College Course Opened New World to Bennett : How Plato Changed Education Secretary’s Life

In 1961, a wide-eyed city kid arrived at Williams College, marveled at the sight of his first lacrosse stick and was dumbfounded when he overheard a conversation in the lavatory of the freshman dorm:

“Brandon, do you realize that the French spoken in Tunisia is different from the French spoken in Algiers?”

William J. Bennett, now the U.S. secretary of Education, recalls that “I had never heard of anyone called ‘Brandon.’ Everyone I knew was named ‘Steve’ or ‘Chris.’

“I finished brushing my teeth and I went upstairs and I called my mother. I said, ‘I don’t think I belong here,’ ” Bennett related. “She said, ‘Give it a couple of weeks.’ ”

Bennett, who did stay on the Williamstown, Mass., campus and went on to receive a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas and a law degree from Harvard, recalled that early “intellectual intimidation” before an audience of 250 scholars at Georgetown University recently.

The topic was the impact that classic texts had on their lives, and for Bennett, that text was Plato’s “Republic,” Books I and II, wherein Socrates asks the young men of Athens whether justice is its own reward.

Bennett, 42, graduated from a Jesuit high school in an era when Catholic students almost invariably went to Catholic colleges.

Bennett said he had gone to his headmaster for college advice and asked, “Is it Georgetown or Holy Cross or B.C. (Boston College)?” The Jesuit replied, “No, I want you to go to some place like Williams or Dartmouth or Harvard. You are in a contrary pose, and I want you being contrary there.”

‘Not Intellectual’

So Bennett joined the lacrosse veterans from prep schools and others on the Williams campus. He was a football player and “a prodigious reader” but “not precocious and certainly not intellectual.”

“I wanted to go into advertising and make a lot of money and use the four years at Williams . . . to become sophisticated and stop being square,” he said.

But because of Williams’ requirements, he found himself in the introductory philosophy course of Plato scholar Laszlo G. Versenyi, who is still teaching at Williams. The first assignment was Books I and II of the “Republic.”

“It seemed to me and many of my fellow students and classmates as if we were being confronted by a reincarnation of Socrates himself,” he said.

From cynicism and arrogance, he said, “I and many of my classmates resisted the notion that this question of justice should be taken seriously. . . . Why should a man be just if he can get away with being unjust?”

“We were . . . more than willing to take the opposite side,” he said. They argued that “the issue of taking justice seriously was a sham and that this was a kind of fairy tale. We’d been taught this before in grade school, high school, and now we were sophisticated people who didn’t have to have this told to us anymore.

“We wanted to be on our way,” he said. “These were tales told to frighten children into some kind of notion of orderly behavior. We didn’t need that.”

Beneath it all, Bennett added, “we wanted to be persuaded that we were wrong.” And, under Versenyi’s tutelage, they realized that they were. “Something happens to the participants in the Platonic dialogue. They walk away, not only with their minds changed . . . but their insides are shook up a little bit too,” he said. “So we fought our way through it, half the semester for Books I and II.

“Back and forth, up and down the campus, I argued with Versenyi. To and from class, before class and after class. I called him at home one night . . . I argued with classmates and with anybody else,” he said. “When I got home, I argued with my mother and my brother, who could not have cared less about Books I and II of the ‘Republic’ but were glad to see I was taking it seriously.

“I was late for football practice a couple of times because of arguments going on in the student union.

“Versenyi and other teachers, committed to the serious raising of serious questions of young men, had taken many of us,” Bennett said. “These men and women and their texts took us, they took us like lovers and we were theirs.”