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"No matter where they've attended school," the reader is assured in Becoming a Master Student, the most widely used text intended to orient incoming freshmen, "liberally educated people can state what they're willing to bet their lives on." But this otherwise helpful book fails to give students direction on how to discover such confidence.
Among the more formidable attempts to help higher education address life's big questions was the Great Books movement, closely associated with the life work of Robert Maynard Hutchins at the University of Chicago. He was leery of any social or institutional commitments fueled by zeal without knowledge, and the latter came most notably through a study of the great thinkers through the ages—the "Great Conversation." During a lively 1970 interview (worth reading in its entirety), he cautioned the Academy:
It is the absence of anything relevant in the current program of the multiversity that has produced this demand for relevance on the part of the young. When young people are asked, "What are you interested in?" they answer that they are interested in justice, they want justice for the Negro, they want justice for the Third World. If you say, "Well, what is justice?" they haven't any idea … . They are ignorant of the fact that there is a Great Conversation echoing back through history on the subject of justice.[1]
Anthony T. Kronman, former dean of the Law School at Yale, makes a laudable attempt to revive this Great Conversation approach in Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life. Kronman's focus is on the humanities, and his appraisal is blunt: humanities professors in our finest colleges and universities have collectively blown it, cowering in the face of the German "research ideal":
This damage was not the result of an attack from without. It was not caused by barbarians crashing the gates. It was a self-destructive response to the crisis of authority that teachers of the humanities brought down on their own heads when they embraced the research ideal and the values associated with it.
According to Kronman, the Academy is a mess, elevating what Max Weber dubbed the "Vocation of Scholarship" as the measure of all things. From graduate interns through veteran professors, specialized research has long since eclipsed the importance of teaching. Tenure and rank promotion are tied closely to peer-refereed publications in discipline-specific fields. While Kronman acknowledges great gains in the hard sciences, and much new knowledge in the humanities as well, he contends that the perennial questions of the human condition are relegated to the periphery in the university today. He supports this indictment with twenty pages of anecdotes.
In the next section, Kronman steps back to sketch a three-stage overview of American higher education, beginning with the founding of Harvard in 1636 and the ensuing "age of piety." Here the "ends of human living" were indeed central to the curriculum but, Kronman laments, teaching was erroneously based on dogmatic religious assumptions. Unsurprisingly, it's in the second period, the "age of secular humanism," that Kronman finds the zenith of American education.
Beginning after the Civil War and lasting through the mid-20th century, this expansive era, like the age of piety, was unembarrassed by fundamental questions about the meaning of life. But higher education in this phase had cast off the shackles of faith. It presupposed the existence of a common human nature and a pluralistic belief in many paths to fulfillment, but within an acceptable range of responses. Through a study of the Great Conversation, secular humanism (a flag that Kronman is quite comfortable waving) "assumed that the ultimate values toward which a human life may be directed are relatively few in number," and "a relatively permanent set of possibilities" exists since the human condition remains constant through the ages.
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