Educated, and Roots

Late last night, I finished Tara Westover’s 2018 memoir, Educated. There’s a lot to say about this beautiful book, and I want to return to it in a subsequent post. But for now, I want to write about a few narrow things about the book in relation to two conversations I had this week — one with a statistician from the Department of Justice and one with a Pomona friend.

Both conversations were, I think, a kind of return to roots. I knew the statistician from my time in DC. I spent Spring 2018 “studying abroad” on the DC program, and I was an intern at the Voting Section of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. When I first began, I honestly hadn’t thought much about voting rights outside of the gerrymandering context. But I remember feeling an instinctual reverence at being in the Section that enforces the Voting Rights Act, which I knew to be the crown jewel of the Civil Rights Era and perhaps the most effective civil rights law in American history. Over my time there, I remember being inspired by the lawyers and staff at the Section, whose knowledge and passion about voting rights seemed never ending. I remember their gentle advice on my memos (which were often quite bad), their insights on oral arguments, their enthusiasm for maps and history, their reflections on the people they’d met in the field when investigating potential infringements of voting rights law.

I left the Section in May 2018 feeling determined to become a voting rights lawyer. I took classes in statistics over the next year; I (unsuccessfully) sought internships the next summer to get back in the game; I tried to keep up with folks I met at the Section. There are few places in the world where I feel rooted, but DC — in part due to the Voting Section and in part due to the church I attended — was one of them.

Since then, I’ve drifted from thinking about voting rights. In part, research took over my mental space — human rights treaty monitoring, habeas corpus, federalism, the Office of Legal Counsel, seed dispersal. Different questions were on my mind. But there’s also a communal element of education and passion. Learning about and dedicating oneself to a cause are so much easier when there are others who are like-minded. Losing contact with the people in the Section over the last year-and-a-half allowed me to drift, and it was easy to justify that drift (they were all busy people, and I probably asked them so many dumb questions that most of them didn’t want to talk anymore).

It was about a week ago that I realized I could — and should — pick that interest back up. It came to me through a bit of a funny way. When I applied for the Marshall, I asked to do my second year studying quantitative political science to bolster my ability to analyze elections. The purpose was to put me in a position to become a successful voting rights litigator. I’ve begun doing my applications for next year, which reminded me of that original purpose.

It turns out that writing about my passions a year ago had a kind of ratcheting effect on me. It concretized my plans and allowed me to feel more stable in my professional interests. And though I drifted away, reading those essays pulled me back, because I genuinely felt, and continue to feel, that I had captured something about myself in those essays. Writing and thinking about those essays strengthens the likelihood that I follow this path; the ratchet cranks and constrains my future possibilities.

In any application, I think, you feign a kind of certainty and clarity of purpose. You are meant to be optimized, to be sure-footed. You tell stories about your past that lead in a Whiggish way to a present that, in turn, has set the stage for a bright future. You connect the dots in a way that can never be completely accurate, because history is always more complex than the stories we tell. Things have a kind of randomness to them: a friend tells you about an opportunity, there’s free pizza at some event, a mentor makes a stray comment that resonates with you. But you don’t say that. Every cover letter you write makes it sound like this job is the greatest opportunity in the world, even as you write twenty different letters.

Can this cynicism cohere with my earlier contention that my application had felt genuine? Yes. When Butterfield wrote about Whig histories, he emphasized that telling such stories of the past — what he referred to as “studying the past with reference to the present” — helps construct who we are.

Educated reminded me of Butterfield’s observation. Lurking underneath Westover’s narrative throughout the book is her systematic journaling, a kind of history-writing that, later, she will come to doubt. At the height of her mature crisis, she writes about a nagging self-doubt that leads her to question even her journals. They were scrutinizable records, concrete and contemporaneously written. Could they be false? In her state of delusion, she thought they must be. “That meant that more than my memory was in error,” she agonizes. “The delusion was deeper, in the core of my mind, which invented in the very moment of occurrence, then recorded the fiction.” Her reading of the past was not just colored by her present state of mind. It was fully coincident with her present understanding of herself.

The culmination of her growth is when she overcomes that doubt. It’s when she feels capable of finding her own truth separate from the truths she had been told her entire life, truths that made her dependent on others’ stories. She writes, “Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create.” It’s a different story. A different past. And a different present.

There’s a consciousness implicit in her conclusion. To self-create is to evaluate, to construct. One must actively narrate, to impose a structure on one’s past and present, to come to a sense of self. There’s going to be some trickery in that process. I don’t know myself well enough to be able to narrate a perfectly accurate story. But I’m telling this story about voting rights because I believe there is truth there. Because I want to live as if the story were true. And because the act of storytelling helps make that story true — because it cranks the ratchet. Better to believe the self-fulfilling prophecy than to surrender to the angst-inducing inertia of everyday life.

