Grounds of Being Café Chicago In a small booth sit Lawrence Kohlberg 48 Saul Alinsky 30 George Steiner 48 and Claudia Kania possibly 22 With strong hesitation Claudia takes a drink of coffee Kohlberg begins to speak Kohlberg Say kid You ve been living here practically your whole life Er almost You ve been to Smart sat in at lectures at the IOP and practically live at the Co Op What s your next move Claudia It's it 's difficult to say really It seems like an obvious choice but is it Alinsky Well it depends What do you want to study Claudia Philosophy Or maybe not Maybe something more stable something more STEM y Maybe computer science or shudders computational mathematics Alinsky Boisterously and with emphasis Philosophy Well kid you've definitely come to the right place It practically runs in our blood UChicago is the bastion of contemporary intellectualism a monument to the world s most brilliant intelligentsia a cardinal haven for astute and untethered inquiry Steiner I think she gets it Saul The school has a great department sure But what makes it great Think of the Civic Knowledge Project the Leo Strauss Center the Elucidation podcast all of these initiatives started to bring people like you into the picture all of them started by people like you The resources are already here it s up to you to use them Claudia That's easy for you to say You guys were philosophy majors who were actually successful That s usually not the case for the rest of us who end up back at the proverbial acropolis of Mom's Basement So say I get in Then what Kohlberg Back when me and George were still running around the Quad like a bunch of goons we weren't exactly plotting the next revolution