A proposition: No one more fully embodies the nature of elite American higher education today, in all its contradictions, than a man who has spent so much time being molded by it, following its incentives and internalizing its values. But what are those values, exactly? Of course, there are the oft-cited, traditional virtues of spending several years set apart from the rest of the world, reading and thinking. You know: the chance to expand your mind, challenge your preconceptions and cultivate a passion for learning. In this vision, eager minds are called to great institutions to reach their intellectual potential, and we know these institutions can perform this function simply because they are called Harvard and Yale.
That may be the way a prestigious education works for some, but probably not most. A 2023 survey of Harvard seniors found that 41 percent — 41 percent! — were entering careers in consulting or finance. The same percentage were graduating to a starting salary of at least $110,000, more than double the national median. Last year, the most popular majors at Stanford were economics and computer science. The ultimate value of college for many is the credential, guaranteeing a starting spot many rungs up the ladder of worldly success: Nothing you learn at an elite university is as important as the line on your C.V. that you’ve paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to type. And if you were feeling cynical, you could argue that the time you spend applying to college will affect the rest of your life more than anything in particular that happens while you’re there.
“It is only when we forget our learning that we begin to know,” Thoreau observed, famously, after his experiment in simple living. (Though, rich of Thoreau: he went to Harvard.) In a much different, much opposed way — one involving central heat — Bolger has spent the past three decades conducting his own half-mad American experiment in education. He has drunk deeper at the well of the university than almost anyone else. What does he know?
In 1978, Bolger was 2, riding in a Buick Riviera in Durand, Mich., when the car was hit by a drunken driver. He was basically fine, but his parents were seriously injured, and his mother, Loretta, spent months in the hospital, ending up with a metal plate in one of her legs. She had to leave her job as a schoolteacher. Bolger’s parents’ marriage disintegrated. His mother could be difficult, and his father, an engineer and patent lawyer who represented himself during the nasty divorce, was emotionally abusive. Bolger and his mother began splitting time between their comfortable home near Flint and his grandfather’s ramshackle farm in Grand Haven, which was so drafty they sometimes curled up by the wood-burning furnace.
Bolger’s mother spent much of her money in the ensuing custody battle, and her stress was worsened by her son’s severe dyslexia. In third grade, when Bolger still couldn’t read, his teachers said he wouldn’t graduate from high school. Recognizing that her boy was bright, just different, his mother resolved to home-school him — though “home” is perhaps not the right word: The two spent endless hours driving, to science museums, to the elite Cranbrook Academy of Art outside Detroit for drawing lessons, even to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington. At night she read to him: epic works of literature like “War and Peace” but also choose-your-own-adventure books and “Star Wars” novelizations.