One thing that practically every pundit, philosopher, author, activist, and business success story agrees on is “the value of a good education.” For Bill Gates (dropped out of Harvard), it’s all about jobs: “Unemployment rates among Americans who never went to college are about double that of those who have a postsecondary eduction.” Robert Frost (dropped out of Dartmouth) was more interested in the deliberate approach you could learn in university: “College is a refuge from hasty judgment.” Colleges and universities didn’t exist in Aristotle’s day, so he never actually attended at all. Nevertheless, he agreed that “Education is the best provision for life’s journey.”
Benjamin Franklin is one of these people too. He dropped out of school when he was just ten years old, and ran away from his apprenticeship a few years later, but told everybody else “An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.” On the other hand, we might want to give him a pass because while he never attended college (or, for that matter, high school), he did found the University of Pennsylvania. That’s the school that Elon Musk actually did graduate from, after dropping out of the University of Pretoria and before dropping out of Stanford University. Musk may have set some sort of record; he enrolled in a Stanford Ph.D. program but only stayed for two days.
Steve Jobs (dropped out of Reed College) might have been slightly more honest than some others. His take on education was (as quoted by Walter Isaacson) “The school is at fault for trying to make me memorize stupid stuff rather than stimulating me.” Still, the general opinion of most people is that education is a good thing, if you can get some. And February 8 is a day that made it just a bit more possible to get some eduction. One thing that happened today was that Leiden University was founded in Leiden, Netherlands, in 1575. It’s the oldest college in that country, and according to some it helped usher in the Dutch Golden Age from 1588 to the “disaster year” of 1672.
It’s pretty unusual for an age of any sort to have such well-defined starting and ending dates. The reason the Dutch Golden Age started so precisely in 1588 is that’s the year the Dutch Republic was established. That part of Europe was ruled by Spain in those days, and several provinces declared independence and won a revolutionary war. The new nation wasted no time in building a fleet of ships and creating a colonial empire around the world. Their fleet was enormous — over 2,000 ships, more than England and France put together. And they used it partly to fight primarily naval wars, agains France, Portugal, England, and France. Even though the Dutch Republic was comparatively tiny, they kept winning their wars.
The country was also more tolerant of ideas and religions than practically anywhere else in Europe (tolerance is also a characteristic of the best universities, so maybe Leiden University had something to do with that). As a result, it became home to great artists like Rembrandt and Vermeer, and to scientists like Hugo Grotius and Christiaan Huygens. Not coincidentally, all of them settled not just in the Dutch Republic but actually in Leiden. Having a leading university in town is good in a lot of ways.
The people in Williamsburg, Virginia would probably agree with that. That’s where the College of William & Mary was founded on February 8, 1693. It’s the second-oldest college in what’s now the US, and there are only 8 older ones anywhere in the English-speaking part of the world. The college got its name from King William III and Queen Mary II, who were the joint monarchs of Great Britain at the time. They’re the ones who granted the charter to found the college. Very much like the Dutch Republic, the site of the College of William & Mary, Virginia, established religious freedom and tended toward tolerance of other sorts of diversity. On the other hand, one of the colonial-era presidents of the school, Thomas Dew, spent a fair amount of time and effort defending slavery, so there’s that as well.
If you’re familiar with the geography of the eastern United States, you’ll know that Virginia is very close to Delaware (although they don’t share a border). And that slavery thing popped up in Delaware a few years after Thomas Dew’s administration at the college. To be more specific, it was February 8, 1865 that Delaware declined to ratify the 13th Amendment to the Constitution — that’s the one that outlawed slavery. Later that year the Amendment got the required number of ratifications by states, so slavery was outlawed in Delaware, too, but they still didn’t ratify the thing for another 36 years. Slavery was woven pretty deeply into the fabric of the US in those days.
Slavery looked like it stayed pretty deeply woven into the nation well into the 20th Century too, when, on February 8, 1915, D. W. Griffith’s epic film The Birth of a Nation premiered. As a film it was an amazing accomplishment. It ran for twelve reels, more than any movie ever made, and lasted three hours. Griffith was a pioneer of movie techniques like closeups, fade-outs, and was the first to come up with camera angles and techniques that made hundreds of extras in a battle scene look like thousands on the screen.
Unfortunately Griffith wasn’t at all a pioneer of social consciousness or the kind of tolerance you’d find at a good college — the film was widely panned as racist and even pro-slavery. It inspired riots at the time. But all the controversy was, as it sometimes still is, good for business. Another revolutionary thing about The Birth of a Nation was how incredibly much money it brought in. But it probably also prompted the recreation of the Ku Klux Klan a few months after it debuted. It was really the first blockbuster movie in history, even though it wasn’t about science fiction or superheroes.
For movies like those, later filmmakers would have to turn to different kinds of inspirations like books written by people like Jules Verne or comics penned by people like Bill Finger. Both of those guys were born on February 8, you know. More than 30 movies have been based on Verne’s books. As for Bill Finger, well — he’s the co-creator of Batman. And you don’t have to have a college degree to know what that means.
