Robert Moses was an idealistic scholar, not a grade-driven student, at Yale

Evidence

And the idealism was deep. Not only had Bob Moses read most of Pater; he believed in what he had read. He loved learning genuinely and for its own sake. If he was competitive in swimming, he wasn’t in classroom work. He wasn’t uninterested in marks, but he wasn’t especially concerned about them either. He spent night after night behind a closed door reading, but his friends began to realize that the reading was not for grades; sometimes they would look at the stack of books on his desk and not one of them had anything to do with the courses he was taking; they were there because they interested him. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 175

Categorization

• XREF: Contrast to his later pragmatic, remorseless behavior — ironic echo of the man who belittled the ‘masses’ he claimed to serve. — connects to: Robert Moses toured European museums with scholarly intensity atypical of Yale undergraduates — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 176