Prof. Michael Gilmore (ENG) told me that Brandeis now teaches as many business courses as English courses. I repeated this to my USEM class-one student said, "That's OK! Lots of us will go into business, but few will become educators." This misunderstanding needs correction, without my resembling a preacher waxing flatulently on virtue.The class, called "Where the Idea of the Computer Came From," is an intellectual history of computer science. We just read a novella by the Viennese writer Stefan Zweig, The Royal Game. An Austrian banking official, under Gestapo interrogation, keeps his sanity by stealing a book of chess games, memorizing them, and playing fantasized chess in his head. Learning to see moves ahead, he gains mental acuity and outwits his interrogators. A liberal arts education gives you similar insight, in situations you can't presently imagine.

Literature and history are about the human experience-your experience-of strategy, success, and failure, meritocracy and accepting equality, greed and graciousness, revenge and reconciliation. When you read about Basil of Byzantium quarreling with the Duke of Dorset, it's not some dusty dispute-they hated each other. Their blood pulsed like yours does. Listen to an opera love aria-my favorite, from Massenet's Manon, reminds me of a story of my own-filled with feelings like yours: head over heels, imbued with romantic hope, sexuality, fear and exaltation.

Just as Jewish tradition recounts the history of the Jewish people, read by Jews as a guide to who they are and where they came from, our literary and historical tradition is a stumbling, triumphant, warts-and-all chronicle of who we are and what we feel. Studying it bestows perspective, so we don't clang unconsciously and stupidly through instant replays of challenges that really aren't new. And language has extraordinary power: The Gettysburg Address is better than "87 years ago, we started a country."

I once locked horns with a senior colleague from another university-an academic priority fight over research that I thought would earn my reputation and tenure. His predatory aggression clear, I felt overwhelmed and outraged. During this war, I went to see Calderon's Life is a Dream, a 17th century play about a king warned that his infant son will kill him one day; the king imprisons his son, who grows up full of resentment and hatred. Furious, I was barely watching, until I realized: this play was about me. My urge for academic vengeance risked precisely the ruin that I wanted to avoid.

Venture capitalist Mitchell Kertzman recently spoke at the International Business School about his career as a CEO-turning on, tuning in and dropping out of Brandeis in the 1960s, getting seduced by programming, and his ensuing success in the software industry. Brandeis has real affection for alumni, complemented by pecuniary interests resembling Carl Sagan's wonder at the cosmos. "I never studied programming or how to be a CEO," he said, "but I learned-I'd learned how to learn." Like Zweig's hero, he saw moves ahead.

Students inquired about obtaining VC funding. I asked, "What should students study to learn how to learn, and succeed in what they do?" The answer wasn't managerial economics, or entrepreneurship. "Latin," he said-when we're poised to axe classics! "Math, logic, physics," he continued-like a medieval monk studying the quadrivium, this modern-age software mogul praised the Boston Latin School, where he learned how to learn. Is the University's administration or development office hearing his words of wisdom?

Calderon's play contains lessons for the administration. Despite its genuine interest in Brandeis' success, commitments to "niche" and interdepartmental programs serving as Trojan Horses (Greek!) for other agendas, to "service to the Jewish community" (as Dean Jaffe was instructed to tell the Board of Trustees)-thus inverting the University's mission statement-and the consequent marginalization of the College of Arts and Sciences, will dismember the University that others want to save. Will today's strategic innovation look tomorrow as wrongheaded as a dot-com bust, or the Ford Pinto? Will we be able to afford a recall? Stop worrying about Brandeis being "unique" -we're all unique. What's important is our intellectual heritage: too valuable, for too long, to squander. Brandeis isn't about uniqueness, or innovation. It's about learning what's known and-above all-thinking for yourself, so you can confront the unknown.

In Hippolytus, Euripides wrote, "We know the good, and we get it-we just don't do it." Tom and Ray from "Car Talk" add a prescient warning: "It's the cheapest car owner who ends up paying the most."

Editor's note: The author is a professor of computer science.