Recently, while I was stranded in a JFK airport lounge, a thoughtful 16-year-old started talking to me. \u201cWhat do you do?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m a historian,\u201d I answered. Following the protocols of status-obsessed, achievement-oriented America, the teenager followed up: \u201cWhere did you go to school?\u201d When I replied \u201cHarvard,\u201d he said, breathlessly: \u201cI 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?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d I said. \u201cBut I have a different question I like to ask young people. How\u2019s your soul?\u201d He looked confused. \u201cI get it, I\u2019m a lunatic,\u201d I said, breaking the tension. \u201cBut think about it. When every adult you encounter\u2014teacher, grandparent, parent\u2014asks what you\u2019re studying or where you\u2019re 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\u2019t grown-ups send a different message? What counts is your soul, your inner life, who you are, not what you do.\u201d<\/p>\n
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, \u201cThis entire campus became incredibly prosecutorial to the public shaming stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n
Like most academics, Ms. Lepore kept quiet about the intolerance and illiberalism on campus. Now, she said, \u201cI look back on that time with considerable shame at my unwillingness to really speak out.\u201d 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, \u201cFinance!\u201d Mimicking a basketball shot-clock buzzer, I responded, \u201cEhhhh . . . wrong!\u201d A 28-year-old hugged me and said, \u201cNo one\u2019s ever asked me that before.\u201d<\/p>\n
My JFK airport friend answered as most students do: \u201cFine.\u201d Then he returned to asking about college admissions. But my question bemused him. Circling back, we discussed America\u2019s great offer of a liberal arts education. I claimed college should sharpen your brain, expand your soul and strengthen your character.<\/p>\n
Sadly, many students today spurn this gift. Only 8.8% of bachelor\u2019s 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 \u201cpractical\u201d or lucrative degrees. Some students fled as liberal arts professors transformed once nonpartisan classroom podiums into political platforms.<\/p>\n
Partisanship and careerism distance universities from their original mission. Harvard\u2019s motto, Veritas, meaning \u201cTruth,\u201d assumes certain absolutes are worth seeking as moral and ideological guardrails. The University of Chicago\u2019s slogan, Crescat scientia; vita excolatur, \u201cLet knowledge grow from more to more; and so be human life enriched,\u201d articulates the purpose of an education. Traditionally, professors didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
Ralph Waldo Emerson feared that specialization produced fragmented functionaries. In a 1837 address to Harvard\u2019s Phi Beta Kappa society, the philosopher warned about Americans suffering \u201camputation from the trunk,\u201d strutting about as \u201cso many walking monsters,\u23af a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.\u201d<\/p>\n
One three-word question won\u2019t save our society, our universities or our students. But it\u2019s progress. When elders ask young people \u201cHow\u2019s your soul?\u201d they\u2019ll be making the kind of countercultural value statement all of us need.<\/p>\n