Episode Details

Source: “How Ben Sasse Is Living Now That He Is Dying,” Interesting Times with Ross Douthat, The New York Times, April 9, 2026.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/opinion/ben-sasse-cancer-death.html

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My father died of pancreatic cancer. I know what the remaining months look like — not from a distance, but from the inside of a family that watched it. The negotiations with hope. The morning inventory of what still works. The slow, irreversible transfer of weight from the body to the spirit.

Ben Sasse is dying the same way. He is 54 years old, his face bloodied by the medication keeping him alive a few months longer, and he is still thinking harder about America’s future than most healthy people half his age. In a conversation with Ross Douthat of The New York Times this week, Sasse said something that stopped me cold. He said that higher education has abandoned its core responsibility: not research, not credentialing, not political combat — but formation. The hard, slow, unglamorous work of helping a young person become a capable adult.

He’s right. But he stopped one step short.

The formation crisis is not only a university problem. It is a business problem. The formation arc does not end at twenty-one. It runs to thirty. High school plants the seed. University deepens the root. The first employer — if they understand what they hold — produces a fully formed human being: someone with judgment, character, institutional wisdom, and the kind of tacit knowledge that no algorithm has ever encoded. Germany has known this for eight hundred years. America abandoned it a generation ago. And now the AI wave is arriving to sort the companies that understood this from the companies that did not.

That’s the argument.

My son Dakshin is a hematology-oncology fellow at Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit, spending his fellowship years searching for the genetic solutions that might one day break this disease — the disease that took his grandfather, and that is now taking a man I regard as one of the finest public servants America has produced in my lifetime. The Long Game is not a metaphor in our family. It runs across generations. My father formed me. I tried to form Dakshin. Dakshin is now on the frontier of the science that might save the next Ben Sasse. That is the formation arc made flesh.

I have spent thirty-six years on manufacturing floors across three continents. I have seen what formed people can do — at GM Lansing, at Royal Enfield Chennai, at Ather Energy. I have also seen what happens when institutions treat people as costs to be minimized rather than capabilities to be developed. The results are not subtle. You can see them in quality numbers, in turnover rates, in the hollow look of a worker who has been told for twenty years that his judgment does not matter.

Sasse diagnosed the university version of that hollow look. I am here to tell you it lives on the shop floor too. And in the corporate office. And in the HR function that replaced formation with compliance. We are not talking about two different diseases. We are talking about the same disease in different buildings.

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What Sasse actually said

Here is what stopped me. Sasse told Douthat: academia is a total mess, and yet we need institutions to help people go from fifteen to twenty-one. You have to do home leaving. First job. Habit and character formation. Higher education could be a genuinely useful transitional institution. Right now it enables endlessly deferred adolescent behavior.

Read that again. Home leaving. First job. Habit. Character. He is not talking about curriculum reform or campus politics. He is talking about the ancient responsibility of institutions to form people — to take the raw material of a young human being and return something capable and whole.

Douthat pushed Sasse into AI. Sasse’s answer was t