Ben Storey (PhD'05, Social Thought) and Jenna Silber Storey (PhD'10, Social Thought) discuss their unique path from studying in the Committee on Social Thought to faculty roles at Furman University, to authoring 'Why We Are Restless" (Princeton UP, 2021) and their current roles as Senior Fellows at the American Enterprise Institute.
Ben Storey and Jenna Silber Storey serve as Senior Fellows at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), specializing in research surrounding liberal education, civic thought, and the university's relationship to society. Prior to joining AEI, Ben served as the Jane Gage Hipp Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Furman University, and Jenna served as an Assistant Professor in Politics and International Affairs at the Furman University. They are co-authors of Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment (Princeton University Press, 2021), and are working on their next book project, The Art of Choosing: How Liberal Education Should Prepare You for Life.
Ben Storey earned his PhD from the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought in 2005. He received his BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Jenna Silber Storey earned her PhD from the Committee on Social Thought in 2010, having previously received her BA from Boston University.
Kelly Pollock:
Hello. This is Dialogo, the podcast where we speak with alumni of the Division of the Social Sciences here at the University of Chicago to hear both about their time in our graduate programs and about their career and life trajectories. Today we are joined by two alumni of the John U. Neff Committee on Social Thought, Dr. Benjamin Storey and Dr. Jenna Silber Storey, both of whom are senior fellows in the social, cultural, and constitutional studies department at the American Enterprise Institute. I am Kelly Pollock. I am the Dean of Students in the Division of the Social Sciences.
Paul Poast:
And I'm Paul Poast, Deputy Dean in the Social Science Division here at the University of Chicago.
Kelly Pollock:
So Ben, Jenna, welcome to Dialogo.
Dr. Benjamin Storey:
Thanks so much, Kelly and Paul, for hosting us. It's always a pleasure to talk with people at our alma mater, to which we're grateful for so much.
Dr. Jenna Silber Storey:
Thank you very much for inviting us.
Kelly Pollock:
So I want to start by asking both of you, I don't think I fully know, I'm sure some listeners don't know what the American Enterprise Institute is, what it does. So I'm hoping you can tell us a little bit about what this organization is and then what you do there.
Dr. Benjamin Storey:
Great. Well, the American Enterprise Institute was a discovery for Jenna and I in the middle of our careers. We were teaching at a liberal arts college, Furman University, in my case, for 17 years. And we had a sabbatical coming up and we thought about applying to be in residence at various universities around the country, but then we thought we've spent several decades on campus now, and maybe it would be a way for us to learn a little something to situate ourselves in a different kind of environment.
In my case, I had been a political science professor for all that time, and I'd never really had a close look at politics. And we knew another University of Chicago Committee on Social Thought alumnus, Yuval Levin, who had founded a new division here at the American Enterprise Institute. And so we got in touch with him and sought to see if we could come spend our sabbatical here.
We got to AEI and we didn't quite know what to expect, but what we found was a really interesting context in which to do intellectual work. So there's a lot of variety as we've since learned in the way in which think tanks are organized. AEI has many features that are similar to universities. So for example, scholars here enjoy academic freedom. AEI does not take institutional positions.
And so in this sense, it really is like what it is sometimes described as, which is a university without students, a place in which really scholars are doing intellectual work that is the core of the institution. And so we also have at AEI a separation between the fundraising side of the institution and the scholarly side of the institution that really allows scholars the freedom to do their work without concern about day-to-day fundraising kinds of questions.
And so the AEI has just proved to be a really propitious environment in which for us to continue our own work, which is now focused on university reform.
Paul Poast:
Thank you, Ben, for giving that overview. I think that really helped a lot thinking about AEI as a university without the students. Turning over to Jenna, would you be able to share a little bit about your perspective on that transition? Because you also moved from the traditional university environment and then over to AEI and love to be able to hear about your perspective on that shift. And I'm especially curious about moving away. What are the pluses and what are the minuses of being at a university environment now without the students?
