Author Archives: Peter

beautiful structures and the revival of public life

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In 1983, David P. Billington began his book The Tower and the Bridge with words that could be written today:

While automation prospers, our roads, bridges, and urban civil works rot. Children control computers while adults weave between potholes. The higher that high technology sails the worse seem our earthbound services for water, transportation, and shelter. Yet civilization is civil works and insofar as these deteriorate so does society, our high technology notwithstanding. We forget that technology is as much structures as it is machines, and that these structures symbolize our common life as much as machines stand for our private freedoms. Technology is frequently equated only with machines, those objects that save labor, multiply power, and increase mobility. In reality, machines are only one half of technology, the dynamic half, and structures are the other, static, half — objects that create a water supply, permit transportation, and provide shelter.

This book is devoted to the idea that structures, the forgotten half of modem technology, provide a key to the revival of public life.

Billington offers several provocative distinctions. We have already seen how he distinguishes structures from machines. He also differentiates engineers from architects:

Structural designers give the form to objects that are of relatively large scale and of single use, and these designers see forms as the means of controlling the forces of nature to be resisted. Architectural designers, on the other hand, give form to objects that are of relatively small scale and of complex human use, and these designers see forms as the means of controlling the spaces to be used by people. The prototypical engineering form–the public bridge–requires no architect. The prototypical architectural form–the private house–requires no engineer.

And he distinguishes (structural) engineering from science–even from applied science. In his account, engineering depends on experience and judgment, not on the application of mathematical principles or laws. If I understand correctly, he wants us to realize that a suspension bridge is not a line with mathematical qualities that can be derived from physics. It is a whole bunch of stuff (including joints, hinges, and other components) that works in a particular location. Engineers use thought-experiments, physical models, and experience to draft their designs and often correct them during the construction.

Central to his argument is the claim that engineers have been compelled (since ca. 1790) to pursue, or even to maximize, “efficiency, economy, and elegance.” Whereas an architect might be hired to make an attractive version of something that we already know how to design, a structural engineer’s job is to solve a new problem (such as spanning a river) at minimal cost. But Billington insists that great engineers have been deeply aesthetic and that judgments of beauty have spurred more efficient and economical designs. A good example is the Salginatobel Bridge (1930) by Robert Maillart, which illustrates this post.

Before reading Billington, I would have cited cultural reasons for the turn away from ornamentation and other explicit forms of “style” in modernist architecture, and I would have observed the same turn in other arts, including painting and poetry. I would have said that a recognition of cultural variation–the idea that each time and place has its own style–convinced modernists that style was arbitrary and contingent and turned them toward minimalism and functionalism.  Walter Gropius wrote:

We have had enough and to spare of the arbitrary reproduction of historical styles … The modern building should derive its architectural significance solely from the vigour and consequence of its own organic proportions. It must be true to itself … A breach has been made with the past. … The morphology of dead styles has been destroyed; we are returning to honesty of thought and feeling.

For Billington, however, Gropius and other modernist architects were not the driving force. Structural engineers made beautiful things without ornamentation because their job was to maximize efficiency.

Engineers’ most prominent and influential creations have been public objects, like the Brooklyn Bridge and the Eiffel Tower. “Technological forms live also in the social world. Their forms are shaped by the patterns of politics and economics as well as by the laws of nature.” And successful structural engineers are good at navigating those social “patterns.”

Billington even wants to connect democracy to the modern advances of structural engineering:

These forms imply a democratic rather than an autocratic life. When structure and form are one, the result is a lightness, even a fragility, which closely parallels the essence of a free and open society. The workings of a democratic government are transparent, conducted in full public view, and although a democracy may be far from perfect, its form and its actual workings (its structure) are inseparable. Furthermore, the public must continually inspect its handiwork; constant maintenance and periodic renewal are essential to its exposed structure. Politicians do not have life tenure; they must be inspected, chastised and purified from time to time, and replaced. when found corrupt or inept. So it is with the works of structural art. They, too, are subject to the weathering and fatigue of open use. They remind us that our institutions belong to us and not to some elite. If we let them deteriorate, as we flagrantly have in our older cities and transportation networks, then that outward sign betokens an inner corruption of the common life in a free democratic society

I find this paragraph moving but not necessarily persuasive. When George Orwell wanted to distinguish radical and genuinely democratic socialism from Stalinism, he urged the left to stop bragging about Soviet “mechanical progress, tractors, the Dnieper dam, and the latest salmon-canning factory in Moscow.” For Orwell, excellent structural engineering did not equal democracy.

I’m not even sure that impressive structural engineering always depends on a state. Whether you approve or disapprove of it, Steinway Tower at 111 West 57th Street, NYC (2021) is an impressive engineering feat, extending the tradition of slender simplicity to house 84 stories of private, luxury condominiums.

