I learned about Bob Woodson through Glenn Loury’s YouTube channel, which I discovered during these PhD years. The timing created an unintended comparison. On one screen the university assigned texts, carefully constructed arguments and occasional discussions where everyone appeared to know the conclusion before the question had been asked. On the other screen, Glenn Loury talked with people like Bob Woodson, John McWhorter, Shelby Steele and others who disagreed with one another in public without requesting anyone’s removal. The conversations were alive. People interrupted, contradicted themselves, sometimes changed direction in real time. Academia seemed interested in its own weather. Glenn Loury’s channel opened the windows. I was happier there.

Music taught me the same way. The deepest musical knowledge comes from a drummer in a bar, a piano with two dead notes, or an audience whose silence means your brilliant idea failed. Bob Woodson was one of he most interesting people I discovered, he disturbed the usual political furniture. Less interested in producing the correct analysis of suffering than discovering who was actually reducing it. Looking for the person running the neighbourhood program, rebuilding the school or helping mothers whose children had been murdered. He believed people commonly described as powerless were not empty containers awaiting policy. They possessed moral resources and the ability to act. That idea should not have been radical. He made me think about the business of professional rescuers vs. real people.

I have a similar experience in music, to look for the overlooked player, the self-taught arranger, the teenager making impossible sounds in their bedroom, the person without the proper vocabulary who somehow blows us all away at the Tranzac. Education should not be the experience of hearing the echo of your existing convictions. It should involve the risk of encountering a mind that has lived through realities your theories only visited. I did not agree with everything I heard on Glenn Loury’s channel. That was precisely why it was awesome. I learned these years how institutions classify knowledge. Bob Woodson made me wonder how institutions overlook knowledge because it arrives without institutional clothing. I feel like I enrolled in one university but accidentally attended another. I did not realize he died at the start of the summer. Will miss his charm and the regular feelings of illumination.