Christopher Schaefer
@ChrisSchaef
Fellow at @Renew_Democracy. PhD in History @Cambridge_Uni, formerly @gmfus @Tocqueville21. Views my own.
I can’t speak to administrators’ attitude toward liberal education; I’m just a lowly assistant professor. But what I know, because I saw it every day, is that students love reading excellent books and talking about them, and they themselves say it changes them
I wrote about the lack of administrative support for the liberal arts in @nytimes. The standard story we hear is that students don't want it. But a darker reality is that even when it wins big with students and donors it loses with those in power. nytimes.com/2025/07/17/opi…
As a first semester freshman, I took a course where we read the entirety of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The class had a dozen students, and some weeks we read around 500 pages. There are still students who want college experiences like that but it’s fewer every year.
When Tony Judt praised the miracle of America's great state schools, he thought first of all of IU Bloomington, where humanities programs are currently being blown to shreds
Matthew Yglesias drank the @CatherineProj Kool-Aid! Welcome, and thank you for writing about us! Why I joined a weird Zoom book club, by @mattyglesias slowboring.com/p/why-i-joined…
Happy to see @mattyglesias has found the @CatherineProj. I have been leading groups of one kind or another with it for four years now and it has been one of the best things in my life over that time. slowboring.com/p/why-i-joined…
General Stanley McChrystal helped take down al-Zarqawi and hunt bin Laden. But he still called Bin laden an effective leader. Whiskey Tango, Ep. 1 with @Kasparov63. Watch the first half free: 🎥👇
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The division of much of intellectual life into journalism and academia is sort of a tragedy because the defects of each one are potentially very nicely remedied by the other
🧵on today's 80th anniversary of the most famous radio broadcast in Danish history. It came from London but is little known in the UK. At 8.30 pm Danish time on 4 May 1945, Johannes Sørensens announced the start of the BBC Danish service's usual evening transmission. 1/11