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."
