Something Is Going Right at Universities

"Roosevelt Montás grew up in a small mountain village in the Dominican Republic. Two days before his 12th birthday, his mother flew him up to New York, where she had found a minimum-wage job in a garment factory. A few years later, when he was a sophomore in high school, some neighbors in his apartment building threw out a bunch of books. One of them was a finely bound volume of Socratic dialogues. Montás snagged it-and Socrates changed his life."

"In plumbing the depths of his own psyche, Augustine gave me a language with which to approach my own interiority," he recalled in his memoir, "he gave me a model and a set of questions with which to explore the emotional wilderness, full of doubt and confusion, that was my own coming-to-adulthood, in America.""

"Augustine paradoxically caused Montás to lose his Christian faith, but led him to gain a faith in philosophy. Montás went on to lead Columbia's Center for the Core Curriculum, and he is now starting a center on citizenship and civic thought at Bard College."

"I get to visit about two dozen campuses every year, and I meet at least a few teachers like Montás at each of them. I can generally spot the ones with the pure disease, the ones with that raw teacher-fire. Usually, they had some experience early in life when they fell in love with learning. This love then became a ruling passion, and now they fervently seek to share it with their students in the classroom."

Roosevelt Montás grew up in a small mountain village in the Dominican Republic and moved to New York before age twelve to work in a garment factory. Later, he found a finely bound volume of Socratic dialogues among discarded books, which changed his life. A high-school mentor helped him enter Columbia, where the Core Curriculum required confronting major works of Western civilization. Reading St. Augustine gave him language and questions for exploring his own inner life during his coming-to-adulthood in America. Augustine ultimately led him to lose Christian faith while gaining faith in philosophy. He later led Columbia’s Core Curriculum center and began a new center on citizenship and civic thought at Bard College. The piece also describes teachers who develop a ruling passion for learning and seek to share it with students across many types of colleges.

Read at The Atlantic