Dr. Jenna Silber Storey:
Yeah, thank you for the question. I think when AEI was first presented to us as a university without students, my immediate response was, "That sounds terrible. I love my students." They're some parts of the best parts of my day. I was joking a bit at that moment because we were already enjoying our time here. And I think, of course, the daily contact with students is something that I do miss.
We've made an effort to teach students through the AEI summer honors program, through the Hertog program in the summer, and now in a relationship with Johns Hopkins where we will have the opportunity to do some co-teaching. So it's really important for us to keep connected with students and to keep connected with university life in various ways.
But the advantage that immediately presented to us when we came to AEI and thinking about the topics that we want to think about, which all concern university matters, was that stepping away from any particular institutional context, any particular university actually allowed us to think about some of the topics that we wanted to talk about, like liberal education, civic education, university governance, in a way that didn't have our minds going toward, well, what will my colleague down the hall say to this or my dean won't allow that.
We actually didn't realize how much our thoughts about liberal education, which is what we came here to write about, were in fact affected by the context we were living in. Now that said, we would not have had the opportunity to develop these thoughts without that particular context. We were very grateful for the time we spent at Furman for our students, for our colleagues, and so forth.
But part of the argument we wanted to make when we came here and it's a book we're just about finishing up now was that liberal education had come to mean in the contemporary university context generally as a smattering of courses that didn't add up to any complete picture of what it meant to be an educated person.
And that we needed to look back to earlier conceptions of liberal education, particularly those that focused on the education of young people to be capable of self-government, both personally and in a collective sense, to try to think about how our contemporary university context could better achieve that end. We were just writing that. We thought we were on sabbatical when we were writing that, perfectly natural thing to do, but AI seemed like a really interesting kind of way to step away from institutional context to do it.
And I think the other thing that attracted us was that the president, Robert Doerr, immediately made us feel welcome and said that he really wanted people to come to AI to think about culture who are not going to get enmeshed in culture war. So whether that's the culture of the university or the culture of journalism or the culture of Congress or what have you, he was really looking for scholars who could understand the internal cultures of these different institutions without just shooting across the barricades.
And I think that is the kind of niche we've tried to carve out for ourselves and now for the others. We've gathered a number of scholars in our center that are occupying the same ground, people that have lived experience in the university that love it, that know it from the inside, that know what it's like to be on a faculty hiring committee and so forth, and that can look at these practices with a sense of how they might be adjusted to better achieve the fundamental aims of the university and to restore public trust and are not looking to just come in and obliterate what's going on there or something like that.
Kelly Pollock:
Another question that listeners may have is what the heck is social thought and what is the committee on social thought? What does it mean to get a PhD in social thought? And so I think from the kinds of things you're describing about the things you study, the way you study is starting to answer that question, but maybe we can step back and answer it from a sort of more fundamental kind of way. What was it that you did in your doctoral program? How did it teach you to learn and to think in some of these ways?
Dr. Benjamin Storey:
A Committee on Social Thought is a program in philosophy and theology, history and social theory and imaginative literature. That is, those are the three different areas that govern the definitive Committee on Social Thought experience of the fundamentals exam. And so Jenna and I both came out of our undergraduate experiences and in different ways interested in thinking about the very capacious kinds of questions that could be raised in a program in which one touched upon all of those different fields.
And so on the one hand, you could say there's very little vet that is... The committee is very wide-ranging to say the very least, but at the same time, its students bear a certain stamp that is very distinctive. The way that I would describe it is that people are extraordinarily good at keeping their academic work and their human and personal concerns closely linked to one another.
And so if you talk to a committee on social thought student, whether they're working on the sociology of Max Weber or the historical approach of Herodotus or whatever it is among the classic text that tend to be the focus of Committee on Social Thought students' studies, those things are just very immediate questions for them. There's none of the detachment and ironic distance that often characterizes the academic world.
