[A]Why can’t this happen more often? It is no accident that Worthen and so many others are drawn to a teacher who is not a lifel

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问题 [A]Why can’t this happen more often? It is no accident that Worthen and so many others are drawn to a teacher who is not a lifelong academic, but who was active in the real world. Yet our universities operate too much like a guild system, throwing plenty of people with dissertations at students, not enough with practical knowledge. Why aren’t there more scholars, like Hill, Gaddis and Kennedy, who teach students to be generalists, to see the great connections? Instead, the academy encourages squirrel-like specialization.
[B]Grand Strategy is taught by three great professors—John Lewis Gaddis, Paul Kennedy and Charles Hill. But when my students talked, there was always a special reverence for Hill. This was the Renaissance man, the career foreign-service officer who had used power from the inside, but who also applied literature and philosophy to everyday problems. What they were really describing when they talked of Hill was a man of authority, an adult in full.
[C]One of my students, an uncommonly self-reflective young woman named Molly Worthen, did something more than just admire Hill. She asked: Who is this man I look up to? Where does such an authoritative person come from? In the year after graduation, she devoted herself full time to writing a book-length biography. I’ve just seen her manuscript; it’s one of the more uplifting documents I’ve read in a long time. At one level it’s a regular biography. It describes Hill’s foreign-service career, first as a China-watcher, then in Vietnam, then as a speechwriter for Henry Kissinger, then in Israel and, at the climax of the Cold War, as Secretary of State George Shultz’s right-hand man.
[D]College students, even at Yale, live enveloped by uncertainty. What should I do with my life? What really matters? Hill seemed to them a man who in the course of years had figured it all out. He was an austere but commanding presence in their lives. Students would go to him outside class, seeking guidance about life. Hill made time for them. He didn’t hem and haw; he rendered judgments. One student had a few conversations with Hill and joined the Marines after graduation. Some rebelled against his self-confident opinions, but others were drawn by his sense of seriousness, his aura of great purpose, which they longed to share.
[E]A few years ago, I taught a course at Yale. Over dinners, I’d listen to my students talk about their other courses, and in many of these conversations there was one that stood out: Grand Strategy. For many students, this yearlong course was not just a class, but a life-altering event. Somehow students in Grand Strategy were applying Thucydides, Kant and Sun Tzu to modern foreign policy crises. They talked excitedly about seeing the connections between big ideas and big events.
[F]But this is not really a biography of Hill. This is a book about teaching. It’s a book about the complex relationship between an experienced person, offering life’s lessons, and a young seeker, hoping to acquire them. Throughout her manuscript, Worthen describes what it was like to write about her guide. To study him, she used all the mental disciplines he had taught her. Soon she found that their roles were becoming reversed. She found herself judging the guru. She found herself reaching conclusions independently.
[G]Too many universities have become professionalized information-transmission systems, when teaching should instead be this sort of relationship between the experienced Hill and the young Worthen, on whom little now is lost.
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