Startling Pace of Global Warming."