And so in our post-committee academic careers, we found that we're able to fall back into conversation with fellow committee students wherever we find them out there on the conference circuit or in the broader world because of this kind of shared approach of earnestness about the importance of the kinds of things that we're studying and the way in which they might affect the questions of how we live right now. That'd be my take on what the committee was for us. I don't know if Jenna wants to... I'm sure she's got her own version of this.
Dr. Jenna Silber Storey:
I'll just say a little something to piggyback off of that, which is that I think the fundamentals exam was what we all had in common. The fundamentals exam is our master's exam. Ben listed all of the topics that you needed to cover. You were supposed to pick about 15 books that fit under those topics and you'd spend the first couple years studying those books. So a major question, like a get to know you question for a social thought student was, what books are on your exam?
That was definitive of who you were. You were also supposed to be addressing a question or set of questions through those books. So what's the question that motivates you and what do you think you need to read to understand that question was, like Ben was saying, not only something you were studying, but something that was definitive of yourself and the way you were going to be in the world.
So I think one consequence of that is that the marrying of the personal perspective with the academic quest is that many social thought students are taught to and are able to speak in ways ordinary people can understand. So to bring the knowledge they've learned through their studies, these often painstaking studies of these old texts to illuminate contemporary questions.
I think this is really well done now and expressed through The Point Magazine, which didn't exist when we were there, but it was really satisfying to see that publication come out because I think that expresses a lot of what the Committee on Social Thought is about. But you also see a lot of people like Yuval Levin and others writing crossover books or trade books because they're able to bring knowledge to the public in that way.
Interestingly, when we went back by invitation to look at John Neff's writings only way long after we graduated, just a few years ago on the occasion of Robert Pippin's retirement from the position of chair of social thought, we saw that a lot of the things that John Neff was saying a social thought student should be able to do were things that we somehow imbibed through the practices.
I don't think anyone ever said this to us. And I think if someone put some of these claims on the table, there'd be tons of disagreement about them. But one of the things he did indicate in those early outlines for the committee was that their graduates should be able to speak to the public and to bring their studies to eliminate contemporary questions.
Paul Poast:
So I'm not going to ask the perhaps obvious and maybe unfair question of what was your list? And to ask you to draw the way back. However, I am curious, and I'm sure listeners would be curious too. So obviously you had this list. As you said, each of you had 15 books on it. But given that where you are now, is there at least one of those books that you're like, "Yeah, I keep referring back to that?"
Because there's going to be some that you're like, "Yes, I studied it at this time and that was fine," but there's really one or maybe two of those books on the list that it's like, "No, that's really a book that has stayed with me and I continue to reference." I'd be very curious to hear from each of you on that.
Dr. Benjamin Storey:
Well, sure. So the most important book on my list was Michel de Montaigne's Essays, which turned out to be the subject of my dissertation. I did not come to Chicago with any intention of studying French things. I didn't know any French when I got to Chicago. But lo and behold, in my first year of graduate school, Robert Pippin sent around an email that said, "Hey, this great French scholar is going to come over here and teach a course on Montaigne's Essays."
And he said, "It's a fundamentals exam favorite." And I thought, "Hmm, I wonder what that's all about." And so during spring break, I went to the Seminary Co-op bookstore and I purchased a copy of The Essays and I started digging in. I thought this was really interesting. And lo and behold, the person who showed up to teach that class was a really extraordinary French polymath named Marc Fumaroli.
And Marc Fumaroli was a member of the Collège de France and the Académie Française and also somebody who was... He was a terrific actually art historian in addition to the other things that he did, was the president of the Friends of the Louvre and actually bought paintings for the Louvre in that capacity, and just introduced me to a kind of style and range of European learning that I had never previously encountered.
And he taught this absolutely fascinating class on The Essays that eventually inspired me to learn French, go to France, write a dissertation on that subject. And eventually Jen and I wrote a book together that begins with Montaigne and continues through the whole tradition of the French Moralist. And one more thing I'll say about Montaigne is that Montaigne is an author of astonishing breadth.
