What the best professors do — and what the best-educated students will look like in 10 years

On the occasion of the U.S. Professor of the Year awards, I’m thinking about my professors back at Northwestern University and the l’universita di Bologna. I did not have one professor who dominates my recollection of my academic development but that may be because I had so many I found brilliant and inspiring. With the benefit of 20 years of retrospection, I probably got the most out of those courses that were off-center from my studies and which I haven’t much studied since college. These did as much to open up my mind as anything else.

It started with a History of Philosophy class my first quarter as a freshman student where a Greek professor with thickly-accented English introduced me to the foundations of western thought, including Plato & Aristotle. 

My second year, it was Professor Johnny Payne in a fiction writing class who stands out. I was obsessed with short stories at the time. I would go to the library and instead of studying or reading whatever I was supposed to for my classes, I’d inhale the short fiction of writers like Raymond Carver and Rick Bass. I read a decade of “Best American Short Story” compilations and O’Henry Prize winners and then became absorbed by brilliant absurdist writers like John Irving and John Kennedy Toole. I really got into southern fiction, particularly that from my home state of West Virginia. Of course one of the things I learned from Professor Payne’s class was that I was not the next Hemingway or Carver. Professor Payne indulged me, though, and allowed me to be a very enthusiastic, utterly mediocre writer of short fiction 

My third year of college, I studied at the University of Bologna, Europe’s oldest university. There, I learned Italian by learning its poetry (and I still prefer Italian poetry to English and American poetry). I had so little money that when I bought a book I would buy one that had as many pages as possible so that I could get the most pages for my money (it was then that I read John Steinbeck’s longer works). I had a terrific Marxist professor of Russian history who disagreed with me about just about everything but who put so much of his time into my development that though we disagreed about my conclusions (I was and remain a capitalist) he awarded me the highest score with honors. He set a wonderful example for demonstrating how people can disagree without being disagreeable and I learned as much from him as I did from anyone that year, during which I was otherwise absorbed studying medieval European history.

My final year of college, my attention turned to America’s cities and its poverty. I took a great class on the economics of state and local government and one on the sociology of the inner-city where read deeply moving works by writers like Alex Kotlowitz and Jonathan Kozol that put me on my path to my first job after college as an inner-city school teacher.

My university career was intellectually omnivorous. The best professors were discovered by serendipity instead of specialization. It was a wonderful four years (punctuated by having a lot of fun, for which I’m thankful that Facebook did not exist at the time). 

As a father of three young children, I hope they get to enjoy the kind of intellectual abandon I had at college. When you read my book The Industries of the Future (which of course you will do after pre-ordering it here :)) you will see that I advocate for interdisciplinary thinking.

I think that while we need specialization, the breakthrough thinkers and leaders of the future will be able to combine an understanding of things that are technical (engineering, science, economics, math) with domains in the humanities (political science, history, sociology, psychology). The best-educated students 10 years from now will be polymaths — drawing from wildly different academic areas and bringing them together to imagine and invent the industries of the future.

There needs to be a more interdisciplinary approach in education that merges the sciences and the humanities in a way that prepares kids for a world where those silos are already beginning to be broken down.

Alec Ross is the author of The Industries of the Future, to be released in February by Simon & Schuster.