I have some other questions for Billington. He suggests that structural engineering–in the form that he describes–is a modern development. I can accept that no one had explicitly defended its principles or distinguished engineering from architecture before Thomas Telford in 1812. But surely the practice of engineering is very old on all inhabited continents, and perhaps previous engineers (or master builders) saw themselves in similar ways without writing articles about it.

For Billington, the Eiffel Tower is a paradigm of structural engineering. I would ask: Why isn’t it architecture? Its sheer size can’t be the criterion, because architects have also designed very large objects. Perhaps the Eiffel Tower accomplishes its task with maximum efficiency, but its task is not utilitarian. Its job is to reach as high as possible. Maybe it is a gigantic sculpture?

Finally, Billington argues that the beautiful minimalist structures of the 1800s and 1900s resulted from the application of new technologies (plentiful iron; then steel and concrete) under constraints of efficiency and economy. But earlier I suggested a different origin for minimalism, one that can explain free verse and abstract expressionist paintings as well as glass-clad skyscrapers. Could it be that there have always been efficiency-maximizing engineers, but the public gained aesthetic appreciation for their work as a result of cultural changes after 1800? In that case, structural engineering is old, but we see it in new ways thanks to modernist artists.

Any provocative and compelling book will prompt critical questions, but Billington’s 1983 work endures as an argument for good structural engineering as a component of democratic public life.

See also: explaining the crisis in architecture (with the Gropius quote and other background); three great paintings in dialogue. I quote Orwell from The Road to Wigan Pier.

community engagement and concern for democratic values

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I am interested in the Tocquevillian thesis that participating in voluntary groups enhances democratic and liberal values.

John Dewey was another major proponent of this view. Alan Ryan emphasizes Dewey’s belief that democracy, properly understood, “bubble[s] naturally upward from small-scale interactions and [is] not to be imposed from above.” (Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism, 1995, p.169).

The Democracy for All Project is a collaboration between the Charles F. Kettering Foundation and Gallup that collects representative survey data, most recently from 23,000 people surveyed from April 24 to June 10, 2026. The main report is entitled Frustration Rises, Commitment Endures.

I analyzed the raw data from Kettering/Gallup, looking for relationships between three measures of community engagement and several beliefs relevant to democracy.

The three measures of community engagement are:

  • “How often do you attend events in your community, such as festivals, town halls, arts performances, etc.”?
  • “How often do you usually attend church, synagogue, mosque, or temple?”
  • [Have you] “volunteered or actively participated in organizations or groups that are designed to improve conditions in your community”?

I chose these three because they offer a nice range of frequent forms of engagement.

I put them in regression models along with gender, age, race/ethnicity, education, and partisanship. I will report the relationships between those variables and the following questions of interest.

1. [Are you concerned are about] “People being harmed by federal agents, military, or law enforcement during peaceful protests”?

    To make my assumptions explicit, I want people to say yes to this question. The model shows that people are more likely to agree if they are younger, more highly educated, not White, and if they volunteer in their communities or attend community events. But they are less likely to agree if they attend religious services frequently. Party identification and gender are unrelated to this outcome.

    Because I used a regression model, we can reject the explanation that local engagement is related to this democratic value because the people who are locally engaged are younger or more diverse or more highly educated. The model is supposed to detect relationships that hold once everything else is held constant. So a White, less educated person who volunteers is more likely to be concerned than one who is not.

    2. [Are you concerned are about] “People who are ineligible to vote casting ballots in U.S. elections”?

      Again, to disclose my own assumptions: I am against ineligible people voting, but I think this is very rare, and being very concerned about it is problematic. So I would like people to say no.

      In the model, concern is lower for those who are Democrats, female, younger, and more educated and who volunteer. It is higher for those who attend religious services. Attending local events is unrelated.

      3. “How concerned, if at all, are you that political leaders are blaming or targeting people from certain groups for problems they see in the country?“

      Here I would want to see agreement. Positive answers go with being a Democrat, female, younger, not White, and more educated. Support also rises with volunteering and attending events, but religious attendance is negatively correlated.

      [Are you concerned are about]“Political leaders pressuring election officials to change election outcomes”?

      For the record, I am concerned. So are people who are younger, female, more highly educated, prone to volunteer, frequent attendees at local events, and not regular attendees in religious services. Party identification is not significantly related to this question in the model, meaning that it can be explained away with the other variables.

      Overall, we see some support for the Tocquevillian thesis, except that church participation is negatively related to the values that I would espouse. (This is not always the case: see “active church membership may counteract problematic religious messages” and “church attendance, religious identity, and politics” [revisited].) For some of these questions, the relationship with party identification drops out once we measure the other factors. Volunteering has a consistent relationship with the values that I would espouse. Attending local events is less consistent.

