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The Questions That Matter
The Freshman Address
November/December 2007
by Richard C. Levin ’74PhD
Richard C. Levin ’74PhD is president of Yale University. This address
was delivered September 1, 2007, in Woolsey Hall to the Yale College Class of
2011.
Members of the Class of 2011, I am delighted to join Dean Salovey in
welcoming you to Yale College. And I want to extend a warm welcome also to the
parents, relatives, and friends who have accompanied you here. To parents
especially, I want to say thank you for entrusting your very talented and
promising children to us. We are delighted to have them with us, and we pledge
to do our best to provide them with abundant opportunities to learn and thrive
in the four years ahead.
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A
university education should equip you for any and all of life’s challenges. |
Three weeks ago, as you were beginning to prepare yourselves for your
journey to New Haven, I spent a very pleasant weekend reading a new book by one
of our distinguished Sterling professors, the former dean of the Yale Law
School, Anthony Kronman, who now teaches humanities courses in Yale College. I
had one of those experiences that I hope you have time and again during your
four years here. I was disappointed to finish reading the book. It was
beautifully written, closely reasoned, and utterly transparent in its
exposition and its logic. I was disappointed because I wanted the pleasure of
my reading to go on and on, through the lovely summer afternoon and well into
the evening.
Professor Kronman’s book, Education’s End, is at once an affirmation of the essential value
of the humanities in undergraduate education and a critique of the humanities
curriculum as it has evolved over the past 40 years. Professor Kronman begins
with a presumption that a college education should be about more than
acquainting yourself with a body of knowledge and preparing yourself for a
vocation. This presumption is widely shared. Many who have thought deeply about
higher education—including legions of university presidents starting most
eloquently with Yale’s Jeremiah Day in 1828—go on to argue that a
university education should develop in you what President Day called the “discipline
of the mind”—the capacity to think clearly and independently, and thus
equip you for any and all of life’s challenges.
Professor Kronman takes a step beyond this classical formulation of the
rationale for liberal education. He argues that undergraduate education should
also encourage you to wrestle with the deepest questions concerning lived
experience: What constitutes a good life? What kind of life do you want to
lead? What values do you hope to live by? What kind of community or society do
you want to live in? How should you reconcile the claims of family and
community with your individual desires? In short, Professor Kronman asserts
that an important component of your undergraduate experience should be seeking
answers to the questions that matter: questions about what has meaning in life.
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From the founding of Harvard in 1636 to the Civil
War, the university curriculum was almost entirely prescribed. |
Professor Kronman then divides the history of American higher education
into three periods, and he argues that the quest for meaning in life was
central to the university curriculum during the first two, but no longer. In
the first period, running from the founding of Harvard in 1636 to the Civil
War, the curriculum was almost entirely prescribed. At its core were the great
literary, philosophical, and historical works of classical Greece and Rome, as
well as classics of the Christian tradition—from the Bible to the
churchmen of late antiquity and the Middle Ages to Protestant theologians of
the Reformation and beyond. In the minds of those who established Harvard and
Yale and the succession of American colleges that were founded by their
graduates, the classics were the ideal instruments, not only for developing the
“discipline of the mind,” but also for educating gentlemen of discernment and
piety. In this era, Kronman argues, the proposition that education was about
how to live a virtuous life was never in doubt. Through their mastery of the
great texts, the faculty, each of whom typically taught every subject in the
curriculum, were believed to possess authoritative wisdom about how to live,
and they believed it their duty to convey this wisdom to their students.
After the Civil War, the landscape of American higher education changed
dramatically, as new institutions like Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and the
University of California took German universities as their model. For the first
time, the advancement of knowledge through research, rather than the
intergenerational transmission of knowledge through teaching, was seen to be
the primary mission of higher education. As faculty began to conceive of
themselves as scholars first and teachers second, specialization ensued. No
longer did everyone on the faculty teach every part of a prescribed curriculum;
instead the faculty divided into departments and concentrated their teaching
within their scholarly disciplines.
Amidst this transformation, explicit discussion of the question of how
one should live was more or less abandoned by the natural and social sciences
and left to the humanities. Humanists, like scientists, became specialists in
their scholarship, but they recognized that the domain of their expertise, the
great works of literature, philosophy, and history—modern as well as
classical—raised, argued, and re-argued the central questions about life's
meaning. And they continued to see their role as custodians of a tradition that
encouraged young people to grapple with these questions as a central part of
their college experience. But humanities professors no longer had the moral
certainty of their predecessors. They saw the great works of the past not as
guidebooks to becoming a steadfast and righteous Christian, but rather as part
of a “great conversation” about human values, offering alternative models of
how one should live, rather than prescribing one true path. Engagement with the
“great conversation” remained an important component of college education in
the century between the Civil and Vietnam wars, a period which Kronman labels
the era of “secular humanism.”
