Stephen Colbert Featured in Ken Bain's “What the Best College Students Do”.

Ken Bain’s interview with the TV satirist Stephen Colbert is revealing both for its insight into Colbert and for its ideas on how higher education ought to work.

Colbert grew up in South Carolina, as the youngest of 11 children in a family that prized curiosity and reading. When he was 10, his father and two brothers were killed in an Eastern Air Lines crash. “After that,” he told Bain, “I saw my job as making my mother laugh.” He did so with jokes and antics. When he went off to college — first Hampden-Sydney and then Northwestern — he immersed himself in philosophy, then theater and improv. Both taught him about “momentary” failure and disappointment, set against “the light of eternity.”

He told Bain, the provost at the University of the District of Columbia, that bad grades didn’t “control him” but were “feedback.” Aided by interested professors, Colbert’s world view “freed him to take risks, to explore, to probe deeply, to find self-motivation in what he liked to do, and of all that to find an outlet for his creative energies.” If you think about The Colbert Report’s putative buffoon as someone steeped in Shakespeare, Shaw, and “A Man For All Seasons,” you may never watch it in quite the same way again.

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Released August 27, 2012 Amazon | Harvard University Press.

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Because Stephen came last in a family of eleven children, he received the constant attention and admiration of his older brothers and sisters. “They used the term ‘adorable’ so often that it almost became pejorative,” he mused years later. “They were always picking me up, and carrying me around. I felt valued.”

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For Colbert, the liberating nature of failure crystillized in the theater. “Improvisation is a great educator when it comes to failing,” he noted. “There’s no way you are going to get it right every time.” But that ability to find comfort in bombing had its roots in what his mother had told him repeatedly, perhaps beginning on that tragic day when he was ten years old. “‘Momentary disappointments can be seen,’ as my mother used to say when we had a heart-breaker, ‘in the light of eternity. This moment is nothing in the light of eternity,’ and that opens you up to the next moment if you don’t put too much weight on the moment where you are failing right now.”

“If you don’t conceive of things that way,” he obsered while sitting in his office in midtown Manhattan preparing for his nightly television show, “you are struck only in this moment, and a failure just extends for as long as you conceive of it as important.” That doesn’t mean, he quickly added, “that you shouldn’t learn from it, but that main thing you should learn is don’t worry too much.” As for life, “You haven’t done it before; how could you possibly get it perfectly right?” Perhaps that attitude helped him see grades not as something that controlled him, but as feedback that he could use.

Stephen is featured on pages: 50 – 55 | 73 | 87 | 111 | 172 | 175 | 210 | 225

For those of you with an Amazon account, a preview of pages 50 – 55 is available.