People say about Montaigne, there's a famous quotation about Montaigne that says, "What doesn't Montaigne say?" The Essay is like a thousand pages long, depending on the other version that you use of it. Montaigne at one point says, "Sometimes I contradict myself, but I don't contradict the truth." So he really ranges around and he touches on everything.
And that was a big part of the approach to academic study that seemed to us characteristic of the committee, which was that the committee, although it did lend students a certain stamp that Jen and I tried to describe a little bit earlier, there was no policing of disciplinary boundaries that went on in the committee.
That one just was ready to assume, "Hmm, maybe political questions and philosophic questions and religious questions and political questions, maybe all these different kinds of questions actually have deep intrinsic links." And that is a thought that I think has followed us through all of our subsequent work and including the work that we're doing now at the American Enterprise Institute.
Dr. Jenna Silber Storey:
I think the two books that have stuck with me as most important from my list are John Milton's Paradise Lost and Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan. I had read those as an undergraduate, had at least written some papers. I think they factored in my senior thesis. And I came to the committee with the intention of trying to explore the possibilities for religious life and modernity because I think... That was the question that really preoccupied me at the time.
Some might say modernity edges out religious life, but then you have the example of Milton and his wonderful epic poem, Paradise Lost. I was really interested at the time about how that compared to Dante's view of Christianity and so forth. So I was really interested in early modernity. I actually started doing a joint degree with history in part to explore these questions.
And I think along with the question of where religion fits into our vision of life insofar as it's constructed by our political environments came to me also the epistemological questions. So I was really fascinated with Hobbes' chart of the organization of knowledge and how he was trying to shift medieval ways of thinking to his version of how we should reorganize the university. And you can see this sticks with us to this moment.
Kelly Pollock:
Ben mentioned this book that you co-wrote about restlessness and using some of these French philosophers. I would love to hear both a little bit about the book and this connects with this idea that you've mentioned a few times about using this old scholarship to inform the current day and the things that are maybe compelling to us right now, but I also want to hear just a little bit about what it's like to write a book with someone you're married to.
Dr. Jenna Silber Storey:
I was going to say, if you'd like to talk about... You can go ahead and talk about the book. It starts with Montaigne, which is really Ben's topic. I've done a lot of work on Tocqueville. And we kind of came at this from different ends of the book. The book has four chapters, one on Montaigne, one on Blaise Pascal, one on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and then the final one on Alexis de Tocqueville. So I'll let Ben talk a bit about the book, and then maybe I'll talk about working together.
Dr. Benjamin Storey:
One of the wonderful things about the University of Chicago is that unlike a lot of R1 universities, the teachers were really serious about the teaching. Our teachers, they paid... Our most important teachers in some ways were Leon and Amy Kass, and Leon was particularly important to me. And something that one of their other students said on the occasion of Amy Kass' death a few years ago was that the Kass' took their students more seriously than those students took themselves.
And that was extraordinarily true in the case of my encounters with Leon, is that he took me as if I meant what I said, and then he made me think about what it would mean to mean what I said. And that involved me thinking through what I was saying to a greater extent that I otherwise might've been inclined to do. On the one hand, the University of Chicago modeled this great seriousness about teaching and about students. And on the other hand, it modeled this great seriousness about texts.
And so that approach is the approach that came with us when we went off to Furman to do our teaching work. And so we would just go back and forth between the things that we were reading and the students that we were talking with every day and who became really a very important part of our lives while we were at Furman. And we started to make some connections between the things that we were seeing in our students and the things that we were seeing in the books that we're reading all the time.
One of the most important connections for us concerned this word restless. That is the most important word in the title of that book. Alexis de Tocqueville has this wonderful chapter of Democracy in America called Why Americans are So Restless in the Midst of Their Prosperity, in which he describes, as many of your listeners will know, that here's this country where people are freer and more prosperous than basically in any other political project that human beings have ever created before.
