In the academic environment, there is great value placed on publications, intellectual conversation and elbow pads. The picture that we have of academics is fundamentally elitist. That’s its allure.

Academics watch Frontline documentaries; they read William Safire’s column in The New York Times on Sundays; they spend that same Sunday tackling the NYT crossword puzzle. These sort of elitist practices and our knowledge of them becomes the stuff that we imagine conversation to be like at our professor’s social hours. But this isn’t necessarily the case. I’m positing that the kind of intellectual that matters in the real and the academic world is the one that fits the description of a modern renaissance man. What if all of the time that you spend reading People magazine and oohing and ahing at cutethingsfallingasleep.org was actually contributing to your development as an intellectual?

The academic world that I want to live in finds no disparity between the crass and the aristocratic. Consuming any object of knowledge, even in its basest form, is what allows us to understand the world around us and develop connections between our trade and ourselves. By flattening the scope of what we consider important products of scholarship, we can allow ourselves to become alive with the understanding of each. As educated people, we can and should find ways to relate our studies that are personal and important. You can work out a mathematical algorithm for the soup selections on campus; you can find game theoretical models in Conan O’Brien’s tangle with NBC. The main goal of a liberal arts education is the development of critical thinking that can be applied to any subject.

My most valued professors can move between different spheres of scholarship and relatable real-life scenarios to arrive back at their main arguments. Aside from humanizing the people who stand behind the dossier in your classes, understanding this sort of intellectualism will make your achievement thereof more attainable.

I write this to encourage my professors to continue to talk about their personal lives or their comic book collections to help me understand formal game theory. I also aim to make you, the student, less embarrassed of your own extracurricular interests. Be proud that you know Robert Pattinson’s hometown, but don’t forget those essays you read by Descartes. Don’t be embarrassed to talk about either or both in any company, regardless of their education level. Though they seem basic or even crass in comparison to your academic dealings, both are very much a part of your own cerebral development and understanding of the world.