Time & Perspective Quote by Walter Jon Williams

The sly move here is how Walter Jon Williams praises college while quietly refusing its most marketable premise. He doesn’t say it trained him for a career or delivered a credential that “paid off.” He calls it “useful” for “other reasons,” a phrase that politely detonates the modern sales pitch of higher education as job pipeline. Coming from a working writer, that’s not anti-intellectual posturing; it’s a values statement from someone whose profession depends on mental cross-pollination more than institutional checkboxes.

The emphasis lands on exposure: “a great many influences I wouldn’t otherwise have encountered.” That’s the core argument for college as an engineered accident machine, a place where you bump into disciplines, politics, aesthetics, and oddball peers you didn’t select via algorithm or hometown gravity. “Influences” is a tellingly artistic word, less about mastery than contamination - the good kind. It frames education as porous rather than transactional.

Then there’s the most writerly detail: “whose thoughts are still with me.” He’s not celebrating campus life; he’s describing intellectual hauntings. The “time with some very intelligent people” sounds modest, but it implies the real credential is memory: conversations that outlive syllabi, a private archive of arguments and insights that keeps showing up on the page years later.

Contextually, it’s a defensible middle path in the culture war over college: neither worship nor dismissal. College matters, he suggests, when it expands the mind’s cast of characters - especially for someone building worlds for a living.