I had never been to the New York Times before. I expected marble. There was some marble. I expected intellectuals. There were many. The interview took place high above Midtown Manhattan in a conference room overlooking a forest of steel, glass, concrete, and money. The skyscraper itself interested me considerably more than most of the people inside it.

Before entering, I spent several minutes studying the structure from the street. The building employed a steel moment-frame system with reinforced concrete cores and a curtain wall facade. The wind loading calculations alone were substantial. Somebody had designed expansion tolerances. Somebody had calculated live loads. Somebody had worried about harmonics. Somebody had specified fasteners. Somebody had built it.

Inside, however, nobody seemed particularly interested in discussing the building. The panel consisted of David Brooks, Paul Krugman, and two of the paper's more prominent liberal writers: Michelle Goldberg and Jessica Grose.

David Brooks arrived first. He possessed the careful appearance of a man who had spent most of his life indoors but had read extensively about people who had not. His suit fit perfectly. His posture was excellent. His hands were small. His fingers appeared optimized for turning pages and adjusting reading glasses. They did not appear optimized for carrying concrete block. I suspect he could have done so if sufficiently motivated, but it would not have been his first instinct.

Paul Krugman arrived next. Krugman carried himself with the confidence of a Nobel laureate, which is understandable because he is one. He possessed the unmistakable demeanor of a man who had won thousands of arguments and expected to win thousands more. His hands were slightly larger than Brooks's but remained, from my perspective, largely administrative.

Jessica Grose appeared exactly as one would expect someone who writes frequently about family, culture, parenting, and modern life to appear. She carried several notebooks. She seemed organized.

Michelle Goldberg projected the calm confidence of someone accustomed to discussing national political trends before audiences that generally agreed with her. Her posture suggested she expected questions. Her expression suggested she expected particular kinds of questions.

Back home, these would have been considered remarkably delicate people.

I sat down. Immediately I noticed something else. The men were crossing their legs. Both of them.

Moderator: "Would you like to begin?"

Bricklayer: "Sure."

I pointed at Brooks.

Bricklayer: "Why are you crossing your legs?"

The room froze. Brooks looked down.

Brooks: "Comfort?"

Bricklayer: "Interesting."

Krugman uncrossed his legs. Nobody spoke.

Bricklayer: "I've never understood that."

Brooks: "Crossing your legs?"

Bricklayer: "Seems unstable."

Krugman laughed. The tension eased slightly. I spread out in my chair.

Moderator: "Perhaps we should discuss politics."

Bricklayer: "We'll get there."

I looked around the room. The panel appeared relaxed. More importantly, they appeared relaxed around me. I recognized the expression. I had seen it before. It is the expression highly educated people sometimes wear when they believe they have correctly estimated another person's intelligence. I decided to test the estimate.

Bricklayer: "What did everybody major in?"

The question appeared almost disappointingly simple. Krugman answered first.

Krugman: "Economics."

Bricklayer: "Makes sense."

Krugman: "Princeton. Then Yale."

Brooks answered next.

Brooks: "History."

The others answered as well, describing degrees, graduate programs, fellowships, academic tracks, internships, and career paths that seemed to involve an astonishing number of seminars. I listened carefully. Then they looked at me.

Brooks: "And you?"

Bricklayer: "Dropped out of high school."

The room went quiet.

Krugman blinked.

Bricklayer: "Scored a 1300 on the SAT first."

Brooks: "You took the SAT?"

Bricklayer: "Before the 1996 recentering."

Krugman laughed.

Bricklayer: "You know where I think it starts?"

Brooks: "Where?"

Bricklayer: "The test."

Krugman smiled.

Bricklayer: "I'm serious."

Brooks: "Go ahead."

Bricklayer: "The SAT."

The room became quiet.

Bricklayer: "Everybody acts like the college situation happened overnight. It didn't. It was built. Piece by piece. Layer by layer. The first thing you do is convince a kid he's college material."

Krugman: "Many are."

Bricklayer: "Sure. But everybody can't be."

Krugman leaned back.

Bricklayer: "Maybe I'm wrong. But sometimes I wonder whether every adjustment, every reform, every new metric, every new ranking system somehow always points in the same direction."

Brooks: "Which is?"

Bricklayer: "More applicants."

Krugman laughed.

Bricklayer: "Think about it. Better scores. Better outcomes. Better prospects. Better opportunities. Every brochure says the same thing."

Brooks: "College graduates do earn more on average."

Bricklayer: "The average person in this building probably earns more than the average American. Doesn't mean everybody gets a desk here."

Nobody spoke.

Bricklayer: "My point is simple. You tell eighteen-year-olds they have limitless potential. You tell them they're special. You tell them they're future leaders. You tell them the degree pays for itself."

Pause.

Bricklayer: "Then you hand them six figures of debt."

Krugman: "Most students don't borrow six figures."

Bricklayer: "Enough do."

I nodded.

Bricklayer: "Alright. Let's talk about liberal arts."

The room became noticeably quieter. Brooks smiled. Krugman smiled. The two Times writers exchanged a glance.

Bricklayer: "I don't understand them."

Brooks: "The liberal arts?"

Bricklayer: "Correct."

Brooks: "What don't you understand?"

Bricklayer: "The job."

The room laughed. I did not.

Bricklayer: "I'm serious."

Brooks: "Not every educational pursuit exists solely to train someone for employment."

Bricklayer: "That's a wonderful thing to say after you've already got employment."

Krugman laughed.

Bricklayer: "Look, where I come from, when somebody says they majored in history, philosophy, literature, cultural studies, gender studies, communications, or something similar, the immediate question is simple."