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      No, how could I believe in my poetry
      If even David Plante disbelieves in his?
      But I, too, can ask why I want to write,
      Expecting no success but enjoying
      A cool pool of words in which to slide down,
      Noises fading in the muffling depths, or
      Like rinsing mud from the side of a bucket,
      Leaving a hot pan to soak until the stain
      Softens, or trailing fingers through water
      To mark it momentarily with my mind.
      It is not what happens but how it feels
      To choose to cool a hot thought slowly down,
      To shape a portion of fluid into form.

      See also: signal (2015); a poem should (2013)

      what should be the mission of a great university?

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      The recent Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education says:

      Focus on the mission. In 2016, departing from its traditional emphasis on the creation and dissemination of knowledge, Yale expanded its mission statement to include “improving the world today,” educating “aspiring leaders worldwide,” and fostering “an ethical, interdependent, and diverse community.” These are all worthy goals. But they are not what makes a university a university. We recommend that Yale adopt a focused university-wide mission statement such as the one currently articulated in its own Faculty Handbook: “Yale University’s mission is to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.” This statement serves as the basis for the recommendations that follow in this report.

      When I led a discussion of this report with a large group of Tufts undergraduates through CEVIHE last week, some students expressed skepticism or cynicism about official mission statements. I agree. I usually view such texts as mere advertising copy–including the Tufts’ mission statement, which looks to me like outreach to prospective undergraduates.

      That said, I think the Yale faculty committee was right that any recommendations for an institution should flow from an authentic idea of that institution’s mission (whether it is stated on its website or not). Therefore, choosing a mission statement for a university is a worthy task.

      Yale’s current mission is very different from the one proposed by a faculty committee of the same university in 1828. They asked “What then is the appropriate object of a college?” Their answer: “the discipline and the furniture of the mind: expanding its powers, and storing it with knowledge.”

      In those days, Yale made no pretense of creating knowledge. It did not hire faculty to conduct research and scholarship. The teachers’ job was to transfer the knowledge that they had already acquired when they were students–particularly their knowledge of the ancient languages–to “furnish” young men’s minds.

      The mission that the recent Yale report endorses derives from Johns Hopkins’ founding goal, “to advance the arts and sciences.” In fact, the Yale report echoes the 1872 inaugural address of Hopkins’ first president, Daniel Coit Gilman, who said that universities may have many functions, but what makes them universities in the promotion of knowledge. His ideal, in turn, reflected Prussian influences.

      I think that knowledge is good, but it is certainly not all that Yale actually does. Consider that 30% of Yale’s revenues come from medical services, or that it budgets about $89 million for athletics, or that it allocates a portfolio of about $441 billion. Descriptively, one could say that Yale’s mission is to operate a hospital and an investment fund.

      But a mission statement should be aspirational, and Yale could strive to make all of its other functions serve its knowledge mission. That would be a choice, different from an ideal such as public service or developing students’ character.

      To choose a mission for any given university, it might be helpful to select a guiding analogy or model. What should the institution be like?

      1. A laboratory: This is a place where knowledge is created, preserved, and shared. People who work in a lab may disagree, and their disagreements can be valuable, but the goal is always to resolve disputes with evidence. Laboratory workers may learn and develop ethically, but scientific methods and instruments are supposed to be people-proof, so that they can generate knowledge irrespective of the scientists’ characteristics. The main outcome is the findings contained in publications.
      2. A debating society (or an op-ed page, or a high-quality talk show): This is a place where people exchange opinions. To be interesting and valuable, it must welcome–and even curate–diverse opinions. Whenever everyone seems to agree, it is time to invite someone who has a different “take.” The main outcome is the education of participants and listeners.
      3. An advanced prep school: a university like Yale (which, for full disclosure, I attended) could be analogized to a boarding school. It is a place where young people live together, develop skills and networks, and prepare for the next level. The main outcomes are the successes and contributions of the graduates.
      4. A not-for-profit, multi-purpose corporation. Yale could be seen as an entity that operates a major hospital, owns many of the prominent buildings of a mid-sized US city, serves food, attracts more tourists than any other site in Connecticut, runs a significant regional repertory theater, discovers medical advances, fields a football team, and does anything else that its trustees choose as long as the surplus revenue goes to endowment. The outcomes are diverse.
      5. A city: Cities do not have mission statements–nor should they, because their residents must be free to pursue their own goals. But the mission of a city government can be to serve its residents. In the same way, a university can offer a range of services to its members, who should be able to pursue various goals. The immediate outcomes are the well-being of students and other members of the community. (This suggestion came from a student during the CEVIHE discussion.)

