Montana Meets Manhattan: Two Adventures in Education

Image created by David Roberts in Canva

Dear Friends,

This post is a conversation between

david roberts

and me. David grew up in Manhattan as an assimilated Jew. I was raised in rural Montana in a fundamentalist Christian home. But here we are, both Substack writers and friends, discovering all sorts of things we have in common. In this conversation, we discuss how our formal education shaped our lives.

Josh

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David: Josh, you grew up in rugged Montana, a different universe from my Park Avenue, private school world. Rural for me was Central Park. When I told my wife you hunted elk, she told me everyone reading this will think you’re the cool guy, while I’ll be the stereotype of the obnoxious rich kid from a John Hughes movie.

Josh: That’s hilarious, because I grew up thinking I was very uncool! In fact, I spent most of my college years explaining that Montanans weren’t all militia members.

I grew up on 20 acres in northwestern Montana, where I tended our large garden, gathered firewood, and hunted elk with my father and grandfather. Despite the fact that our family income fell below the poverty line, I was fortunate in other ways. Our house was full of books, including my mother’s private collection of works by Chaim Potok and C.S. Lewis, and I had an excellent peer group in the public school. There were only 52 students in my graduating class, but some of my classmates went on to study at West Point, Cornell, and other elite universities.

David: We were both reading the same books! I loved Lewis’s Narnia series and all the Potok books. I was raised in a very Reform, very secular household. We had both a Christmas tree and a Hanukkah menorah. So Potok opened a whole new world of Judaism for me, an authentic world. Did the books influence your approach to religion and to your educational ambitions? 

Josh: You know, even though I am not Jewish, I deeply identified with Potok’s character Reuven in The Chosen because the strictures in my life seemed so similar to his orthodox upbringing. My family was deeply religious, which meant that I never once considered attending a secular university. If I went to college, it would have to be a Christian school. My reading and my peer group were not strong enough to overcome that primary influence initially.

I browsed a catalog of Christian colleges and settled on one that I liked – King College, in Bristol, Tennessee – for its classy navy and white colors. King also had my preferred major, Political Science, and a baseball team.

But I very nearly chose a trade instead of college. My father knew a court reporter who claimed that I could make six figures as a freelance stenographer, even in the early 1990s. It didn’t seem practical to acquire college debt when such a lucrative career option was available.

In the fall of my senior year, I won a scholarship to a stenography school and abandoned my college search. My teachers were heartsick about it, and my guidance counselor advised me against setting goals that were too easy to reach. But I could not be moved.

That changed when my father insisted that I meet the local court reporter. He read to me from a deposition he’d taken that day, laughing as he recited every “um” and “uh.” It made me physically ill to think of that as my life. By then it was February or March. I hurriedly applied to King College, was accepted, and began to prepare myself for a different career.

David, was there ever any doubt that you would go to college?

David: When any of us think back to how our life unfolded, it’s awe-inspiring to think about how small contingencies can have such large effects, like your meeting with the court reporter.

At my school, Riverdale, it was expected that every student would go to college. I had good grades and good scores on my SAT so my parents, teachers, and classmates assumed I’d go to an Ivy. Entering senior year in the fall of 1979, I decided I’d go to Princeton to study international relations at the Woodrow Wilson school. I always loved history and thought I might be destined to make decisions of great international import. This replaced my nine year old dream of being an astronaut, although my favorite Halloween costume remains my NASA suit and helmet (with a moveable shield!).

Josh: You went to UPenn, as I recall, not Princeton. How did that come about?

David: Hubris! I just assumed with my grades and scores, I could get in anywhere I wanted. I applied to Princeton Early Decision and in December was shocked to learn that Princeton and I were of different minds. I was deferred and ultimately rejected.

So, I applied to two other schools: Harvard and UPenn as my “safety school.”

Josh: Penn is a very selective university now. Were you worried you wouldn’t get in anywhere?

David: I should have been. I guess I still had some hubris left in me. Also I was lazy. This was 1979; you had to type your applications. No common app! So when I made a series of mistakes on my Yale application, I grew tired of using “white-out” and tossed it.

In 1979, it was far easier than now to get into Ivy League schools. Also, I was a legacy candidate; both my grandfathers and an uncle were Penn alumni.

How did your college experience lead you to become an academic?

Josh: I remember “white-out”! In fact, I typed many of my high school essays on an old Smith Corona. There was nothing more tedious than trying to get the paper aligned just right, so you could type a fresh letter over the correction.

