Following graduation from Amherst, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship enabled me to test the depth of my interest in literary scholarship by beginning graduate studies at Harvard University.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.
As soon as I moved to Princeton in 1978, I became fascinated by local history, much of it Revolutionary War-era; and I became fascinated by the presidency of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University.
Amherst was pivotal in my broad intellectual development; MIT in my development as a professional economist.
I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture - I'd write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be.
As an undergraduate at Amherst College, I was devoted to Dickensian novels and antiestablishment journalism while marginally fulfilling premedical requirements.
I enjoyed reading and learning at school, and at university I enjoyed extending my reading and learning. Once I left Cambridge, I went to Yale as a fellow. I spent two years there. After that, George Gale made me literary editor of 'The Spectator.'
As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.
I went to study at Oxford University in the 1980s on an imperial scholarship instituted by Cecil Rhodes.
I obtained a Woodrow Wilson Doctoral Fellowship and entered the graduate program in History at the University of California. With no Greek or French and minimal Latin and German, I was in no position to pursue my classical interests, so I began work at Berkeley with little more than an open mind.
I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.