On the final day of reunion weekend, a friend and I went to lunch at the home of one of our old professors, a political scientist who specialized in the South China Sea, long retired, and his wife. Another of our professors was there too, a scholar of political philosophy and the American political regime. He’s still teaching, somewhere in his mid-eighties. We talked about Middlebury for a while, the way you do. But we spent much of the afternoon on something else entirely. We talked about artificial intelligence and what it is doing to the classroom, and how to teach undergraduates in an age where machines can write passable essays in nine seconds. Two men who have spent their lives teaching the young to think were trying to work out, in real time, what thinking even means for the students now coming through. They were not lamenting. They were genuinely curious. It was the least nostalgic conversation I had all weekend.

The day caught up with me in the college parking lot afterward. My car had a flat, the tow truck was 30 minutes out, and the political philosophy professor offered to wait with me in his car. So we sat, with nowhere in particular to be, and the conversation simply continued. We talked about the decisions I had made since graduating, and a particularly consequential one in front of me, and he listened the way he had listened to me at twenty, which is to say without hurry and without telling me what to think.

It felt like talking to an old friend. It also felt like talking to a grandfather. I have been trying to name that combination since I drove home, and the closest I can get is this: it is a particular kind of relationship that a residential college manufactures and that almost nothing else in adult life does. It is not only mentorship nor quite friendship. It requires several years of proximity to form, and then it survives the loss of that proximity for decades. It can pick up in a parking lot on a Sunday morning as though no time has passed, because in some way that matters, none has.

I arrived at Middlebury in 1997 from Karachi, eighteen, carrying the specific blend of confidence and bewilderment that is the standard condition of the age. I had no idea what I was walking into. Almost no one does.

What I remember least, it turns out, is the coursework. A few classes left a permanent mark. Much of the content is gone, the readings and the papers and the frameworks I once held with real precision, all of it dissolved into a residue I can no longer itemize. What stayed is harder to name. A way of sitting with a problem instead of rushing it. A reflex against the first easy answer. The conviction that I was supposed to have a view and be prepared to defend it to someone who had spent thirty years dismantling weaker ones. That did not come from a syllabus. It came from living inside an environment that demanded it of me every day for four years, until it stopped being something I did and became something I was.

The friendships stayed too, though not all of them. You cannot keep everything, and pretending otherwise is the sort of thing people say at reunions before going home to their actual lives. But some held. When I lived in Asia and came back to the States for a stretch of meetings, I would build an evening around connecting with someone, dinner in the city, two or three people who had known each other at twenty-two picking up at forty as if the intervening decades were a rounding error. Whether any of that compounded into the network advantage the alumni brochures of liberal arts colleges promise, I genuinely cannot say. What I can say is that the friendships were worth keeping for no reason beyond themselves, which is the only reason they hold up over time.

Here is what I did not understand at twenty-two and understand now. The college did not deliver those friendships. It delivered the conditions for them. Proximity that cost nothing. Shared rituals that required no one to organize them. Daily contact so low-stakes that it never registered as effort, which is precisely why it worked, because that is what wears down the layer of performance between people until what is left is simply being known. Those conditions ran continuously for four years and then shut off without warning. Everything I have done since, every dinner scheduled, every deliberate reach to stay connected with a college friend, has been an attempt to rebuild by hand a thing that was once ambient and free.

There was posturing at the reunion, naturally. Careers compressed into their most flattering summaries. Choices narrated with just enough self-awareness to appear undefended while remaining fully defended. I did it too. It was quieter at the twenty-fifth reunion than it had been at the tenth, less anxious, but it was there, the low hum of people re-establishing who they have become for the benefit of people who knew who they used to be. What cut through it were the conversations that happened in the margins. Late at night, over scotch we could not afford as students. In a parking lot waiting for a tow. Those did not require performance because there was nothing to prove. The knowing was already in place. You only had to show up.

Some people showed up entirely on their own. Some came after the gentlest nudge, one of them flying in from Taipei. Some did not come at all, held back by a child’s game or a niece’s graduation or the ordinary weight of an early June weekend that pulls in every direction at once. I do not judge any of it but I have learned, later than I should have, to put myself high on the list of things worth prioritizing. Adult life produces an inexhaustible supply of legitimate reasons not to show up, and at some point the reasons stop reading as separate decisions and start reading as a pattern. The ones who came revealed something.

My older daughter starts her second year at Dartmouth this fall, an hour down the road. I have now watched the same arrival twice from opposite ends of it. Mine, off a plane from Karachi into air so clean it felt like an accusation. Hers, already fluent in the country, stepping onto a campus that looked to me almost exactly as mine had looked, the same white clapboard and heavy folded mountains, the same cold outline around the shoulders in September. Several of my classmates still have children under ten. As we spoke over lunch we discovered we were living different decades on the same calendar, some of us walking children to elementary school while others were looking at a soon to be empty house. I caught myself wanting to tell them what I think I now know, which is that the institution does its part and then hands you the rest, and the rest is the entire thing.

The tow truck eventually came. My professor went back to whatever the rest of his Sunday held. I drove south out of Vermont, past the postcard towns and the boarded-up ones, and somewhere along the way I understood that the thirty minutes in his car was perhaps the most valuable thing that happened all weekend, more than any party or panel or planned event our reunion committee had labored over. None of it had appeared on a syllabus. None of it had been promised in any brochure. You spend four years believing the place is giving you an education, and then you spend twenty-five years discovering what it was actually giving you. The lunch discussion worried about a machine that might take the first thing. I am fairly sure it cannot touch the second. That distinction is the whole of what the place is for, and I only caught it on Sunday morning in a parking lot, waiting for a stranger to come change a tire, talking to a man in his eighties who knew me before I was anyone.

Adil Husain is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Intelligence Council.

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