2. From the Honors Program to Strasbourg

Another key decision that I made in 1966-1967 was to accept an invitation to join the Fordham Honors Program. This was a no-brainer, since the main benefit of the Honors Program was the Junior Year Abroad program, and I had set my sights on studying abroad.

The Honors Program consisted of several elements: a) the Honors House (also known as Alpha House), a tiny club house in the middle of the campus where one could hang out and study; b) an Honors Seminar in sophomore year, which was dedicated that year to reading about the interaction between science and philosophy and society: We read The Sleepwalkers, by Arthur Koestler, and Physics and Philosophy by Sir James Jeans, among other titles; c) Junior Year Abroad, which this memoir is about - all Honors Program candidates had the option of spending their junior year in Europe; other students could do so also, but it required special arrangement; d) the Honors Thesis, written and delivered in the senior year (I never did it).

During the spring, we were to write a major paper (10-20 pages), and I decided to write mine on the subject of the role of Arabic philosophers in transmitting Greek philosophy from the Middle East to Europe in the early Middle Ages. The tale of how the remains of Greek thought were preserved and translated by Nestorians, then interpreted by great thinkers such as Al-Farabi, ibn-Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn-Rushd (Averroes) is a familiar story to scholars, but I was transfixed by the narrative.

In the course of writing the paper, I was also faced with the necessity of choosing a place to spend my junior year abroad. Among the senior honors program veterans, the name Strasbourg kept coming up in conversations. Even though the majority of JYA students ended up in Paris, Strasbourg had a certain allure. I was also interested in Renaissance-era universities with a strong background in theology and philosophy, and the names Friburg, Freiburg and Tubingen kept appearing as well. Each of them had distinguished Catholic faculties with strengths in philosophy as well as theology, and each of them was located in a small college-oriented town. In the end, though, I was sold on Strasbourg as a compromise between the quaint medieval town-campuses and the majoritarian orthodoxy of Paris. I began to look forward to going there.