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The question of how you should
live should be at the center of the undergraduate experience. |
Kronman goes on to argue that since the 1960s, the tradition of secular
humanism has been eroded—he would even say defeated—by two forces.
The first of these forces is a growing professionalization, discouraging
humanists from offering authoritative guidance on the questions of value at the
center of the “great conversation.” The second is politicization, challenging
the view that the voices and topics engaged in the “great conversation” of
Western civilization have any special claim to our attention and arguing for
increased focus on the voices and topics, Western and non-Western, that have
been excluded from the Western canon.
Kronman’s argument about the contemporary state of the humanities will
be welcomed by some and met with fierce resistance from many others. But the
inevitable controversy about the current state of the humanities should not
obscure for us this most important point: that the question of how you should
live should be at the center of the undergraduate experience, and at the center
of your Yale College experience.
The four years ahead of you offer a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to
pursue your intellectual interests wherever they may lead, and, wherever they
may lead, you will find something to reflect upon that is pertinent to your
quest for meaning in life. It is true that your professors are unlikely to give
you the answers to questions about what you should value and how you should
live. We leave the answers up to you. But I want to make very clear that we
encourage you to ask the questions, and, in seeking the answers, to use the
extraordinary resources of this place—a brilliant and learned faculty,
library and museum resources that are the equal of any campus anywhere, and
curious and diverse classmates who will accompany you in your quest.
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The humanities have a
special role in inspiring you to consider how you should live. |
Because of their subject matter, the humanities disciplines have a
special role in inspiring you to consider how you should live. But I also want
to suggest to each of you that questions that bear on the shaping of your life
will arise in whatever subjects you choose to study. You will find that
virtually every discipline will provide you with a different perspective on
questions of value and lead you to fresh insights that will illuminate your
personal quest.
Your philosophy professors, for example, aren’t likely to teach you the
meaning of life, but they will train you to reason more rigorously and to
discern more readily what constitutes a logically consistent argument and what
does not. And they will lead you through texts that wrestle directly with the
deepest questions of how to live, from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and
Nietzsche and beyond.
Your professors of literature, music, and art history will not tell you
how to live, but they will teach you to read, listen, and see closely, with a
keener appreciation for the artistry that makes literature, music, and visual
art sublime representations of human emotions, values, and ideas. And they will
lead you through great works that present many different models of how, and how
not, to lead a good life.
Neither will your professors of history instruct you on the values that
you should hold most close, but, by giving you an appreciation of the craft of
reconstructing the past, they will lead you to understand how meaning is
extracted from experience, which may help you to gain perspective on your own
experience. And history, too, provides models of how one should, and should
not, live.
In your effort to think through how you wish to live and what values
matter most to you, you will find that challenging questions arise not only in
the humanities. Long ago, I taught introductory economics in Yale College. I
always began by telling the students that the course would change their lives.
I still believe this. Why? Because economics will open you to an entirely new
and different way of understanding how the world works. Economics won’t
prescribe for you how society should be organized, or the extent to which
individual freedom should be subordinated to collective ends, or how the fruits
of human labor should be distributed—at home and around the world. But
understanding the logic of markets will give you a new way to think about these
questions, and, because life is lived within society and not in abstraction
from it, economics will help you to think about what constitutes a good life.
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How might a longer life span alter your thinking about how to live? |
Dean Salovey has already given you some insights gleaned from his study
as a professor of psychology. His discipline probes many fundamental questions.
What is the relationship between your brain and your conscious thoughts? To
what extent is your personality—both in its cognitive and emotional
dimensions—shaped by your genetic makeup, your past experiences, and your
own conscious decisions. The answers to these questions have an obvious bearing
on the enterprise of locating meaning in life.
Your biology and chemistry professors will not tell you how to live,
but the discoveries made in these fields over the last century have already
extended human life by 25 years in the United States. As the secrets of the
human genome are unlocked and the mechanisms of disease uncovered, life
expectancy may well increase by another decade or two. You may want to ponder
how a longer life span might alter your thinking about how to live, how to
balance family and career, and how society should best be organized to realize
the full potential of greater human longevity.