      I worry that it is in bad faith to claim that a university’s mission is knowledge. If the pursuit of knowledge is supposed to determine everything a university does, then many of its actual functions should be spun off. And to interpret a $441 billion endowment as simply a means to the end of promoting knowledge is a convenient way to ignore its other outcomes. With more than $20 billion invested in private equity, Yale is the 31st largest private equity institutional investor in the world. That money has many other affects besides generating returns that can pay for laboratories and seminar rooms.

      Here is a different way of thinking about such issues. In a provocatively entitled article, “A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice” (1972), Cohen, March and Olsen posited that any “organization is a collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision makers looking for work. … To understand processes within organizations, one can view a choice opportunity as a garbage can into which various kinds of problems and solutions are dumped by participants as they are generated.”

      The phrase “garbage can” sounds pejorative and isn’t really necessary. The core idea is that complex organizations develop so that they have multiple functions. If that describes a modern university, then debates about its mission statement are worthwhile but will never resolve the question. Universities are opportunities for people to pursue various agendas, and they will make competing claims about “the” mission. Perhaps the best universities are those in which this ongoing debate is handled relatively wisely.

      See also: the university between a club good and the commons; universities and newsrooms as laboratories or debating societies

      translating Mind is Mind-Made

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      Few lines of text have been memorized by as many human beings over as many centuries as this one:

      manopubbangama dhamma, manosettha manomaya

      You don’t have to know the language to glean that it is verse. It consists of two pairs of eight syllables–a pattern that repeats for many subsequent lines after this one. Gama rhymes with dhamma, and three different words begin with mano.

      You can’t tell from the Latin characters alone, but this line scans in a classic rhythm called siloka in Pali, which uses “light” (short) and “heavy” (long) syllables. You could get some sense of the metrical pattern by reading aloud the following string of English words:

      Short short longer longer
      Short longer longer longer
      Short short longer longer
      Short short short longer

      These features make the line enjoyable and work as mnemonics. Regular verse is easier to memorize than prose.

      All the words are very abstract, and they mark out zones of meaning that have no equivalents in English. In fact, some translators use the Sanskrit dharma to render the Pali word dhamma in English. Dharma can mean law, duty, doctrine, righteousness, experience, phenomena, thing, or truth. A modern English-speaker may get more from that one famous Sanskrit word than from any single English word chosen to render it.

      There is no verb, because Pali, like Latin, can leave the verb “to be” implied.

      The first person who translated this line into English, F. Max Müller, wrote, “All that we are is the result of what we have thought; it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thought” (1898).

      Asked to translate it literally, ChatGPT proposes, “Phenomena have mind as their forerunner; mind is their chief; they are made by mind.” Claude says, “Mental phenomena are preceded by mind, mind-chief, mind-made.”

      Gil Fronsdal (2018) has:

      All experience is preceded by mind, 

          Led by mind, 

          Made by mind.

      His version employs the open typography and plainspoken diction of modernist verse to offer a valuable perspective on the ancient text, which is dense, formal, and abstract.

      I cannot do better than Fronsdal (or AI), but I can explore alternatives. For example, what if we tried to make the English mnemonic?

      In advance of whatever we find is mind. 
      The mind is in charge; it makes the mind.

      Or what if we expanded each Pali word into several English counterparts, to indicate its range of meanings?

      Things, or what we experience, the truth--
      What comes before and is responsible
      For all this is the conscious stream. Mind is 
      The chief and what's foremost. Mind is mind-made.

      The next verse begins with the same four Pali words as the first one, but to repeat my extended translation of them would become tiresome. So I could make that line more concise, and continue:

      Mind comes before all experience and truth:
      If the mind is serene and bright, then ease
      Follows like a shadow that will never depart.

      By the way, I am not sure I agree with this text. If you suffer pain because of an injury or violence, I don’t think it’s all in your head. Nor does a serene mind inevitably bring ease; the eternal note of sadness rolls back in.

      This verse comes with a whole metaphysical basis that is worth considering but not necessarily correct. But it could also support some sensible ordinary advice: when something seems bad, you may be able to change your reaction to it rather than altering the thing itself.

      The text is the Dhammapada (v.1). I got help from both ChatGPT and Claude. See also: the fetter; The Tangle; This is beautiful, scolds the mind; on translation as spiritual practice; Caedmon’s Hymn and modern responses; and Mani Rao’s innovative Sanskrit translations (with a mention of Anne Carson).

      what about human life is essential to preserve?

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      At the beginning of the 20th century, people could presume that we are terrestrial creatures whose habitat is Planet Earth. They could predict that we will continue to live as humans until our far-distant natural demise or an end decreed by God. They could define human beings as creatures who work (homo laborans) and make tools and who understand the tools we’ve made. They could presume that we alone speak and reason in language, unless divine beings also interact with us.

      Technology changed all those presumptions. It became clear that we could live on other planets, we could wipe out the species in a few moments, we might be able to automate all work, we might make machines that exceeded our own understanding, and we might build machines that could reason and talk, perhaps better than we do.

