Academic requirements seemed to fall into two categories: Some were aimed at his knowing a little about a lot; others were related to knowing a lot about a little. These were summed up in the phrases "distribution" and "concentration."

Trinitarian Approach

Distribution was represented by General Education. A student was supposed to understand the trinitarian approach to the mind, grasping the attitudes of the Natural Science, the Social Sciences, and the Humanities. In all three cases, this educational effort followed the "learning by doing" theory, since even introductory courses in General Education had very little to say about the underlying premises and attitudes of their field as contrasted with others, but simply "did" in their own area.

This narrowness was perhaps inevitable, since every instructors necessarily revelled in the superiority and necessity of his particular approach to life, and felt that his own premises were intuitively obvious consequences of the world order. There were very few men who could see themselves in perspective, and set off the individuality of their disciplines and attitudes against all the alternatives.

The scientists could hardly under- stand what was unique about science, because they were on the inside looking out, and saw the humanities and the social sciences as ineffective forms of empirical naturalism. Meanwhile the Humanities attempted to subsume the sciences instead of admitting them as an alternative, and this with only the vaguest understading of what the sciences were really up to.

The synthesis was therefore left largely to the individual uncommitted student, who could occasionally avoid taking a parochial approach because he was not emotionally involved in any form of academic life.

Irrelevancy

But while the lack of commitment to a discipline could upon occasion lead to objectivity about the divergent approaches, it more often led to the irrelevancy of the material studied. The student who looked at a discipline from the outside seldom found it possible to use this approach for dealing with anything which really mattered to him He found himself regarding the academic life as a meaningless game, a juggling of materials into circular and therefore meaningless patterns. And so Rumplestiltskin was forced either to ignore what he was learning or else to stride pensively up and down his Elsinore posing endless alternatives until either madness or disaster followed his incapacity to exclude possibilities in favor of action.

But Harvard did not encourage this sort of thing. General Education was essentially not very different from other courses. Learning by doing meant that you confronted the problems which faced a discipline and looked at the discipline's techniques for solving them. The primary question was always the positive one, "What can this discipline do?" rather than the negative one, "What can it not do?" and perhaps this accounted for the sometimes incredible arrogance of educators.

Over and over Rumplestiltskin was induced to believe that his intellect could somehow do the impossible. Every discipline followed the assumption of University educators; that men could be made into what they were not by trying hard enough. The scientists were perhaps more honest about their quest than others, since they continually narrowed the questions they asked in order to make the answers they could get sufficient unto the occasion, until finally they were no longer asking questions about which anybody cared, and so managed to avoid explicit claims which they could not fulfill.

But requirements did not end with General Education. There were others, sometimes more incredible than amusing, with which the University and the departments attempted to define a liberal education and suggest what sort of person Rumplestiltskin ought to become.

The most important of these academic requirements were those established by the departments. These usually mirrored the University policy of knowing something about the whole department and a lot about some particular specialty of that department. The consequence was envisioned in mathematical terms, with knowledge building up from the most general understanding of all fields to the most meticulous understanding of some specialty, a glorious conic section.

Not Building Blocks

The only problem was that for Rumplestiltskin knowledge was not neatly constructed of building blocks which could simply be seized and shoved into place, and the moments at which his intellectual pursuits came to significance were not arranged according to any systematic program.

Indeed, he found that the primary problem at Harvard was that knowledge was treated as something which could be bought and sold, given and received, and that the University thought that by requiring the right courses it could give him the perspective which he lacked upon arrival. The trouble was that he could only listen to what was being said to him on very rare occasions, and predicting these moments was utterly impossible. The courses and the books which suddenly registered and left the deepest imprint on him seemed to be unrelated to the greatness of the subject-matter, author, or lecturer, and to depend almost entirely upon their relevance to his own inscrutable mental movement.