At least in larger numbers, they enjoy those kinds of goods. And nonetheless, they don't seem to be able to sit still and enjoy themselves. They tend to jump from one thing to the next. And so they'll start off a career in business, and then they'll drop that and do some farming, and then they'll move on from there to get into politics. One thing after another. They cannot sit still. And it makes them unhappy is the thing that Tocqueville notices about this.
And this is a kind of haunting observation that seems to me to retain its relevance ever since the 19th century. And in particular, we saw this in our undergraduate students. That is we are at this beautiful, leafy, little liberal arts college. It was a really nice place to spend one's day. And we looked at the kind of lives that our students were living and they were running around from one extracurricular activity to another extracurricular activity. Nobody seemed to be satisfied with one major.
They had to have two majors and three majors. They couldn't just study abroad in one country. They had to study abroad in several different countries. They couldn't just have one summer internship. They had to have several of those. And it was driving them a little bit nuts. And so we thought there are many different explanations for a phenomenon like that, and we think there are a lot of different true explanations of phenomenon like that. We were interested in exploring it in a way that we could understand it, which was by doing something of a philosophic history.
And so we traced this back to some of the arguments made by Michel de Montaigne, the first author that we use in this book, who, to put the argument very briefly, looked at this argument that human beings have been having about the question of the highest good. What makes a human being really happy? He looked at that in the context of his own time, which was the time of religious war that was just tearing France apart. And he thought, "What would it be like if we just dropped that question?"
If instead of asking what the highest good is, just saying, "Look, there are lots of good things in human life. Make yourself happy by taking a little bit of this and a little bit of that." And so nothing too much, the old motto of moderation, but nothing too little. Montaigne adds to this. And this made a lot of sense in his context as a way of tamping down the intensity of the intellectual conflicts behind the religious wars.
In our own context, it seemed to us to be something that was worth maybe reconsidering because we saw it as bound up with certain kinds of discontent that we detected among our students.
Dr. Jenna Silber Storey:
And so in the book, we tried to focus on the costs that our students were suffering for not being disposed by the educational plan that was set before them in the college. And certainly Furman is not unique in this regard. This is the general elective system that is almost ubiquitous. The cost of asking people to dabble in a bunch of different things and never really asking them to put one thing over the other.
In other words, the cost of not focusing on some kind of highest good or orienting endeavor. So I think at the end of that book and in some articles we wrote just after that book, we talked about the possibility of orienting your studies around a question very similar to what the Fundamentals Program, which is an undergraduate program that is somewhat aligned with the Committee on Social Thought at the U of C, which asks its students upon application to write about a question.
I think this is taken very seriously. So the way we interpreted it at the end of this book is we challenge our students to ask, what is the question of your life? What are you trying to answer through your studies, through your internships, through your friendships? What is it you're trying to get clearer about? Can you use your liberal education to launch yourself on a more purpose of quest to discover something that you think is so important that you will orient your activities around that?
Paul Poast:
So thank you for sharing about the book, and it's making me want to go pick it up. And in fact, I'm wondering when there's going to be a trade press version of it, because I could see that being the type of topic that is very much on the forefront of people's minds in terms of restlessness, because you do, you see that all over society.
We absolutely see it here at U Chicago. What you were just describing about the Furman student, we see that with the U Chicago students absolutely. So thank you for sharing that. Before we move on, I do want to go back and make sure we pick up on a very important question, which was what was it like to write that book together?
Dr. Jenna Silber Storey:
Thank you for returning to that. So the book was the first really long form thing that we wrote together. Prior to that, we'd done a few shorter things. But I'd say we really perfected the ability to write together by working hard on that book. And it wasn't easy at the beginning, definitely some frustrating moments, but we learned to really work together. And I'd say and its most thrilling.
It was really the experience of thinking with another person where we'd be standing there on the very last draft and trying to perfect the sentences and we'd literally almost seem to have the same thought, and we'd be writing together almost word after word. Our oldest daughter who observed this process at about age 14 or so used to complain that we had unitary mind disorder.