      Hannah Arendt mentions each of these developments in the Preface to The Human Condition, which she published in 1958. Some of the traditional assumptions about humanity had already collapsed by then, due to atomic weapons and space exploration. So far, there were no machines that could do all our work or think better than we can, but she saw that those developments were coming unless we blew ourselves to dust first. Just five years later, she worried that “electronic ‘brains,’ devised and constructed by men” will “not only do man’s brainwork incomparably better and more swiftly (this, after all, is the outstanding characteristic of all machines), but can do ‘what a human brain cannot comprehend” (Arendt 1963, 530.)

      She therefore posed the question: what is the human condition? She wanted readers to consider what is essential to us. This is what must be preserved if we love humankind. For her, love of our species was not contingent on our being excellent in some way–for example, the best thinkers on the planet. It was a fundamental ethic.

      Clearly, human life will end if we vaporize ourselves. Presumably, we can live as humans on other planets: science fiction has envisioned that situation vividly. Whether we can be human without working or once we share the world with machines that think better than us are harder questions, and the answers depend on what it is to be us.

      Later in the book, Arendt will explain that part of being human is to “act.” In her specific meaning of that verb, to act is to discuss what to do with other people who are independent and heterogeneous (Arendt’s “plurality”) and then to do or make things together.

      Because many interacting people are required to decide what to do, Arendt cannot tell us how to address developments like nuclear weapons or artificial intelligence. We must think them through together. She writes:

      To these preoccupations and perplexities, this book does not offer an answer. Such answers are given every day, and they are matters of practical politics, subject to the agreement of many; they can never lie in theoretical considerations or the opinion of one person, as though we dealt here with problems for which only one solution is possible (p. 5).

      Why should we make decisions together instead of just doing the right thing? Arendt writes:

      There may be truths beyond speech, and they may be of great relevance to man in the singular, that is, to man in so far as he is not a political being, whatever else he may be. Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves (p. 4).

      We live in a meaningful world–a world with meaning to us–only if we create it together. The question of the moment is whether our world will remain meaningful to us if we transform it through artificial intelligence that we no longer understand.

      What are the “truths beyond speech” that Arendt mentions here? The most obvious candidates are transcendent truths, such as religious insights that a person might receive as revelations or intuit by introspecting. But there is a way in which science and technology are also “beyond speech.” Of course, scientists must communicate. However, for them, communication is a cost, a means to the end of analyzing nature. The less talk is necessary to produce knowledge, the better.

      Ideally, scientists and technologists apply impersonal methods to generate knowledge that accumulates. A technician can install a light fixture or even design a new electrical device without reading and discussing the words of Alessandro Volta and Nikola Tesla. Historical contributions are now embedded in current techniques, some of which are algorithmic. And if a library is a device for accumulating knowledge, then a Large Language Model may be a better one.

      Arendt is a solo scholar, applying her learning and methods to analyze how our thinking has developed so far. Her narrative in The Human Condition is the work of one thinker, yet she is in constant and explicit dialogue with previous writers and with her readers. Thus her contribution lies between “truths beyond speech” and “practical politics.”

      The purpose of her text is to set questions that we must answer collectively by thinking and acting:

      What I propose in the following is a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears. This, obviously, is a matter of thought, and thoughtlessness—the heedless recklessness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of “truths” which have become trivial and empty-seems to me among the outstanding characteristics of our time. What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing (p. 5).

      Sources: Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958; “Man’s Conquest of Space,” American Scholar 32, no. 4 (Autumn 1963). See also: the worlds we can lose when intelligence becomes artificial; Reading Arendt in Palo Alto; the papal encyclical on AI

      why Victorian elites spent so few hours on the job compared to modern elites

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      According to the American Time Use Survey, American managers work a median of 43 hours per week, and 10% of them work at least 55 hours per week (Flood, Sayer, and Backman; my tabulations). Managers work more hours than people in the lower-status occupational categories. Construction, production, and transportation all report about 40 median weekly hours.

      In Victorian times, when British managers ran the wealthiest and most advanced economy in the world and the largest empire in history–and when factory workers often labored for 72 hours per week–the elite spent few hours on the job.

      I formed this impression recently as I read Anthony Troloppe’s Phineas Finn, a novel about politics. Finn, a rising MP and the Under-Secretary of State in charge of Canada, works for a few hours most afternoons, punctuated by holidays in country houses. He is dismayed that his former mentor, the barrister Mr. Low, must work 10 hours/day to make a living “and could rarely call a day his own.” Of course, Victorian workers and domestic servants worked even longer hours than lawyers did. But none of Finn’s political friends, including the Prime Minister, seem to work much beyond the afternoon.

