Holiday Message 2025 | The Romance of the University

Hello everyone and welcome to the 2025 holiday message for the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. Whenever it's a holiday break, I sometimes think about my first year in college. In fact, going back for holiday vacation and meeting up with all my old friends from high school. You know, I had a group of friends, mutual friends that we had had for years. We basically all went to different universities, very different universities, so didn't keep close touch with each other at the time, but then of course got back together and then again during the summer, after that next semester was over. I could not help but be struck by how different my friends were. Not in bad ways or not always in good ways. They were just different. They were a little bit different people when they came back from a short exposure to university life than they had been for the years when I knew them. You know, of course, they changed. We all changed, during high school, during the four or five years, whatever. We were hanging out together, but relatively gradually. And then they went off to the four corners of the Earth. They came back, and they were noticeably different. The thing that obviously occurred to me at the time was, wow, going to college really changes you in some ways, and I'm sure that it changed me and they noticed that just as well. But what I eventually realized is that they all changed differently, right? It wasn't as if there was something that happens to you when you go to college and it all happened to them and now they were different or we were different. It's that somehow they had all grown into people who were closer to who they always should have been. They blossomed in some way. There were always those tendencies and characteristics inside them that now you could recognize more clearly because they came much more to the surface. There was the techie guy who was now really into computers, the poetic soul who was reading literature and literary theory a lot more and could quote it suddenly, there was a Reagan Republican who is now very into free markets and business strategies and all that. Again, not all good or bad, just different. They had become a little bit more who they really should have been all along. Now obviously a huge amount of this if you think that this is a common kind of phenomenon going to college, changing a little bit, coming back a lot of it is social socialization, right? A lot of it is meeting friends, being with people who are like you, getting into a different crowd, stuff like that. Just the fact of living away from home in a very different environment is bound to change you in some ways. I do, however, think that some of it is academic, that some of it has to do …