Roosevelt Montás’s Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation (2021) is both a defense of the Columbia University general education program and a memoir recounting his interactions with writers such as Plato, Aristotle, Freud, Descartes, and Gandhi. John McWhorter (2021) calls it “a combination memoir and call to arms.” While I appreciate Montás’s commitment to the importance of the humanities and its role within higher education in the United States, I find his argument deeply troubling.
Beyond the Credential Factory: Why Higher Education Must Shift from Management to Flourishing
For decades, higher education leadership has obsessed over “student success” as a purely operational metric. We track retention and graduation rates and postgraduation outcomes with the same linear precision that
Yoshitaka Iwasaki
August 3, 2026
