Fiorina and Medieval Studies

Somehow I found a reference to the fact that HP's current CEO is not only a law school dropout rebel but also holds a B.A. in Medieval History and Philosophy from Stanford. This quote is actually pretty interesting:

The most valuable class I took at Stanford was not Econ 51. It was a graduate seminar called, believe it or not, "Christian, Islamic and Jewish Political Philosophies of the Middle Ages."

Each week, we had to read one of the great works of medieval philosophy: by Aquinas, Bacon, Abelard. These were huge texts - it seemed like we were reading 1,000 pages every week. And by the end of the week, we had to distill their philosophical discourse into two pages.

The philosophies and ideologies themselves certainly left an impression on me. But the rigor of the distillation process, the exercise of refinement, that's where the real learning happened.

* * *

I was on my way to law school, and I was quaking in my boots.

I was going, not because it was a lifelong dream, or because I imagined I could change the world, but because I thought it was expected of me. I thought I owed it to my family, especially my father-a Stanford law professor, a Duke law school dean, a 9th circuit federal judge- not because he'd ever said so, but because I'd assumed it to be true.

So off I went to law school in the fall. And from the start, it left me cold. I barely slept those first three months. I had a blinding headache every day. And I can tell you exactly which shower tile I was staring at in my parent's bathroom when I came home for a weekend and it hit me like a bolt of lightning: It's my life. I can do what I want.

Interesting. That's pretty much the way I feel about what I learned with Dr. Moye and Alexandras Shtromas, and what I wished I too had done during the first semester of law school. LOL