Here are a few of the voices I’ve found helpful:
Ben Sasse: Everyone should watch, listen to, or read Ross Douthat’s interview with Ben Sasse, the former US Senator, former president of the University of Florida, and committed Christian who is dying of pancreatic cancer. Along the way, Sasse talks about the role of the academy in (American) society:
“Academia’s a total mess, obviously. And yet we need institutions to help people go from being 15 to 17 to 19 to 21. You have to do home leaving, you have to do family formation, you have to do first job, you have to do a ton of habit and character formation stuff. Higher education could be a really, really useful transitional institution. Right now, it enables lots of endlessly deferred adolescent behaviors and not enough rigor and not enough clarity about either research or teaching or character formation. … The answer is not to hate on the liberal arts. The answer is to recover the liberal arts. … But I think the 101 question is: What is the best use of 45 months of an 18- to 22-year-old’s time? Why would we compel people to do anything? It better dang well benefit them and benefit the broader society in terms of the economic output they’re going to produce, but more importantly, the civic engagement that they’re going to be able to have and the love of neighbor and the engagement with a republic — a small-r republic of pluralists who say, ‘We don’t want a polity that’s based on power, we want a whole bunch of people who want to flourish and thrive and build great things in their community.’ And that requires you to be acquainted with some of the wonderful ideas and with beauty in the past — and most of that is way more interesting than anything that is political.”
“We should be preparing the mind and the character for all of the various vocations and callings in life — and to be prepared for the first job, but also for the third job in an industry that doesn’t even exist yet and won’t for 15 or 20 years.”
Jennifer Frey: Ross Douthat also interviews Jennifer Frey, who was fired without cause from her role as the inaugural dean of what was a successful great books Honors College at the University of Tulsa. In a viral New York Times opinion piece, Frey describes the program this way:
“Our success in Tulsa derives from our old-fashioned approach to liberal learning, which does not attempt to prepare students for any career but equips them to fashion meaningful and deeply fulfilling lives. This classical model of education, found in the work of both Plato and Aristotle, asks students to seek to discover what is true, good and beautiful, and to understand why. It is a truly liberating education because it requires deep and sustained reflection about the ultimate questions of human life. The goal is to achieve a modicum of self-knowledge and wisdom about our own humanity. … At the Honors College, we taught our students that wisdom is a distant goal, and that we need to work on ourselves as we try to approach it. We need to cultivate what our college called ‘the virtues of liberal learning.’ For example, we need to cultivate the humility to recognize that we have much to learn from the past and from one another. We need to cultivate a love of truth for its own sake and the courage to speak our minds and to follow the truth wherever it may lead us — even when it leads us into difficult waters where our disagreements are deep and unsettling. When students realize their own humanity is at stake in their education, they are deeply invested in it.”
David Foster Wallace: In his famous, “This is Water” 2005 Kenyon College commencement address, David Foster Wallace argued that the point of a liberal arts education is not learning how to think but learning what to think about:
“[L]et’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about ‘teaching you how to think.’ If you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think …. But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. … I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. … The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”
To be sure, you don’t have to get a degree in the liberal arts to cultivate attention, self-discipline, and the ability to care about other people, but it can help.
Susan Sontag: The title of this post comes from a 1983 Susan Sontag commencement address, now dated in its second-wave feminism, but still worth reading for her comments on the importance of the liberal arts and her concluding peroration:
“Perhaps the most useful suggestion I can make on the day when most of you are ceasing to be students, is that you go on being students—for the rest of your lives. Don’t move to a mental slum. … Keep on reading. … Lay off the television. And, remember when you hear yourself saying one day that you don’t have time any more to read—or listen to music, or look at painting, or go to the movies, or do whatever feeds you head now—then you’re getting old. That means they got to you, after all.”
If you have read this far, do yourself a favour and watch Jerry Seinfeld’s rag on “passion” in his 2024 Duke commencement address:
HT: Melissa Kirsch
