UPDATE: Dr. Westover spoke at Stanford, addressing student questions on how:
Poverty undermines one’s ability to focus on learning. Always having to worry about money and work multiple jobs is a burden many of our students understand.
You should study something for yourself, not just to be useful to an employer. This imperative makes personal and spiritual sense. But let’s not under value skill learning in college, skills not only put food on the table, but learning them can also inspire intellectual inquiry.
To value others. BYU had one thing going for it that secular institutions lack: An acceptance of the intrinsic worth of every campus community member. If one sees every ideological opponent as still a “child of G-d” then no matter how one disagrees, one values that person. How can secular campuses better value all community members?
Late in Educated, Tara Westover’s harrowing memoir about growing up in a reclusive Mormon survivalist family in rural Idaho, she listened to Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” for the first time. She heard in his lyrics a theme song for her own education:
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; None but ourselves can free our minds.
Marley’s call to mental self-liberation spoke to Westover in her remarkable path from an Idaho family junkyard, where her parents kept her out of school and away from doctors, to Cambridge University.
The youngest of 7 children, one of two girls, she had spent her childhood pulling copper from radiators, surviving several bloody accidents, enduring brutal physical and mental abuse from an older brother. All the while, she had imagined her future as no different from that of her passive, perpetually apologizing mother, constrained to kitchen work and motherhood by 18. That is, if she survived the impending apocalypse of Y2K or a government attack, for which her family fervently prepared.
Always somewhat at odds with her family’s world, she knew no other until a brother who attended college encouraged to her to study for the ACT and gain access to Brigham Young University. At BYU, she learned history and found mentorship that brought her to Cambridge. In that august British institution, she studied John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, and contemplated life as an educated woman.
Moved by the Bob Marley song, she consulted Wikipedia and learned of Marley’s untimely death from cancer because he had refused doctors’ recommendation to amputate his toe. Reflecting on Marley’s choice of his Rastafarian belief in bodily wholeness over a surgical intervention, a vision of evil, skeletal medical establishment physicians reaching their bony fingers out to snatch Marley’s toe disrupted her reverie.
Then, Westover caught herself. Her anti-modernist family had raised her to fear doctors, and in this moment, where she savored Bob Marley’s call to free one’s own mind, she realized she’d not yet liberated herself from her family’s hostility to science. Immediately, she called the university clinic and requested all her vaccinations. Now she had become the first in her family to be vaccinated as well as educated.
Getting vaxed is no small obstacle for Americans. But what is the price of education? There are some families who remain unable hear their educated children, and all the worse for ones like Dr. Westover, whose family rejected her when she returned to support a sister who’d also revealed her abuse to her. Cast out, accused of possession by demonic forces, Dr. Westover adopted a chosen family. But not all returns prove as devastating as hers. While education may precipitate confrontation with familial belief and heritage, the outcome remains unwritten. Some will integrate their worlds, others not.
Incoming first-year and new transfer students reading Educated as part of Stanford’s Three Books Program were riveted, especially those students, who are first-gens, the first in their family to attend college, like Westover. One opened the conversation with a mixture of awe and confusion:
“That’s great that she got vaxed. I can’t my family to do this. But is she identifying with Marley or criticizing him?”
Others responded:
“Maybe both?”
“Can a white Christian woman identify with a Rastafarian?"
“But I heard there were a lot of reasons Marley didn’t get his toe amputated. Religion is just one. Not being able to play soccer or dance on stage were other reasons, so he chose something less invasive.”
The conversation revolved around faith, family, and education, then moved back to Westover, why Stanford chose this book for incoming students, and why in particular had our freshman liberal education program “Education as Self-Fashioning” invited her to speak to us. Many admired her journey and saw themselves in it:
“For 18 years I had deep faith, not that I never questioned stuff my family told me, but now my world is a bit shook.”
Some related not on religious terms, but cultural ones. Their families had ideas about right majors in college and right life paths, but they remained unconvinced. A few registered their skepticism about the book’s premise:
“So, we’re reading this book to show us how if you’re poor, uneducated, and religious, you erase your origins when you get to college?”