      This book is fiction and could be satirical (although it doesn’t seem to be). However, Samuel Hughes supplies facts to support the generalization that Victorian elites spent few hours on the job. “The great prime minister of the Victorian period, William Gladstone, hosted a social breakfast starting at 10.30am (claret was served), continuing till about noon. His rival Benjamin Disraeli attended breakfasts hosted by Lord Houghton, which started at 10am, but which Disraeli would join at about 11.30am.” Hughes adds, “many Victorians had a substantial lunch with wine, usually with professional peers at a club, sustaining them until dinner at about 8.30pm.” That left them just a few afternoon hours to work in the office.

      These men had been educated in what the British call public schools, where (Hughes says) pupils spent about 2-5 hours/day on schoolwork. The curriculum was dominated by Latin and Greek, but few adults recalled either language, which might reflect the lack of attention they had given to their schoolwork. Hughes quotes Winston Churchill: “In all the twelve years I was at school no one ever succeeded in making me write a Latin verse or learn any Greek except the alphabet.” I similarly recall a line from George Orwell’s Wigan Pier: “You forget your Latin and Greek within a few months of leaving school–I studied Greek for eight or ten years, and now, at thirty-three, I cannot even repeat the Greek alphabet–but your snobbishness, unless you persistently root it out like the bindweed it is, sticks by you till your grave.”

      Many leaders had finished their educations at Oxford or Cambridge, where a “pass” degree required almost no work, and the rarer “honors” degree might demand a few hours of studying between morning chapel and an elaborate lunch, plus a tutorial around 4 pm–over sherry.

      The US was not so different. As I wrote in 2015, FDR “was a busy man: Secretary of the Navy, Governor of New York, President of the United States for 13 epic years. And yet he also had time to collect one million stamps and more than 20,000 books, many of them about naval history, a special interest of his. He also welcomed many house guests and obviously socialized constantly. He had a dog and was interested in birds.”

      Here is a theory of why Victorian and early-20th century elites spent few hours officially on the job, while our elites spend so much time at work.

      First, it pays to be recognized and liked by others within an elite. This is “social capital,” as Pierre Bourdieu defines it. The main benefit is to the individual who is included in an elite network. But the whole network may also function better if it is tight and mutually supporting. Then information can move efficiently and individuals may sacrifice–if not for the common good or the welfare of the poor, then at least for their collective interests as the rulers or owners of an institution. Many a Victorian gentleman gave his life for his peers.

      Second, the forms by which elites maintain social ties vary. Victorian gentlemen spent many hours on sports (especially as youth), clubs, dinners, country parties, balls, hunting, and paying visits. As Hughes says, “By one definition, then, elite Victorians did remarkably little work: they could easily spend just four or five hours a day actually in the office. But by another definition, they were working all the time. Lunches, balls, and dinners were certainly fun, but they were not just fun.” These were the places where information traveled and people decided whom to favor and support.

      By the way, Troloppe is sympathetic to his female characters for their vulnerability and lack of explicit power, yet he explores how women exert influence in settings like dinner parties and hunts, where they distribute social capital.

      Today’s managerial elites are more likely to spent their time in meetings or in front of screens, exchanging messages. A typical email, text, or Slack message goes from one person to many. All the recipients must consider whether to reply, which means that every message generates a great deal of work for others. If you are not cc-d or invited to a meeting, you may miss social capital. If you fail to answer a message, you may be forgotten or cause offense. The more hours you spend sending and receiving messages or sitting around a conference table, the better networked you are. People with very busy calendars have high social capital (in the Bourdieu sense) and can dispense appointments selectively. Whole tranches of managers can be mainly engaged in communicating with one another about when and how to meet to communicate with each other, which is exhausting labor.

      Third, networking will tend to become more demanding over time. Wine-soaked lunches will give way to text-message threads at 11 pm. This is because networking in an elite status-group is intensely competitive and has high stakes. It may seem fun if it takes place over claret or at a country house party, but the function is serious. Therefore, the serious side will constantly ratchet up.

      Networking behavior will grow more efficient in the sense that the competition for influence will grow more relentless and unsparing. However, elites will not necessarily manage things better. A remarkably small number of British men (and one Empress) ran a vast empire pretty well–as measured by their own interests–while saving time for drinking and hunting. They were much more efficient at ruling than our modern elites are.

      Functionally, a modern office may be like a Victorian dinner party. But our modern ways seem a lot less fun.

