In my Humanities seminar, the students read a book. I’m guessing that won’t make a New York Post headline: BRANDEIS STUDENTS READ BOOK – but bear with me for a moment. The book was The Education of Henry Adams by – you guessed it – Henry Adams, who was born in 1838 and died in 1918, just at the end of the First World War. Although Adams circulated copies of the manuscript to his friends in 1907, the book was not actually published until six months after his death, winning him a posthumous Pulitzer Prize. Indeed, the prestigious Modern Library voted it the number one non-fiction book of the twentieth century.

Adams had it all. His grandfather was President John Quincy Adams, with whom he was very close. His great-grandfather was Founding Father John Adams. ‘Had he been born in Jerusalem under the shadow of the Temple and circumcised in the Synagogue by his uncle the high priest, under the name of Israel Cohen,’ he wrote of himself, ‘he would scarcely have been more distinctly branded’. Adams went to Harvard, and later in life was a history professor there, producing a series of books about the presidencies of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison that are still considered to be works of genius.

Yet despite all of these advantages and accomplishments, Henry Adams felt at the end of his life that he had failed to become educated. His years as a Harvard undergraduate, he came to realize, had been a total waste of time. And Adams was a top student there, selected to give the oration to the Harvard graduating class of 1858, ‘in a clergyman’s gown, reciting such platitudes as their own experience and their mild censors permitted them to utter ... in a heat that might have melted bronze’.

Having failed to get educated at Harvard, Adams saw his whole long life as a process of what he called ‘accidental education’ through reading, experiencing and especially by going to scientific expositions where the newly discovered mysteries of radium, x-rays and sub-atomic particles were annihilating centuries of what had been considered truth. He was never a key player, but he was everywhere anything was happening, from explaining American tariff policy to the great philosopher John Stuart Mill, to having an evening chat in Rome with the ‘picturesque and piratic’ Italian revolutionary Garibaldi, to freely strolling in and out of the Oval Office for a quiet word with whomever happened to be president. But even as an old man, Adams felt that he still lacked education.

What does it mean anyway to be educated? Adams was still alive when the American Association of University Professors defined the role their members were expected to play. ‘The university teacher,’ they ruled, should ‘above all, remember that his business is not to provide his students with ready-made conclusions, but to train them to think for themselves, and to provide them access to those materials which they need if they are to think intelligently.’

Over the last winter break, I was hiking in the mountains of South India. (Isn’t that the most pathetic attempt of a Brandeis professor to sound cool?) Anyway, I met a wonderful young English guy there on his honeymoon with his even more wonderful Indian bride. Bizarrely, it turned out that we had the same teacher at Oxford, fifty years apart. Nick (for that was his name) told me that he had done there the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) combined program, the same course of study that we’ve just inaugurated at Brandeis. ‘I didn’t learn much at university,’ he said ‘but it taught me how to learn.’ Nick could have been quoting Henry Adams who at the age of 54 suddenly realized in the course of his accidental education that ‘they know enough who know how to learn.’

There was a hilarious book published in 1930 entitled 1066 and All That: A Memorable History of England, Comprising All the Parts You Can Remember, including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates. Like the two authors of that short satire, much of what you will remember about what you studied at college will consist of mixed-up facts and confused theories. But like my new friend Nick and Henry Adams, I’m guessing that if you are here in this room right now, you learned how to learn.

I go to a lot of meetings here at Brandeis, and whenever an administrator refers to the ‘Higher Education Industry’, I always feel the need to object. I mean, does the pope tell the cardinals that they are part of the ‘Roman Catholic Industry’? Like priests, professors work on Sundays, reading, thinking and maybe pushing forward just a little bit against the ignorance that has always challenged humanity.

True it is that a university is also a business. ‘If there is no bread, there can be no learning’, the Talmud warns us. But to allow the consumer market not just to determine preferences but also to confer legitimacy on opinions rather than on reasons can eliminate even the possibility of accidental education by truncating the subjects that a university offers.

As has been said, if you want to make money, go into business. If you want to learn how to make money, go to business school. If you want to learn what money is and how it has functioned and what might be the point of making a lot of it, go to university.

Obsession with evaluation and assessment – the Abbot and Costello of Higher Ed Speak – can have a similar dampening effect. In 2022-23, 79% of grades given to Yale undergraduates were an A or an A-, up from only 10% in 1963. At Harvard, in the final meeting of the Spring 2024 semester, the entire faculty burst out laughing when the Dean could not contain his mirth at revealing that the average GPA there was now 3.8.

There’s an old business mantra that says, ‘if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’. But even at the end of his long life, Henry Adams was unable to measure if the things he had learned had been life-changing for him, or even significant. That’s why he wrote that book, he explained, since before him ‘no one has discussed what part of education has, in his personal experience, turned out to be useful, and what not.’ Liberal arts education is a moving target and eludes measurement in real time. Come back to see us at in a few years and we’ll talk about whether you were educated at Brandeis ... and maybe even convince you to donate a few dollars.

Whether Claude the Robot writes your entire paper or just does your thinking for you to produce a detailed outline of what you’re going to write, either way, we still don’t know what effect AI will all have on the education of the students who will follow you in the next few years. A recent survey of more than 1100 American students in two-year colleges, four-year universities and graduate programs found that 90% of students have used AI academically, and 73% said that they used AI more this year than last, showing that adoption is still rising. About 29% of students use AI daily while another 24% turn to AI several times a week. Yes, television didn’t kill movies like people thought, and the internet didn’t eliminate reading physical books. ‘No scheme could be suggested to the new American’, Henry Adams insisted as he noted the huge technological changes of his own day, ‘but the next great influx of new forces seemed near at hand, and its style of education promised to be violently coercive ... and rapid in acceleration. Prolonged one generation longer, it would require a new social mind.’

You may have noticed that Brandeis University has launched a new advertising campaign under the slogan, ‘one foot in the classroom – one foot in the street’. Henry Adams has a copyright claim here. Over a century ago, he insisted that ‘Unless education marches on both feet – theory and practice – it risks going astray.’ Our credo here in Brandeis is ‘applied liberal arts’. That is to say, we wanted you to graduate not just career-ready, but also having acquired the tools to continue to learn and to appreciate what the celebrated nineteenth-century public intellectual Matthew Arnold called culture – which he defined as ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’ – a life of the mind. You came to Brandeis four years ago not only to be trained but also – as Henry Adams wrote – to be educated. If the Phi Beta Kappa algorithm worked, I’m guessing that you sitting here have already figured that out.

When Henry Adams spoke to the Harvard graduating class of 1858, it was customary to end with a blessing. I suppose I could just say ‘live long and prosper’, but Waltham is light years away from the Planet Vulcan, even if the actor who used to say it all the time was actually from Boston. Then I thought I could somehow be super clever, and work in the words of the prophet Isaiah, who said that self-reliance was ה ָש ְק ִּמ ְב הָונּל ְמ ִּכ' – ‘like a shack in a garden of zucchini’, my translation. The King James Bible prefers the word ‘cucumbers’ to ‘zucchini’, which doesn’t help much, seeing as how cucumbers are 95% water and have very little taste, while you can do a lot with zucchini. OK, so forget about the blessing.

But what I want you to take away from your years at Brandeis is that a college degree is not a product that you buy from a single vendor. An individual university is just one cell in a living and evolving leviathan of knowledge. What we gave you and you acquired at Brandeis was access to an international cultural and intellectual inheritance passed on from generations of scholars, humanists and scientists. So, ok then, my blessing to you is, keep getting educated, accidentally or otherwise.

Phi Beta Kappa Address

David S. Katz

15 May 2026