What stands out 30 years after getting my B.A.? Bach, photography, and the African Queen.

“Careful: this person is not used to free choice.” That’s the warning that should have been pinned to my coat when I landed as a student on the American academic scene. But this post isn’t yet another run at nostalgia. It’s about breadth versus specialization.

I was looking yesterday through a stack of black and white photos I had taken some 30 years ago. The stack is large because at the time, I had enrolled in a photography class at Columbia and the requirements had us work through many darkroom assignments. Here’s one that I am fond of now – taken on the lower East side of Manhattan:


Lower Manhattan, 1973 

Why photography? Was it a filler class to ease an otherwise heavy load? Uh -- no. After my first two and a half years at the University of Warsaw, where the curriculum had been set and included such heavies as Advanced Calculus, Multivariable Analysis, Theory of Logic, Linear Algebra, Programming, Political Economics, Economic Theory, History of Economics – yes, truly, all the classes were like this – I landed in NY and the first thing my academic advisers told me was that I should let loose and develop a liberal approach to education. Explore! – they said. Go for classes you’ve not tried before!

You could say that I listened to this advice with vigor. In the remaining two years in college I took Photography: darkroom techniques, The study of the African Queen (this may have had a sexier title, but that is what we did: we analyzed the African Queen all semester long), Italian 1, 2 & 3, Metaphysics, J.S.Bach, Cultural Anthropology, Renaissance something or other, Introduction to Psychology, Twentieth Century Music, Urban Landscapes, and then a handful of basic sociology classes to fulfill my new major requirements. I have to say, none of these classes could really be labeled as “fluff.” They had their own built-in rigor that was oftentimes more challenging than my run through higher level mathematics (well, perhaps not Cultural Anthropology: I haven’t a single kind thing to say about that class).

One could ask “what’s wrong with that”? Nothing perhaps. Though for years I’d thought it merely to be great training for cocktail party conversations.

Comparing the two curricula may lead one to conclude that a balance might have served me well. Yes, that’s the easy answer. But isn’t it significant that from this assortment of disparate courses each stands out in some way, having left a strong mark on my educational memory? (Again, all general comments here have absolutely no application to Cultural Anthropology: that deserves a special spot in a pile of refuse along other items best forgotten.)

In the summer before going to Law School, instead of brushing up on my lackluster knowledge of the American legal system, I signed up for a UW class on Marcel Proust and his French contemporaries. And again, I remember just about every one of those very excellent lectures, not even so much for the content but for the passion that the professor (Elaine Marks) brought to literary analysis.

Quite obviously, the directive to explore was more than a push toward the unemployment line. And what of the need to specialize? Back in graduate school, one of my professors boasted that there isn’t a subject out there that he couldn’t in two months master well enough to teach to a roomful of students. It’s not an unfair statement. Substance is the easiest thing in the world to learn (it’s also the most easily forgotten) and more often than not one has an entire professional lifetime to learn it in. When law students come to my office, agonizing over class selection, I like to tell them that I was hired by the Law School to run a clinical program and to teach Family Law, having myself never taken a clinic or Family Law when I was a student here.

I’m mindful of all this now, some 30 years after my own college days, when I am again picking up old photos and other little bits and pieces of those other classes, and recognizing their odd presence in a variety of areas of my life.