      Source: Sarah M. Flood, Liana C. Sayer, and Daniel Backman. American Time Use Survey Data Extract Builder: Version 3.3 [dataset]. College Park, MD: University of Maryland and Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS, 2025. https://doi.org/10.18128/D060.V3.3. (My tabulations.) See also: what happened to leisure time? (on FDR’s ample free time); Mrs. Dalloway with a smartphone; two approaches to social capital: Bourdieu vs. the American literature; and vestiges of feudalism in Emma; or, why the gentry acts as it does.

      full-time college students spend 90 minutes per day on academics

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      [Oct. 14: Dustin Fry, a postdoc at the Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation, notes that many–apparently, 55%–of respondents who are coded as full-time college students report zero hours of academic work. This begins to look to me like some kind of data error rather than the reality. If all of the zero-hour students are removed, then the mean number of hours of academic work jumps up to five per day. His finding could basically invalidate the following post. I am grateful for it and wanted to add this caveat.]

      According to the American Time Use Survey, the median full-time college student in the USA spends 90 minutes per day on “non-work education activities, such as taking classes, conducting research and homework, administrative tasks, and extracurricular activities except sports.”

      The graph with this post shows that more than 45% of full-time college students report spending less than one hour per day on academic work (including extracurriculars). But there is a long tail, with a few reporting 11 hours or more. The mean is almost 3 hours/day, pulled up by the high achievers.

      It’s possible that I am naive, but I believe that students at Tufts, where I teach, spend enough hours on schoolwork that it can interfere with their sleep or even feel impossible to accomplish by the deadlines. But the national data show that they are unrepresentative.

      If you are spending less than one hour/day on academics, including the time you spend actually “taking classes,” you just cannot be learning much. Maybe you are happy enough to be a college student living together with thousands of peers. But it is really hard to see why your family or the society should pay for this experience for four years of your young adulthood. Millions of families do pay, but they must see tuition as a kind of toll for entry to the middle class. I can see why they might view the toll-takers much as the Billy Goats Gruff viewed the Hungry Troll.

      If you are getting so little out of your college experience that it occupies less than one hour per day, you might as well replace any remaining effort with an AI tool. And if your professors are so little involved with your education that you are able to get away with less than one hour per day of instruction plus homework plus extracurriculars, they might as well replace their teaching and grading with an AI.

      Credit hours represent a kind of contract. A 3-credit course is supposed to require 9 hours of class plus homework per week, and most students take at least four courses. That takes them to about 40 hours of work per week, or more than five hours per day. If that is the official expectation, yet many students are doing 20% as much work, then the whole thing must seem like a travesty.

      Finally, these data suggest that there is a qualitative difference among institutions. Some students are spending half their waking hours on demanding intellectual work. Others are not intellectually engaged at all. They may overlap on some of the same campuses, but they are probably concentrated in institutions that either demand a lot or not much of their students’ time. Nevertheless, the two kinds of institutions are both called “colleges,” and many students and families may not realize the difference.

      Technicalities: This is my tabulation using data from Flood, Sayer, and Backman. I’ve amalgamated 2003-2025 to get a sample of 3,074. I do not show the trend during this period. For what it’s worth, the median rises in each decade from the 2000s to the 2020s, so the situation does not seem to be worsening.

      In 2013, the National Survey of Student Engagement found that first-year college students spent about 2 hours per day preparing for class. That is a mean, not a median. It may be consistent with the 3-hour mean in the American Time Use Survey, since the latter includes class-time and extracurriculars.

      Sources: Sarah M. Flood, Liana C. Sayer, and Daniel Backman. American Time Use Survey Data Extract Builder: Version 3.3 [dataset]. College Park, MD: University of Maryland and Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS, 2025. https://doi.org/10.18128/D060.V3.3. National Survey of Student Engagement. (2013). A Fresh Look at Student Engagement—Annual Results 2013. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research.See also: a conversation with Farah Stockman about American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears

      a deliberative response to Trump’s building projects?

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      Imagine that it’s 2029 and you have been inaugurated as the President of the United States. (Congratulations and good luck.) You can look out from your bedroom window or during a helicopter ride and see a new ballroom, a huge arch, a helipad, a sculpture garden, and other major physical constructions that your predecessor ordered. Which would you do?

      1. Order them taken down to restore the legitimate status quo ante. If by any chance a court or Congress blocked your unilateral executive action (despite the precedents that Trump had set), treat the restoration of a limit on presidential power as a victory. Otherwise, act promptly to demonstrate the frailty of Trump’s unilateralism and to restore the capital city.
      2. Ask Congress to consider legislation to authorize a complete or partial restoration and to appropriate the necessary funds. Encourage Congress to hold hearings and a public debate. Use your veto power if you believe that you must, but lean in favor of honoring the legislative process. Treat the debate as a restoration of legislative primacy and the rule of law.
      3. Convene a representative body of citizens (perhaps randomly selected) to decide what to do, recognizing that there are genuinely competing values at stake. Some people may love the new buildings, or simply want to use the money that could be spent on restoration for other purposes. You would use a deliberative process to symbolize that the capital’s buildings belong to the people, not to the president or even to Congress. You would be trying to set a precedent for other deliberations.
      4. Ask Congress to authorize a citizen deliberation on the topic and to honor the results.
      5. Do nothing.