In other words, if you ask mom something, she's going to say pretty much the exact same thing as if you asked dad. I think our youngest child, who was, I don't know, maybe six or seven at the time, actually perceived some of the frustration that we had fighting over things like commas and where to put the semicolon, and whether this should be one sentence or two, because we both care a lot about style and about the experience of the reader.
And so I think he would perceive mom and dad are always fighting. Yeah, we're fighting over whether there should be a comma there or not, but our older daughter saw that we were really thinking together about these problems that we both found to be so important to figure out both for the sake of our students and for the sake of our children and for the sake of for our own sakes.
Paul Poast:
And that seems to lead naturally into obviously the work that you're now doing and the project that you're currently writing. And so that's something that I think we definitely don't want to end this conversation without hearing more about this current project, which my understanding is, though I know these things are always subject to change when you're in the midst of working on it, but I believe you're working on a project right now of the art of choosing how liberal education should prepare you for life.
And this seems like it's a very natural extension of exactly what you were just talking about, but I would love to hear and I think listeners would really like to hear about that project, especially because this also seems like it's getting into a topic that is in many ways, if you will, a hot topic right now, like what is the purpose of liberal arts education or really higher education in general?
Dr. Jenna Silber Storey:
You made a remark a bit earlier about our debates about liberal education really being debates about what it means to be an educated person, and I think that's exactly right. And that's the kind of conversation we're trying to speak into with this book.
A lot of the times when you see liberal education glossed in, say, mission statements, you see liberal education almost equated with something like critical thinking, which can mean a lot of different things, but often it means taking apart what's given to you and trying to analyze it, testing things against evidence and so forth, or even taking a critical stance on what you've encountering or what you've inherited.
I think all of those things can be useful parts of what it means to be an educated person, but we've lost a bit of the sense of what makes the entirety of a liberally educated person, which is I think in older times often meant a person who's capable of self-governance, as I was saying earlier, capable of dealing competently in the world, both conducting their own lives well and also working well with others in the experience of collective self-government.
The book we're writing right now, it really turned into a book that one of our students called a memoirgument. In other words, it's a combination between an argument about what liberal education should be and also a reflection on how what our teachers gave us helped us or tried to help us achieve some of those ends. And so I'll just make one or two remarks about it and then see what Ben wants to add.
But we spent a lot of time thinking about how the fundamental activities that we engaged in at the University of Chicago, reading and conversing, might actually help prepare someone to do practical things. So not just to interpret a book and not just to have a really satisfying conversation, we think those things are very important, but actually might help one learn how to make their way in the world.
So we write about how reading a book carefully can actually help you learn to read a soul, another person. So if you think about the experience of reading literature and really taking the depiction of characters seriously and how they're interacting, you can see how this could help you learn to read the likely trajectories of the people that you're engaged with.
Learning a book can also help you learn to read a room, to understand a situation, not just in its particularity and just cause and effect kind of way, but to try to look at a situation before you, whether that be something facing your workplace or your family or your local government, in a really comprehensive way.
Dr. Benjamin Storey:
I've been thinking a lot lately about the date 1636. 1636 is the year of the founding of Harvard. And what's really interesting about that date is that these English settlers just arrived on this continent, barely having built their houses and their farms, sought to build a college. In other words, and they sought to do that in time to educate the first generation of children born to them here. And that's really extraordinary.
I think one of the things that it indicates is that America has been in the liberal education business since before America was America. And you really can't understand this country apart from it's the things that its colleges and universities give to it, that is America has been often described as a land of colleges. And I don't think we could be the best of what we are without the contributions of those institutions of higher education.
Just to give you a sense of this, if you think about the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, these documents that attract, on the one hand, so much controversy, but on the other hand, so much reverence, they're learned documents. There's nothing whatsoever intuitive about the American Constitution. You wouldn't govern this way if you were just trying to go from a vague notion of what seems fair.
