--- Sarah Stewart Johnson, "Bon Voyage 2024 Speech, Oxford as Chrysalis," The American Oxonian, Winter 2025
A wonderful summary of what I think a humanities education is about.
In context
As an undergraduate at an American University, and, like everyone here, a tenacious sort of undergraduate, I was busy. I was also focused on a lot of intermediate, incremental challenges. . . .
. . . As a college student, if I were assigned a chapter in a book, I would basically read that chapter and move on, there were other things always pressing. But at Oxford, with all that time, I realized that I could linger in the library, I could read the rest of an interesting book and also the books alongside it on this shelf. I could spend the whole afternoons walking in Port Meadow thinking about what I what it was I read, talking to friends about ideas, and talking to my tutors. There was no pointless memorizing, no preparation for multiple choice questions... especially as a PPE student, my time wasn't about figuring out what others thought but figuring out what I thought and being prepared to defend it. . . .
