The Reason for Being

I read with interest the article in the Ideas section of Sunday's Boston Globe, "Why Are We Here?" by Anthony Kronman, a professor of Law at Yale.

He notes sadly that all of the young men and women who began college over the last several weeks will not at their college or university have a way of exploring answers to the question, Why am I here? He writes, "In a shift of historic importance, America's colleges and universities have largely abandoned the idea that life's most important question is an appropriate subject for the classroom. In doing so, they have betrayed their students by depriving them of the chance to explore it in an organized way, before they are caught up in their careers and preoccupied."

I agree with him. He recounts how "our top universities have embraced a research-driven ideal that has squeezed the question of life's meaning from the college curriculum." At the same time, young people are hungry for meaning, for understanding the world and their place in it: they are hungry to wrestle with the big questions of life, but for which the current universities are not prepared.

He wants to promote a nonreligious nondoctrinaire approach. He believes that students need exposure to some of the great works of philosophy, literature, and art as well as to conversations in which these works are engaged like Augustine wrestling with Plato and Hobbes with Aristotle.

I thought the tone of what he said in the few references he made to religion was a bit condenscending and dismissive, but in general I think his point is well made.