Samuel Goldman is an associate professor of political science at George Washington University.
The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
—George Eliot, Middlemarch
The late Peter Augustine Lawler, a political theorist who taught for many years at Berry College and died in 2016, was among the wisest people I have known. Asked about the good life, Peter would answer that human beings require three things to be happy. First, we need enough money that we do not face constant anxiety about our physical well-being. Second, we need work that we find meaningful—which does not necessary involve the highest remuneration or status. Finally, we need interpersonal relationships, above all, familial love.
When I was younger, I was confused by the prosaic quality of these attainments. Peter’s list did not include the more dramatic goals that I learned about in graduate school. Unlike Socrates, Peter did not claim the unexamined life is not worth living. Unlike Plato, he did not insist on the necessity of theoretical knowledge. Unlike Aristotle, Peter did not suggest that citizenship in a virtuous political community is essential.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to understand that modesty was part of Peter’s wisdom. While he departed from Aristotle in certain respects, he took seriously the insistence that the good life for a human being must also be achievable by ordinary humans. A small number of exceptions might aspire to the heights of philosophy, politics, or religion, but it is not clear that this aspiration makes them happy. And for most of us, a reasonable degree of security, purpose, and the mutual affection of friends and family are the best that we can do.
I often think of Peter when I encounter grandiose claims about the benefits of higher education. Desperate to justify the large subsidies, high prices, and long period of study required for graduation, universities and their representatives make extraordinary claims about the rewards of attendance. Our degrees are supposed to provide dramatic economic advantages. Our classes are described as “transformative” experiences. Our residential facilities promise not only material comfort, but membership in a “community of care”.
There are two big problems with such assertions. The first is that they are, at best, partial truths. College graduates are more likely to earn sufficient incomes. But the biggest gains are concentrated in a few technical majors and the average “wage premium” has recently declined. A few courses do change students’ thinking in significant ways. Yet the vast majority of students end up in majors of dubious academic value.
And even those who pursue traditional academic subjects don’t necessarily learn much—partly because they also don’t study very much. As for community, some students find lifelong friends and spouses in college or through alumni networks that play an important role in so-called “assortative mating”—in plain English, the tendency of people with degrees to marry other people with degrees. But it’s unclear that this is because of, and may well occur despite, the ever more intrusive controls that colleges impose on their dorms and official associations.
Colleges and universities are hardly the only institutions to exaggerate their value. Because they are supposed to be dedicated to the pursuit of truth, though, the distance between rhetoric and reality is particularly damaging to their authority. In the best case, promising more than we can reliably deliver makes us seem naïve. In the worst case, it makes us look like liars. Declining confidence in higher education has many causes. But the perception that the most prominent representatives of colleges and universities don’t believe what they’re saying doesn’t help.
Peter Lawler taught me that a plausible account of the good life has to be realistic as well as aspirational. The same counsel applies to understanding the contribution of higher education to such a life.
To begin doing that, we should acknowledge that for most students, college attendance is the most significant financial commitment that they and their families will make apart from the purchase of a house. Under these circumstances, appeals to learning for its own sake are not merely ineffective, but likely counterproductive. Rather than conveying intellectual seriousness, they tell students that university administrators, staff, and faculty are either too unworldly or too cynical to provide reliable guidance.
Traditional disciplines cannot and should not compete by crude measures of increased income. Still, they must demonstrate that they are part of a career path that is legible outside the academy. One way to do that is interdisciplinary programs that combine the liberal arts with some pre-professional orientation. This could include majors or degree courses in Politics, Philosophy, Economics, and Law, for example the offerings by the new Hamilton Center at the University of Florida.
At the same time, we can remind students that happiness depends more on the meaningfulness of work than the compensation it attracts. Once you’re in a position to pay your bills (or student loans), it’s not so important how much you earn. Universities can’t tell students what their first or last job will be—yet another unrealistic promise. What they can do is expose students to ways of identifying and comparing purposes that they wouldn’t otherwise encounter. The main reason to continue teaching “great books” is not to promote cultural literacy (although it is true that cultural literacy will help them live well in a society that is infused by teachings and institutions that developed long ago). It is that such books make arguments about the right way to live—and students might find those arguments convincing.