It's very complicated. It took a learned people to decide to govern themselves in that manner. And so in this sense, we think the contributions of higher education to our entire project of self-government are really important. And it seems to us in part important to write this book now from where we are. Because if you think about it right now, the landscape of higher education is divided into, on the one hand, defenders of higher education, and on the other hand, critics of higher education.
And that divide unfortunately well onto the basic American political distinction between left and right. Jenna and I are at a center right think tank. We are people who locate ourselves on the right politically, but we are people who really believe in our institutions of liberal education and what those institutions can do for American young people and for the American Political Project more broadly. And so we wanted to write an account of what we thought liberal education did for us and what we thought it can do for young people going forward.
Kelly Pollock:
This has been obviously a very intellectual discussion, which makes sense for people who were in the Committee on Social Thought and doing the kind of work that you do, but I do want to make sure to ask what sorts of things you did when you were here at the University of Chicago for fun.
Dr. Jenna Silber Storey:
We had conversations. Basically that's it. I do remember making friends with a grad student from Notre Dame at some point who talked about the card game she would play, and I was utterly puzzled. I'm like, "We don't do anything like this." But I'll have to say, the conversations were really, really fruitful, not only in terms of intellectual life, but as you may know, we met at the Committee on Social Thought.
My husband and I met at the Committee on Social Thought. And I think we met in Robert Pippin's apartment during one of the sherry hours for our department. And what really got us together was an argument about who was a better thinker, Aristotle or Weber. At the time, I took the side of Max Weber and we had a pretty fierce argument one night. The next day I was in the computer lab typing up a paper, which we had this nice common computer lab back then, typing up a paper about Max Weber.
And I thought I had a good rejoinder to Ben's great last point from the previous evening. And lo and behold, he walks in about a minute after I had this great thought. And so I jumped out of my chair and said, "We have to talk." Ben was smooth enough to say, "I don't have time right now, but if you want to go to dinner, I'm happy, happy to continue this conversation."
And I was so distracted by the effort to win this argument, I hadn't really realized what I got myself into. And so yeah, that's really largely what we did, but it was a lot of fun and not only met my husband that way, but a lot of good friends, including Yuval who we work with now, and a lot of others who I keep in touch with.
Dr. Benjamin Storey:
I managed to parlay that dinner conversation about Weber and Aristotle into a... She was going to Boston for the summer, and I managed to ask her to give me a ride to Boston. And so managed to get 20 hours in the car with Jenna as a captive audience by means of which to continue this conversation, which was really rooted... My whole approach to courtship was deeply rooted in my reading of Plato's Phaedrus, which was all about how conversation is really the medium of love. I was hoping that I could prove that to be true.
Kelly Pollock:
I think you've got another book coming, using Plato to pick up women.
Dr. Benjamin Storey:
Yes. Right, right, right. That's right.
Paul Poast:
I will just say, that was well played, Ben. Well done.
Dr. Benjamin Storey:
Look, it's the one really smooth move I've executed in my life and I'm sticking with it. But the other part of our Chicago life that was really important to us, I had a dear friend at the University of Chicago named Jonathan Hand, and Jonathan was an older graduate student. Before my preoccupation with Jenna came to take up most of my time, Jonathan and I would have these long brunches at Salonica, our favorite local greasy spoon.
And by long brunches, he and I would sit for five, seven hours together, and he was older. He was wiser. He had read much more than I had. And I got as much of my education from these conversations with another graduate student as I did from the work that my wonderful professors put me through. And so I think that point is just worth underlining because I think that is a thing that is hard for today's generation of students to come by because they feel so pressured to spend so much of their time in some kind of obviously productive way.
What Jonathan and I were doing in those conversations was not obviously productive, most people would've described it as a waste of time, but I have been living off the capital of those conversations for 25 years. Chicago just made it seem natural, and it's one of the things for which I'm most grateful.
Dr. Jenna Silber Storey:
May I say one more thing? I know, because Ben had brought up the way that many graduate students today are pressured to think about professional deadlines, and they have to have articles out early in their grad career and so forth. And I understand that there are just external things that are weighing on them and causing them to think this way.
