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only-slightly-above-average grades. Most thrilled were my parents, who had devoted so much of their meager salaries to my schooling. Never once did they even hint that I was shirking my responsibilities in preferring books and birds over making money.
    Over my last summer at home, I spent more and more time at Wolf Lake observing shorebirds. There I found hundreds of black-bellied plovers as well as dozens of the golden plovers, whose long migration over oceans had so thrilled me when I read about them as a child. Piping plovers still nested on the sandy shores and intermingled with the many more semipalmate plovers that arrived soon after the fall migration started in early August. I would watch the shorebird flocks scurrying along the beach, trying to think through the evolutionary pressures that had created such social animals, which invariably flocked together instead of going their solitary ways. Whether any general principles governing the social behavior of birds even existed, no one then knew. Deep down I was relieved that Indiana's warning would not allow me to stake my future on the pursuit of an objective that might prove a phantom. In contrast, what needed to be found out about genes was relatively clear. They obviously existed, but how did they work? Knowing by graduation where I wanted to go intellectually was the real achievement of my college years.
        Remembered Lessons
1. College is for learning how to think
    Whether on a scholarship or paying full fare, college costs too much time and money if you don't use it to learn how to think. In Joseph Schwab's Humanities I class, knowing what Socrates was reputed to have said mattered much less than confronting whether the reasoning he used to reach his conclusions was watertight. Day after day we were pushed into classroom fights where we boxed with our brains instead of our fists. Syllogisms, in which two premises predicate unassailable conclusions, dominated our classroom hours, with the exact meaning of words being of paramount importance. Failure to spot faulty premises all too easily led to classroom answers that ran against common sense. Back in high school, I was challenged by a friend who had what he thought was incontrovertible proof of the existence of God.
    Going back home, I felt stupidly unable to fight back against his word war, even while suspecting that he was pulling a fast one that I was too dumb to spot. Later when we both went to the University of Chicago, he came up against much better practitioners of semantics and logic. Soon Bill sheepishly confessed to me that syllogisms no longer led him to God, and freed from thinking about sin, he developed a new preoccupation with girls—and more girls.
2. Knowing “why” (an idea) is more important
than learning “what” (a fact)
    World Almanac facts, such as the relative heights of mountains or the names of British kings, got you nowhere at Hutchins's college. The essence of its educational mission was the propagation and dissection of ideas, not the teaching of facts often best left to trade schools. Why the Roman Empire had risen and fallen was much more important than the birth date of Julius Caesar. And why the great European cathedrals were built mattered much more than their relative sizes. Equally unimportant were the details about the French Revolution when contrasted to the philosophical ideas of its eighteenth-century Enlightenment, whose emphasis on reason as opposed to theological revelation greatly accelerated the development of modern science. Likewise, details of Linnean taxonomy paled in significance to the idea of biological evolution, whereby all life-forms have a common ancestor. Better simply to know which books hold details you will need than to overload your neurons with facts that later will never need to be retrieved.
3. New ideas usually need new facts
    Though facts are inherently less satisfying than the conclusions drawn from them, their importance cannot be