Editing Kai Nielsen (philosopher) (section)

== Education ==
Nielsen went to middle school, and high school for two years, in Moline. He then switched to St. Ambrose Academy, part of St. Ambrose College (now [[St. Ambrose University]] (since 1987)), in nearby [[Davenport, Iowa]], because he wanted to play on their basketball team.<ref name="A Life In Philosophy" /><ref name=":2" /> After graduating from high school, he spent three months in officers' training school and served the last two years of the Second World War in the merchant marine, in the Pacific, on a merchant ship. They were attacked once by a Japanese plane but were not hit.<ref name="A Life In Philosophy" /> After the war, he attended St. Ambrose College for two years. St. Ambrose was a Catholic school. Nielsen was struggling with religious bel belief at the time, after having read some philosophy during  the war: "After the war, I went back to St. Ambrose for two years of college before I transferred to the University of North Carolina. So my first college (university) was a Catholic school. There were two people who influenced me there. One was a priest who knew a lot about literature and talked about it in a really interesting way. The other was a layman who came from Montreal and had studied at the University of Toronto – at St. Michael’s College – with Gilson and Maritain. His name was Frederich Flynn and he taught philosophy at this small Catholic college. You had to take a lot of philosophy in Catholic schools back then. Perhaps you still do. It was required and most of the students – most of them Catholics – hated it. Most of these courses at that school were unbelievably boring, taught by priests from scholastic manuals and most of these priests were not very interested in philosophy. I took a course from Flynn who taught Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas. He was very different from the rest. When he talked about Aquinas, instead of just saying the proofs work, he said there were problems with them. And we talked about them and he found that I had an interest in these things. I was by then struggling with religion and he told me I should also read some Scotus, Ockham, and Maimonides and to read the philosophers themselves, not just the manuals. He impressed me and made me interested in philosophy. It was at this time that I also read Santayana and that had a secularizing effect on me. My previous wartime reading of Nietzsche and Dewey had a similar effect. At that time in my life, there were lots of conflicting currents tumbling around in me."<ref name=":2" />

Nielsen then transferred to the [[University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill]], where he received his A.B. degree, ''summa cum laude'', with an honors thesis on James Joyce.<ref>[https://phil.ucalgary.ca/manageprofile/profiles/215-28306/kai-nielsen-cv.pdf KAI NIELSEN Curriculum Vitae (Abbreviated)]</ref> During his time at Chapel Hill, Nielsen became radicalized: "The University of North Carolina was not only segregated by race but by gender as well. There were only male students at UNC initially (except for graduate school). This was also the case when I taught at Hamilton College and Amherst College. I guess there are only two all-male schools left in the United States now [2012], but back then there were a lot of them. But there was also racial segregation in North Carolina, including at the liberal University of North Carolina. The University of North Carolina and Duke University had no black students at all. That was called “separate but equal.” But that, of course, was not true. By that time, I was sensitized to this, so I joined various challenging movements, particularly radical ones, though in the eyes of the establishment, they were all radical movements. It was a period during which I quickly became very radical."<ref name=":2" />

In the same interview, Nielsen described being the victim of a racist intimidation: "During a U.S. presidential race, Henry Wallace (not George Wallace), who had been vice president under Truman, formed a new party and ran for president. I joined a student movement supporting Wallace. (Wallace was a kind of social democrat but his party made the tactical mistake of accepting help from the American Communist Party and that finished them.) Paul Robeson, a black and prominent member of the Communist Party, was an articulate supporter of Wallace. I had seen Paul Robeson play the lead part in Othello in San Francisco during the war when I was still in the service. I remember responding then, “Jesus, what is this?” I was spellbound. We students at Chapel Hill arranged for Paul Robeson to come to campus to talk in support of Wallace and this third party. But he was a member of the Communist Party and by that time had been blacklisted. The university, after a lot of liberal dithering, finally said we could not meet in the lecture hall we had planned for and with their initial agreement. So we went to an empty lot that belonged to a gas station in downtown Chapel Hill that had closed for the evening. I introduced Robeson and he talked there. For that I got a cross burned in front of my house that night."<ref name=":2" />

Nielsen went to graduate school in philosophy at nearby [[Duke University]], in [[Durham, North Carolina]], and received his [[PhD]] from Duke in 1959.<ref name=":0">{{Cite web|title=Nielsen, Kai 1926- {{!}} Encyclopedia.com|url=https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/nielsen-kai-1926|access-date=2021-04-09|website=www.encyclopedia.com}}</ref> During those years at university he also published a novel.<ref name="A Life In Philosophy" />