> But what I took the most inspiration and value from during those undergraduate years was the sheer power of dedicating the entire weight of an academic discip

> But what I took the most inspiration and value from during those undergraduate years was the sheer power of dedicating the entire weight of an academic discipline to the uncompromising _study_ of a subject matter _without_ the explicit agenda of trying to explain it away. And that's the religion of academia (I don't mean that pejoratively).