      Before choosing, you might want to get reliable legal advice about whether Trump’s projects were illegal or else within the bounds of unilateral presidential power as that is currently understood. The answer might affect your thinking but would probably not determine your decision.

      For example, if I believed that Trump had acted unlawfully, I might order the buildings removed to remedy the violation, or I might hesitate to order a demolition that would also be illegal. If I were told that Trump’s actions were lawful, I might either see a green light to demolish the buildings or else work to narrow presidential discretion by deferring to Congress.

      I would also think about this very practically. The fourth option is appealing but would lose its appeal if a bill got nowhere in Congress. I might do nothing instead of expending considerable political capital. After all, an arch can be taken down now or another year, whereas other problems are truly urgent.

      That said, this highly symbolic issue could be used to convey worthy points.

      public intellectuals and the fickle food of fame

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      This weekend, at Amherst, I enjoyed a rich conversation about the purposes of liberal arts colleges. One proposal (not mine, but I appreciated it) was for liberal arts colleges to nurture public intellectuals.

      The colleges represented at the meeting use basically the same criteria and standards for hiring and promotion that research-intensive universities use. Should their faculty be distinctive in any way? Universities tend to reward work produced for experts within fields. Liberal arts colleges could favor work that is meant for the public. Because they can be very selective, they could attract public intellectuals without compromising quality.

      Sometimes, writing or speaking for the public is defined as reaching a large audience–in a word, as fame. But the most famous person who ever lived in Amherst refused to share her work with the public and wrote several trenchant poems about fame.

      For instance, these four lines constitute Emily Dickinson’s poem #1788:

      Fame is a bee.
      It has a song—
      It has a sting—
      Ah, too, it has a wing.

      The “song” is the attraction of fame, but the the “wing” refers to its tendency to fly away after causing pain. The ancient personification of Fame was winged, but I think she was envisioned arriving by air to announce someone’s success, rather than flying away unpredictably. Dickinson suggests a similar idea in the poem (#1659) that begins “Fame is a fickle food / Upon a shifting plate.” There is also: “Fame is the one that does not stay” (#1507).

      Dickinson carefully designed her own funeral, a public event that launched her career posthumously. It seems that she wanted to reach an audience (hence becoming famous) but did not want fame to affect her work. She carefully timed her fame until after she could experience it (Crumbly 2017).

      That sequence is clear in #1427:

      To earn it by disdaining it
      Is Fame’s consummate Fee—
      He loves what spurns him—
      Look behind—He is pursuing thee.

      So let us gather—every Day—
      The Aggregate of
      Life’s Bouquet
      Be Honor and not shame—

      The addressee of the poem (Dickinson herself?) is moving toward an unnamed goal. That goal is not fame, which is behind her. Fame pursues her because she does not seek him. Perhaps an author or thinker who disdains to pursue fame is more likely to become famous because the quality of her work will be higher.

      There is an air here of lovers, like Keats’ figures on the Grecian Urn (“What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?”). And there is something a bit creepy about Fame sneaking up from behind. You would think that turning around to see him would be a mistake, like Orpheus’ tragic error in looking behind him for Eurydice. But Dickinson’s narrator advises, “Look behind–he is pursuing thee.” Perhaps you should look back to remember the temptation that shadows you and then press forward to stay out of his clutches. Play hard to get.

      The second stanza instructs us to attend to what life provides and to make art from it, not caring about the “shame” of becoming famous. We should be concerned with what we can gather, not with what people will think of us.

      Nevertheless, Dickinson is a consummate rhetorician in the sense that she addresses strangers and tries to influence them, carefully considering what they may know, care about, and want to hear. Even though she eschews a contemporaneous audience, she writes for a public. Most readers feel that she is talking to them, and we certainly don’t have to be professional poets.

      The kind of academic or intellectual work that I most appreciate (and try to support through the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts, the Institute for Civically Engaged Research, and other efforts) involves collaborations between scholarly experts and concrete groups, organizations, movements, or communities. The experts must talk in useful ways. It is exciting when their collaborative work expands to large scales and affects many people, but sometimes large scale is inappropriate or impossible. Aiming for big numbers can undermine integrity and quality. The goal is to share what Hannah Arendt calls a “world” with people who are independent and different from oneself.

      If Amherst’s most famous resident is a model, the lesson would be to make things that have value for strangers, not just for colleagues and specialists. But treat fame as a threat to quality. Run away from it.

      Source: Crumbley, Paul. “Emily Dickinson’s Funeral and the Paradox of Literary Fame.” The Emily Dickinson Journal, vol. 26 no. 2, 2017, p. 51-69. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/edj.2017.0014. See also: anxieties of influence; love of the world