National humanities medallist Kwame Anthony Appiah had a memorable first college dinner as a young undergraduate at the University of Cambridge.
Sitting down with a group of strangers, he noted how the conversation flitted from biochemistry to Latin poetry as the young students showed off their academic prowess.
“It was wonderful, and I thought: ‘OK, this is the place for me,’” said the cultural theorist, who serves as professor of philosophy and law at New York University (NYU).
He contended that he was able to get “a lot of my education just hanging out with people” at Cambridge but also benefited from switching degree programmes in the first year – from medicine to philosophy – meaning he became an anomaly in the UK system in studying both sciences and humanities at undergraduate level.