Calling the statistician from the Voting Section helped reinforce this story. It was a captivating conversation — it’s always a pleasure to hear how the work of the Section is going — but it also gave me a sense of optimism that there was something to my idea of writing about enforcement of the Voting Rights Act for my dissertation. It helped remind me of why I thought voting rights were so intellectually interesting and morally urgent. The ratchet cranked. Next, I talked to the head of my program yesterday to ask him whether the idea would be appropriate for a regulation dissertation. His answer? It was a “lovely” idea with many applications to regulatory studies. He was so encouraging, and had so many ideas on the regulatory literature’s intersection with voting rights enforcement, that I’m feeling profoundly optimistic about this project. Another crank of the ratchet. I just emailed a historian to talk about research questions, and I’m so eager to hear his advice when we talk tomorrow (“between stints of shoveling snow,” apparently).

Later on Thursday, after talking to the statistician, I called a friend from Pomona. We talked about her experiences with internships and her plans for the rest of college. We talked about the value of an education, and how she increasingly felt like it was primarily a credential rather than some more amorphous, lofty undertaking associated with searching for freedom or the Good Life. It’s a perspective I sympathize with, one that I feel like many of my current peers at LSE also share. It’s a sense that education is about developing skills and connections, to launch a career and to find stable employment. I was raised to believe this: education was the ticket to “success” in life, and that meant getting into a prestigious college in order to study computer science or engineering, which in turn would lead to a well-paying job at a technology firm. Economic stability was the priority. Reading books, thinking about politics, yearning for pure science — these were to be pastimes, gratuitous allowances, not livelihoods.

But the twin privileges of economic stability and supportive teachers allowed me to believe in a very different philosophy of education. Starting in elementary school, my teachers uniformly urged me to stay curious, to study what I wanted. By college, I had firmly settled on a different understanding of the purpose of education — that it did have to do with those loftier ideals of freedom and ethics, virtue and discipline, conscientiousness and consciousness. Education is about feeling capable of choosing a calling — about self-exploration and -creation that lead to refinement of one’s purposes. Education is about excellence in that calling — about fostering the best version of oneself toward that end. And education is about understanding the incompleteness and unevenness of that trajectory — about always searching, and reflecting, and learning more.

It was sad to hear from a friend that she had come to a much more utilitarian view of education despite being at Pomona, a place of relative opulence, where (one hopes) students have sufficient support to be able to focus on nurturing their curiosity. But it was also sad because it reminded me of times when I had inadvertently succumbed to that view by being transactional with educational opportunities. I had first met this friend by editing one of her essays. I remember being laser-focused on legal and argumentative technicalities in that piece. I spent a long time on those edits, and, at the time, I was proud of those edits. But I didn’t do much beyond those technical edits. I focused too much on the essay’s specific arguments rather than trying to incorporate broader lessons about how to do research or write persuasively. The experience was transactional. Lost was the creation of a collaborative relationship, the process of engaging in dialogue and discussion — the most meaningful and enjoyable parts of education.

Thinking about these conversations has reminded me of some of my deeply held convictions. Faith in liberal education and clarity in my aspirations help me feel rooted. But, perhaps paradoxically, education is meant to be a life-long, challenging process. In an interview (since you know me, it’s obviously from Talking Politics), Westover described how education ought to be dangerous — how it should never be sterilized or become a kind of factory, where the outcome is predetermined. In that sense, her story reflects education at its finest. Her remarkable life shows how dynamic a good education can be. It also demonstrates how uprooting a good education can be — by the end of her memoir, she had left rural Idaho and resided in two different Cambridges; she had become estranged from much of her childhood community; and she had, at long last, discarded a part of her past personality. As I continue to learn more — as I hope to maintain a challenging education — l wonder how, and whether, I’ll change.

* * * * *

Rose: I had a lot of fun calls this week: with old Pomona friends, with professors, with a Marshall friend, with my exercise buddies. It also snowed last Sunday in London! I got a picture of a few cute snowmen. I was hoping to go cycling with my LSE friend, but, alas, it was quite windy on Friday. We went for a short walk near King’s Cross instead.

Art on a Boat!

Graffiti near King's Cross

Snow!!

Architecture on Architecture

Cute Snowmen

Bud: I did some training sessions this week to start volunteering with a pro bono legal clinic that helps immigrants with deportation proceedings. I’m excited to get a side project that’s very different from everything else I do and that is focused on helping others. I think it’ll be good grounding outside of my arcane studies and academic research. Oh, and also, the next season of History of Ideas starts on Tuesday! I am very stoked.

Thorn: Like last week, this week has also been exhausting.

Gratitude: I’m thankful for the colleague from the Voting Section I called this week and his advice.

Future topics:

* Gamestop. I’m talking to my capital markets regulation professor this week to get her take on how to interpret what happened (is happening?).