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.

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,”¹ 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.²

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.

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.

Dressed for the occasion, new Yale students attended an open house at the President's House, where they were greeted by President Levin and Jane Levin.

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.”

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.

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.

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 make-up, 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.

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.

1. Anthony T. Kronman, “Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life,” New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007.

2. “Reports on the Course of Instruction in Yale College.” New Haven: The Yale Corporation, 1828, p. 7.

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T H I SW E E K ' SS T O R I E S

Grant to fund study of stress & self-control

Award-winning researcher named new engineering dean

Zipcar service offers environmentally friendly travel option

Community invited to meet World Fellows at open house, series

FRESHMAN ADDRESSES

• President Richard C. Levin: The Questions That Matter
  
  
• Dean Peter Salovey: The Pursuit of Happiness
  
  

Britton reappointed to second term as Berkeley Divinity School dean

Development Office announces new associate vice presidents

ENDOWED PROFESSORSHIPS

• Dr. Richard Belitsky is the Harold W. Jockers Associate Professor
  
  
• James Duncan is named the Ebenezer K. Hunt Professor
  
  
• Dr. Erol Fikrig appointed the Waldemar Von Zedtwitz Professor
  
  
• Dr. Sally Shaywitz is designated the Audrey Ratner Professor
  
  

‘Art for Yale’ celebrates ‘outpouring of gifts’ to gallery

Team seeking key to unlock link between stress and addictive behavior

School of Public Health creates new deanship in academic affairs

F&ES student working to insure survival of the snow leopard

Yale Rep opens its new season with Shakespeare classic

New York Times columnist to offer ‘Mobile Gadget Show-and-Tell’

New works by painter and printmaker Nathan Margalit . . .

While You Were Away ...

Biomass energy is the topic of talk by award-winning engineer

In Memoriam: Biochemists Joseph Fruton and Sofia Simmonds

Campus Notes

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