College was a revelation to me. I idolized my professors because they introduced me to the examined life. Ultimately, rationalism would lead me away from faith, but I embraced the pursuit of truth very idealistically as a student, and I think you still hear some of that idealism in my writing about higher ed.

Despite those passions, I felt obligated to pursue more practical careers, like journalism. But when the editorial internship that I’d set my hopes on fell through, I took a gap year to teach English in Uruguay. That experience convinced me that I had good teaching instincts, but was less suited for high school. So I applied to PhD programs, won full funding at two, and eventually chose the University of Nebraska.

David: Debt has become a huge burden for college graduates. And even when tuition is fully paid for, living expenses often are not. How did you handle the financial aspect of your education?

Josh: My education was possible only because tuition was low (about $12K a year), federal aid was high (Pell Grants and Stafford Loans), and I made excellent money during the summers as a firefighter with the Forest Service. This allowed me to pay off my college debt before graduate school and to bank savings despite my low wages as a teaching assistant at Nebraska. Consequently, I was completely debt free when I accepted a faculty position at a private college in Iowa.

David: Add firefighter to your impressive resume! I’m feeling increasingly cloistered and bubbled right now. Perhaps there’s no one more provincial than a lifelong Manhattanite.

Josh: Provincial is not a word many people use to describe Manhattan!

David: I grew up on the Upper East Side. We lived on Park Avenue, and in elementary school I was allowed to walk by myself as long as I kept within the 70s and did not go east of Third Avenue. My mother made me promise to cross doublewide Park Avenue using two lights. So my world was very much contained within a nutshell.

Josh: Did Penn broaden your horizons?

David: No. I learned early on that I could skip the classes I didn’t find interesting and still get excellent grades. I didn’t like Philly and returned frequently to New York or visited my high school friends at other colleges. I graduated a year early from Penn’s undergraduate business school, Wharton, and came away with a dim view of my education.

The classes I liked best were outside Wharton. In fact, my very favorite was a literature seminar taught by our common literary idol, Chaim Potok. He was a wonderful and kind teacher.

Josh: What a privilege to study under such an artist! It’s interesting that we both cut corners as students. I rarely skipped class, but I tested my professors by preparing minimally for class. During my freshman year, I even earned a perfect score on an exam without having read a single page of the required text. That A+ made me angry. I realized that I’d cheated myself.

How has your view of college evolved over the decades?

David: Decades! Thanks for making me feel old. After Penn, the people I knew were alike: affluent, college-educated, white, mostly Jewish. I was ignorant about much of the world outside my bubble, including how most people experienced college.

Josh: You have three adult kids. What was college like for them?

David: They all went to Riverdale and then Penn, which by then had become much more selective. I know our three kids are grateful for their education and the friends they made. Unlike me, they really took advantage of their schooling.

My wife and I were also grateful that we could give that education to our children. Our charitable giving, mostly to scholarships, really started with that gratitude.

But what really opened my eyes was my participation in BridgeEdu, a Baltimore-based venture started by a friend, Wes Moore, who is now Governor of Maryland. The purpose of BridgeEdu was to help graduates from inner city Baltimore high schools stay the course at local colleges.

Each student had to overcome multiple hurdles that could trip them up. I learned that for these students completing college in four or even six years was the exception, not the rule. Without BridgeEdu, none of them would have been able to navigate the complexities of Federal financial aid. Plus they all needed full time jobs to support themselves and their families while attending college.

Josh: Another coincidence! I taught The Other Wes Moore in one of my first-year seminars. Such a great book. Affluent students found it just as engrossing as students from rural or urban communities. The book explains how Wes Moore got to college through twists of fate that broke the right way for him and how the “other” Wes Moore, with a similar background, ended up in prison for life through a series of contingencies that broke the other way.

David: Not unlike your meeting with the court reporter, which changed the course of your life.

I love that we started from such different backgrounds and have so much in common¹ as friends and collaborators on Substack. And still so much to learn from one another. 

Your Substack is called The Recovering Academic. Why did you leave a profession you originally loved?  

Josh: I left academe to prioritize my family’s needs after COVID forced us to think about why we lived so far from relatives. I wanted my three kids to enjoy the same privilege I had of growing up close to grandparents. Teaching is still my first love. However, I do have other discontents with higher ed, so the long answer to your question is essentially my whole Substack archive. I recommend “The Calling” as a start.

This conversation has been so fun! Thanks for suggesting it, and I look forward to discussing another topic together sometime soon.

Thanks for reading, friends. I hope you check out David’s excellent newsletter!

1. As it should be, this commonality is relegated to a footnote. We share a sad fandom for the same pathetic baseball team, the Mets.