Zena Hitz, St. John’s College-Annapolis, on the great books.

Tuesday, October 18, 2022

5:30 PM - 7:00 PM (ET)

American University, McDowell Formal Lounge Room 114

AU Students, faculty and staff are invited to attend in-person.

Zena Hitz, author of Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life, will deliver the Lincoln Scholars lecture for 2022. Many students come to college ambitious to be successful in politics and anxious about getting internships and jobs. But is that good for us as learners and as human beings? Is it good for society? In the annual Lincoln Scholars lecture for 2022, Zena Hitz, a tutor at St. John’s College, Annapolis, and author of Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life, will argue that treating education as a purely instrumental value does violence to the activity of learning and encourages us to commodify each other. Only by opening ourselves up to the pleasures of the intellectual life for its own sake, she argues, can we foster a rich inner life for ourselves and learn to treat our fellow human beings with justice and dignity.