Asking this three-word question won’t save society, but it’s a start.
Recently, while I was stranded in a JFK airport lounge, a thoughtful 16-year-old started talking to me. “What do you do?” he asked.
“I’m a historian,” I answered. Following the protocols of status-obsessed, achievement-oriented America, the teenager followed up: “Where did you go to school?” When I replied “Harvard,” he said, breathlessly: “I want to be an investment banker. Should I go to the University of Virginia, then apply to Wharton Business School, or enroll directly in Wharton?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I have a different question I like to ask young people. How’s your soul?” He looked confused. “I get it, I’m a lunatic,” I said, breaking the tension. “But think about it. When every adult you encounter—teacher, grandparent, parent—asks what you’re studying or where you’re going to college, you learn the most important thing in life is succeeding, making money. I know the game. I appreciate its lifetime benefits. But shouldn’t grown-ups send a different message? What counts is your soul, your inner life, who you are, not what you do.”
I started asking this casually existential question a decade ago. Even then, the Academic Intifada had turned many college experiences into thought-control experiments and peer-pressure echo chambers, while still serving as credentialing factories. Cancel culture suffocated academics. The Harvard historian Jill Lepore recently recalled that around 2014, “This entire campus became incredibly prosecutorial to the public shaming stuff.”
Like most academics, Ms. Lepore kept quiet about the intolerance and illiberalism on campus. Now, she said, “I look back on that time with considerable shame at my unwillingness to really speak out.” Systemically, the silence of the tenured lambs reflected their addiction to career comforts at the cost of their souls. My soul-check has triggered various responses. A 20-year-old said, “Finance!” Mimicking a basketball shot-clock buzzer, I responded, “Ehhhh . . . wrong!” A 28-year-old hugged me and said, “No one’s ever asked me that before.”
My JFK airport friend answered as most students do: “Fine.” Then he returned to asking about college admissions. But my question bemused him. Circling back, we discussed America’s great offer of a liberal arts education. I claimed college should sharpen your brain, expand your soul and strengthen your character.
Sadly, many students today spurn this gift. Only 8.8% of bachelor’s degrees are in the humanities. The woke takeover of English, history and philosophy, the key humanities disciplines, accelerated the movement toward science, technology, engineering and mathematics, along with other “practical” or lucrative degrees. Some students fled as liberal arts professors transformed once nonpartisan classroom podiums into political platforms.
Partisanship and careerism distance universities from their original mission. Harvard’s motto, Veritas, meaning “Truth,” assumes certain absolutes are worth seeking as moral and ideological guardrails. The University of Chicago’s slogan, Crescat scientia; vita excolatur, “Let knowledge grow from more to more; and so be human life enriched,” articulates the purpose of an education. Traditionally, professors didn’t only fill young minds with facts. They believed that transferring knowledge and sharing methodologies cultivated young souls to live good lives and better the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson feared that specialization produced fragmented functionaries. In a 1837 address to Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa society, the philosopher warned about Americans suffering “amputation from the trunk,” strutting about as “so many walking monsters,⎯ a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.”
One three-word question won’t save our society, our universities or our students. But it’s progress. When elders ask young people “How’s your soul?” they’ll be making the kind of countercultural value statement all of us need.