My friend Phil, who was my boss during our newspaper days, sent me a clip of Willie Morris’s essay “A Texas Education.”
Morris, a native of Mississippi, went to the University of Texas and was editor of The Daily Texan during his senior year. His tenure was famous for a fight between the newspaper and the board of regents. It was a doozy: academic freedom, free speech and segregation.
The essay is mostly about that brawl. But the part that most interested me was how Morris, at 17, got off the bus in Austin and gradually came to understand what a university might be about. He told of being invited to the home of two graduate students and being stunned to see wall-to-wall books.
It is a rare experience for certain young people to see great quantities of books in a private habitat for the first time, and to hear them talked about seriously in the off-hours. Good God, they were doing it for pleasure, or so it seemed.
People rarely ask, but when they do, that’s my answer. Why go to college? Why read books? Why think about writers and ideas when you could be making money, feeding the poor, fighting injustice and saving the world?
Pleasure. Some things you do for pleasure.
• Source: Willie Morris, “A Texas Education”; Commentary, August 1966. The article is here:
https://www.commentary.org/articles/willie-morris/a-texas-education/
Thanks, Phil.
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