Trying to answer these questions, my students and I decided to write Dr. Westover and elaborate their questions in the context of the liberal education they are about to receive at one of the world’s most elite universities.
Introducing the students and myself, I explained to Dr. Westover, that Educated meant a lot to me especially having taught early in my career at the University of Utah, where my students had been Latter-Day Saints (LDS) returned missionaries. Many were first-gen, low-income students, some already parents, who impressively managed their education, full-time work life, and family. Profoundly moved by my Utah students, I have always bridled at one of the dominant conceits of higher education, namely that the university brings students out of the “darkness” of family life and faith, Plato’s cave as it were, into the “light” of educated understanding.
If my Plato analogy sounds over-wrought, consider what many of us at Stanford used to hear from the late, great political philosopher Richard Rorty:
“Our students come to college as right wing, religious dogmatists, and it our job to make them good, secular, liberal citizens.”
As much as I admired Rorty, I knew, especially after teaching in Utah, that making “good, secular, liberal citizens” was not my calling. Rather, it made more personal and moral sense to me to pursue the Socratic goal of teaching students to lead the “examined life” and learn how to bring others into conversation. I asked my students to respond to Rorty:
Are secularization and liberalization the goals of university education?
They took the rest of the class time with this question. What was this “light” anyway that they were supposed to step out into? Were its sources from Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, and W.E.B DuBois? Foucault’s Discipline and Punish? That last one is pretty dark.
Most students believe whatever perspectives they encounter in higher education, they are free to weigh these in the context of their own lives. A truly liberal education accomplishes just that, they remind me: allowing people to decide for themselves with the full powers of their adult human faculties. They point to John Stuart Mill in On Liberty:
“[I]t is the privilege and proper condition of a human being, arrived at the maturity of his faculties, to use, and interpret experience in his own way.”
Pausing here on JS Mill, and still full of questions about how an educated person differently experiences life, race, cultural belonging, and patriotism, the students addressed Dr. Westover:
Stanford students come from all over the world and North America with one thing in common—we seek a sense of belonging in the university and the world beyond. Low-income, first gen students, like you, we arrive with few resources, a strong imposter complex, and a crazy AF family home life that threatens to undermine our sense of self and work. We read every word in your book with a mixture of wonder, horror, and hope. We have A LOT OF QUESTIONS, not in the least how to break a TV addiction when stuck in spiraling family drama and self-doubt!
Here are some:
1. How would you respond to Richard Rorty’s remark about the purpose of the university and how does it relate to your story?
2. Although you consider yourself secular now, are there unique communities, Mormon and otherwise, to which you feel belonging? If so, how do you participate?
3. As a student of JS Mill, are you a free speech absolutist like he was?
4. We are Brown and Black, and wonder about Malcolm X’s comment in the “Ballot or the Bullet” where he said, “Everything that came out of Europe, every blue-eyed thing, is already an American,” Many of us feel like Malcolm X did. We don’t feel America ever accepted us, though some of us have been here 400 years. We wish there was an America we wanted to belong to and be proud of. Is there an America you feel positive about and want to belong to?
None of us could guess Dr. Westover’s answers to these questions, but we were glad to debate them ourselves and look forward to her talk in October.
Most striking to me about these incoming student conversations is their breadth of positions. Some believe secularization is the only way to build an inclusive world, especially for LGBTQ+ people. Others, some of whom who belong to both queer and religious communities, disagree. Some are free-speech absolutists, others not. Some long for a nation, of which they could be proud, others believe they have one that just needs work, still others believe the concept of nationhood is wholly outmoded.
Having closely read Westover’s memoir, they feel hope at overcoming college imposter syndrome and seek new ways to negotiate their families and heritage. Keen to hear what their fellow incoming classmates of Stanford 2025 say about this book, they eagerly anticipate joining conversations and finding their own positions. All wonder what story they will tell about their own education.