Brooks: "Which is?"

Bricklayer: "'What are you going to do with that?'"

The room became quiet.

Bricklayer: "That's not an insult."

Brooks: "It sounds like one."

Bricklayer: "It's a business question."

Brooks laughed.

Bricklayer: "See, that's the difference. Where I come from, if a kid says he's studying welding, everybody knows what happens next."

More nodding.

Bricklayer: "Engineering."

More nodding.

Bricklayer: "Nursing."

More nodding.

Bricklayer: "History?"

Pause.

Bricklayer: "Now we're all waiting for the second half of the sentence."

The room erupted. Brooks was laughing now.

Bricklayer: "I'm serious."

Brooks: "I know."

Bricklayer: "People back home call them liberal artists."

Krugman laughed. Brooks laughed. I continued.

Bricklayer: "And yes, before you ask, they assume they're liberals."

Brooks nearly spit out his coffee.

Bricklayer: "It's in the name."

Krugman: "That is not what it means."

Bricklayer: "Good luck explaining that to a pipefitter."

Brooks crossed his legs.

Bricklayer: "I think liberal arts graduates are embarrassed by their majors."

The room laughed. I did not.

Bricklayer: "I'm serious."

Krugman: "You're saying history majors are embarrassed by history?"

Bricklayer: "I'm saying I've noticed something."

He opened his notebook.

Bricklayer: "You know what lawyers put on their firm biographies?"

Brooks: "What?"

Bricklayer: "'B.A., University of X.' You know what they don't put?"

Brooks: "What?"

Bricklayer: "'Majored in Political Science.'"

The room laughed.

Bricklayer: "Or eighteenth-century literature. Or comparative whatever. Or postcolonial something. If those majors are so valuable, why does everybody suddenly become mysterious about them once money enters the conversation?"

Nobody answered immediately.

Bricklayer: "That's my question."

Krugman: "I don't think people hide them."

Bricklayer: "Then why do they always lead with the school?"

***

I left the New York Times building with two impressions. First, everybody in there majored in something I would never pay money to learn. Second, they all had small hands.

I spent the afternoon listening to highly educated people explain history, culture, democracy, institutions, identity, and the future of America. They were intelligent. Nobody can deny that. But intelligence and wisdom are not the same thing, and neither one guarantees results.

What struck me was how little anybody wanted to discuss outcomes. Costs. Incentives. Return on investment. The ugly practical questions. Every answer floated upward toward abstraction. Every road led back to theory. Nobody seemed eager to discuss what happens when the theory meets a mortgage payment.

The liberal arts remain, in my view, fundamentally ignominious. Not because history or literature or philosophy are worthless. Read all three. Read twice as much. The ignominy comes from pretending they are obviously worth the price being charged for them. The ignominy comes from the evasion. The school gets mentioned. The credential gets mentioned. The prestige gets mentioned. The major often arrives much later, if at all.

As I left the building, I found myself looking at the facade instead of the people inside it. That seemed appropriate. The writers spent the afternoon explaining America. The building required no explanation. Every brick, anchor, beam, connection, expansion joint, and load path exists because somebody understood consequences. Wind loads do not care about narratives. Compressive strength does not care about intentions. A steel connection is either adequate or it is not.

What struck me was the irony. Inside sat people who write endlessly about the working class. Outside stood the accumulated work of the working class itself. The columns. The concrete. The steel. The masonry. The curtain walls. The foundations extending deep into Manhattan bedrock. The physical reality that allows intellectual reality to exist in the first place. A columnist can be wrong for decades. A structural engineer gets one major mistake. A mason gets one. Reality is a harsher editor than the New York Times. Perhaps that is why I trust it more. What strikes me is the restraint. The thing does not announce itself. It sits there behind that curtain of ceramic rods like it is trying not to be a skyscraper. Most people see glass. I see layers. The ceramic rods hang outboard of the curtain wall, floating a couple feet off the skin of the building. From the street they look almost fragile. Delicate. Like they could not possibly survive a hard winter. Yet there are hundreds of thousands of them. Somebody fabricated them. Somebody shipped them. Somebody unloaded them. Somebody installed them. Somebody had to figure out exactly how much they would move in the sun versus January cold. I always think about that. Nobody ever writes articles about thermal expansion. The closer you get, the more the building reveals itself. The columns become visible. The lobby opens up. The steel frame starts peeking through the architecture. You begin to see what is actually carrying the load. That is the difference between construction and journalism. Construction eventually has to show its work. The average person walking by sees a lobby. I see a transfer of force. Everything above my head wants to go down. Every floor. Every copy of the newspaper. The entire structure is one long argument with gravity. The load leaves the floor slabs, moves into beams, into girders, into columns, down through the tower, into foundations, and eventually into Manhattan bedrock. The building never stops doing this. Twenty-four hours a day. Every second. Every ounce knows exactly where it is going. There is something comforting about that.

Across the street the older buildings tell a different story. Brick. Limestone. Terracotta. Buildings from the era when architects still trusted masonry to look like masonry. You can stand there and watch a century of structural philosophy unfold block by block. Heavy walls giving way to steel skeletons. Steel skeletons hiding behind brick facades. Then glass towers arriving and deciding they no longer needed to pretend.

The panel spent much of the afternoon defending liberal arts degrees. I remain unconvinced. But the building surrounding the discussion was not erected by discourse. It was erected by calculations, specifications, tolerances, inspections, and men who knew exactly what would happen if they got them wrong.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5871944&forum_id=2#49920765)