But a few years ago, I was invited back to be an alumni in residence at the University of Chicago, and a whole number of us who were invited that year came together I think in September. And we were asked by the career services department, I think, to give advice to the grad student students assembled about our career trajectories. And I found out over the course of the day that all of us were totally puzzled why we were asked to come back and talk about our career trajectories, because we all thought they were just utterly idiosyncratic.
We had no career trajectory to speak of, and we had no idea how we were supposed to be serving as role models. But what came out in the course of the actual presentations was that very few of us had ever actually applied for an existing job. And we worked in many different fields by the end of this, but I think seven out of the nine of us had never, ever applied for an existing job.
Instead, we had looked out into the world and to the various institutions and thought, "What would I like to do here and where might I be needed?" And then just wrote to the people heading up these institutions and asked them if we might work there. So there was a fellow alum in residence who was an anthropologist who wrote to the head of the Bank of London and said, "You know what? I've studied the anthropology of finance and people working in finance and I think you need me." And he was hired there.
I also just was an adjunct at Furman University for quite some time since Ben had the tenure track job, made a place for myself there and just said to the dean one day, "I think I belong here," created a tenure track job for me. This is possible. It is not a path that we can set out as something certain, but I think it is actually made possible or more plausible by the way that Chicago had typically approached education, which is find something you deeply believe needs to be studied, needs to be thought about, and dedicate your life to doing that.
And if it's really a serious question and you carve out a serious study of that question, someone is going to find it needful and you will find a satisfying place in the world. You might not know where, but you will find it.
Dr. Benjamin Storey:
Let me just add that Jenna is inspiring more thoughts as she often does. On this point, there was this remarkable conversation that the two of us have remembered ever since that happened. It was a brown bag lunch that the Committee on Social Though hosted for the graduate students. And I believe it was Jamie Redfield, who was this legendary University of Chicago classicist, who was leading the discussion that day.
He said this thing that was just so counterintuitive, so against the grain for graduate students. He said to us that you shouldn't publish a book before you're 40. And we listened to this and we thought, "But, but, but, but I'm going to melt. I'm going to die. Nobody's ever going to employ me if I listen to this advice." But what he was saying was if you really care about what you study and you're studying these kinds of humanistic things, it takes a long time to mature in these areas.
You want to do something that is really good. And so you want to give yourself the necessary period of development that it takes to actually do really excellent and serious work in this regard. And lo and behold, we didn't publish a book until we were over 40 and we didn't die. So it is, again, a testimony to the kind of seriousness that our University of Chicago teachers asked of us and that we have just treasured ever since.
Kelly Pollock:
I'm going to use that as my excuse for why I haven't published a book yet.
Dr. Benjamin Storey:
I used it for a very long time.
Kelly Pollock:
Now that people have heard from you, I think a lot of them would probably love to be able to learn more about what you're doing and find your book. Could you point them maybe toward your website and your book?
Dr. Benjamin Storey:
Sure. So you can find our website is the Center for the Future of the American University here at AEI. And I have to mention one more thing about that, which is that you'll notice that it begins with a little illustration. That illustration is the frontispiece from The Encyclopédie of Diderot & d'Alembert, which is a map of the system of human knowledge.
And that image was on the cover of the brochure of the Committee on Social Thought when the two of us applied. And so those threads have played out in our lives ever since. And our book, Why We Are Restless, from Princeton University Press can be found on Amazon and lovely brick and mortar booksellers everywhere like the Seminary Co-op.
Kelly Pollock:
Excellent. Well, Ben and Jenna, thank you so much for joining us. This has been such a fun and really interesting conversation, and we're so grateful that you spent time with us today.
Dr. Jenna Silber Storey:
Yeah. Thank you for having us. This has been a great conversation for us too. It's terrific to take a little tour back through the U of C with you two.
Dr. Benjamin Storey:
Thanks to you both.