Finally, it is at the core of the physical sciences that one finds some
of the deepest and most fundamental questions relating to the meaning of human
experience. How was the physical universe created? How long will it endure? And
what is the place of humanity in the order of the universe?
For the next four years, each of you has the freedom to shape your life
and prepare for shaping the world around you. You will learn much about
yourself and your capacity to contribute to the world not only from your
courses, but also from the many friends you make and the rich array of
extracurricular activities available to you. Your courses will give you the
tools to ask and answer the questions that matter most, and your friendships and
activities will give you the opportunity to test and refine your values through
experience.
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You have four years to reflect deeply on the life you wish to lead. |
Let me warn you that daily life in Yale College is so intense that it
may sometimes seem that you have little time to stop and think. But, in truth,
you have four years—free from the pressures of career and family
obligations that you will encounter later—to reflect deeply on the life
you wish to lead and the values you wish to live by. Take the time for this
pursuit. It may prove to be the most important and enduring accomplishment of
your Yale education.
Welcome to Yale College.
"Chariot of Fire”
Excerpts from the Graduate School Matriculation Address
November/December 2007
by Jon Butler
Jon Butler is the dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
This address was delivered August 30, 2007, in Sprague Hall. The full text is
online at www.yale.edu/opa/campus/2007_freshman
/200708_butler.html.
Some famous lines by the romantic poet William Blake offer unexpected
insights into the strange links between passion and the lure of ideas that
characterize pure research and scholarship. The lines preface Blake’s prophetic
poem Milton, written early in
the nineteenth century, but they are perhaps best known to most of us as a hymn
or separately standing poem subsequently entitled, “Jerusalem.”
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Poet William Blake “burned with a vision for a new society.” |
Blake is one of Britain’s most difficult poets, and his work elicits
many interpretations. And Blake’s mystical Christian focus did not actually
reflect the already remarkable religious diversity of Britain in the early
nineteenth century, to say nothing of the modern world and the student and
faculty diversity so visibly displayed in this auditorium this morning.
Nonetheless, Blake was deeply prophetic and burned with a vision for a
new society—a new Jerusalem—radiant with justice and honor and
uprightness. To propel this aim, Blake evoked four of the most beautiful lines
that have ever described the passion that propels ideas and the rush for truth:
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
At the heart of a great university is the passion for ideas evoked in
the emotion of Blake’s lines. And this passion for ideas is our purpose and our
nature. It is what we are as a university. It is our being as a community of
scholars.
Your own passion for ideas was implicit and explicit when you applied
for graduate school a year ago. Then, the question was, would you be chosen, and
if so, whom would you choose among those who had chosen you?
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We delight as much in the problems ideas create as we find satisfaction in solutions. |
What you brought to this choice of choices was your achievement as
undergraduate scholars. Your excellence of achievement in the first stage of
your college life was your “bow of burning gold.” That attainment was not
serendipitous, accidental, or aimless. It was directed, purposeful, and
consciously shaped. It was human and highly individual. It was yours, and you
created it through the urgent endeavor that by its human definition can be only
individual.
It is this urgency of endeavor that propelled Blake to one of his most
famous lines: “Bring me my chariot of fire.” In this single, compelling image,
Blake expressed the way truth drives itself. For a university, and for those
who pursue research and scholarship, Blake evokes our most telling commitments—that
we value ideas for themselves, that we find in them endless fascination, that
we delight as much in the problems ideas create as we find satisfaction in
solutions, that we find the search for truth imaginatively exhausting, that we
are propelled never to stop.
We want you to succeed and, indeed, to prosper, and we have no shame in
saying that. Yet the apogee of that success remains simple: that ideas matter
most, for themselves, and for themselves alone. This is what makes graduate
study, scholarship, and research, so distinctive and also continuously
fascinating, so energizing, compelling, alluring, and irresistible—that
the passion for ideas is, indeed, a chariot propelled by its own internal
drive, its own fire.
Blake was right to implore, and then exclaim, “Bring me my spear! O
clouds unfold!” In a world soaked with the disappointing failures of our own
generation, we need more, not less, of what you bring to us and to the world of
ideas. We need more of your unalloyed passion for ideas—and for the
purity of ideals intrinsic to truth and to the human dignity the world’s people
deserve. Only you can bring us your urgency and your idealism. Only you can
realize their aims, perfect their ends. 
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