Many instructors lament that students no longer read, even to pre-pandemic standards. It’s hard to find quantitative data to support this claim—although it may be that reluctance to believe narrative accounts until we see numbers is itself one of the causes. In any case, the anecdotes are sufficiently numerous to be plausible. So what to do?
The answer is make to “deep” literacy a central part of the curriculum. Stated that way, it sounds platitudinous. What this actually means is requiring to students to read, together, from physical texts, out-loud if necessary, with frequent pauses to interpret, assess, and reflect. These methods can, in principle, be applied to any subject. But they work best with books or documents that are actually worth reading, for their own sake, and not merely as sources of information or expressions of a certain period or perspective. In Our Declaration, Harvard professor Danielle Allen, demonstrates how one might build a whole course around reading the Declaration of Independence, line by line, word for word. The fact that she successfully taught such courses at both the University of Chicago and an adult education program suggests that they are neither too elementary nor out of reach for students in other kinds of institutions.
I mention the Declaration because its importance to my own fields of political theory and intellectual history. But I see no reason that similar approaches could not be used for poems, plays, novels, or other genres. As general education requirements have been weakened, many professors have turned to increasingly broad surveys intended to ensure that students have at least some understanding of whole fields before moving on to specialized courses. Especially at the introductory level, it might be more effective—and more rewarding for students as well as instructors—to focus tightly on just one or a few sources, figures, or ideas.
Finally, students need the freedom to make decisions, take risks, and suffer the consequences—including in their pursuit of love and friendship. That means resisting the stifling administrative regime that has descended over residential and associational life. Because it is partly driven by regulatory compliance and universities have a financial interest in filling dorms, this is difficult to accomplish from the inside. Partly because it’s cheaper, though, students should be encouraged to live off-campus as soon as permitted.
Freedom to face the consequences extends to matters of discipline. In the recent anti-Israel demonstrations, student demonstrators claimed their tactics were inspired by classes on revolutionary thinkers, marketing materials that celebrate histories of campus protest, and extracurricular programs that reward activism. Indeed, not just students, but many members of the faculty, staff, and administration portrayed the protests in these ways and believed that there should be no penalties for breaking campus rules, and sometimes laws, in service of what they regarded as a righteous cause. Such inconsistent enforcement is not just inconsistent with the order that universities require to fulfill their academic functions or a reflection of political favoritism. It also inverts the moral logic of civil disobedience, which depends on being willing to accept penalties in service of a higher principle. Consistent discipline instruct students that if universities are not the engines of economic mobility or havens of intellectual development that they sometimes claim to be, neither are they dedicated platforms for social movements.
These suggestions are not equally appropriate to all schools or students. In fact, the majority of enrollment in higher education is by working adults attending non-residential institutions. Most of these students, however, don’t need administrators or professors to tell them about the good life. They would benefit from degree programs with higher standards, lower costs, and less deceptive advertising, particularly at for-profit institutions they’re more likely to attend.
I’ve also said little about the minority of students, of any age and background, who are drawn to what is pompously called the life of the mind. These are the students whom most academics once were. They are also the students who populate our visions of lively seminars, late-night argument, and relationships built around a passion for books and ideas.
Students like these do exist, and it is a joy to teach them. They are also too few to provide a useful ideal for any but the smallest institutions. Such mission-driven colleges are beautiful and valuable. But they will always be exceptions to American rule.
More important, perhaps, such students need little encouragement to imitate Socrates or study Plato—or whatever figures, writers, or artifacts captivate their souls. They’ll do that anyway. What they do need are reminders of just how odd, impractical, and, ultimately, secondary these activities are to the goods that define a life well-lived for those of us who are not geniuses or statesmen—which is to say, almost everybody.
That is what Peter Lawler, perhaps the best teacher I ever met and one with whom I never took a formal class, did for me.
This completes our 2023-24 series: “What has the university to do with the good life?” We’ll return in early Fall 2024 for our next series addressing the question: “What does every university and college student need to learn?”