What is College For? - Purposes of College Education, Lecture 1

I'm Pericles Lewis. I'm the dean of Yale College and I hope you're here for purposes of college education uh the Deain lectures. Our first uh topic for today is the question what is college for? Now I see a good number of the community members who have signed up. This is Battel Chapel. It was built in the 1870s. If I don't know if any of you were at Yale in the 1870s, but the um the you will recall that there was required daily chapel. In fact, it was day it was twice daily for some portion of the 19th century. Only in 1925 did they cut it back to three days a week. And the dean at the time would certainly have had a word with the students who were late for chapel. But we're going to be very welcoming. Please come on in if you're uh and and take a seat. Um today I want to give a just an overview of what this series of lectures in this course are going to be all about. Uh but I have a little bit of background information I'd like to share first. Um first of all I'd like to we we'll go through uh the idea of the purposes and contexts of college education. Uh then we'll talk about the structure and content of the course. I'm going to tell you a little bit about myself. We're going to end with a poem Rilka's uh archaic torso of Apollo. So the course is on the purposes of college education and the focus is really on the kind of a college education we offer at Yale. Sometimes called a liberal education or a liberal arts education or an education in the arts and sciences. Um but I'll talk about some other dimensions of uh college education more broadly as well. Um and I'll tell you a little bit about how we're going to do that. it. I'd like to start with an overview of some of the themes we're going to talk about. So, I start the course with themes. Well, before I get to that, sorry, I'm got to remember the sequence of my slides. If you have a note paper, and if you don't have a note paper, this is the one time it's okay to use an electronic device. Uh particularly if you're a student, please note down three reasons why you decided to come to Yale. And if you're an alum, uh please note down three reasons you decided to come to Yale. And if you went to some other college, please note down three reasons you decided to go there. Or if you did not go to college, please note down three reasons why you did not go to college. You have about a minute or two to to do that. Again, if you'd come to Yale uh in the 19th century, well, certainly if you'd come in the 18th century, your teacher would have been a minister. I am not a minister. Uh, but I'm going to take advantage of this wonderful location to ask you each to turn to your neighbor and explain to them one or two or all three of the reasons you decided to go to Yale or whatever college you decided to go to or that you decided not that you did not wind up going to college. So, please have that conversation for a couple of minutes. Hello everybody, interrupting for a sec. I I'm now going to ask a slightly different version of the question which is why did you decide to go to college at all if you decide to go to college at all and some of you have already answered the question of why you did not go to college so but you know contemplate that a little bit and talk to your neighbor a little bit more about that question not so much Yale or the particular college you went to but why go to college and now you've got another minute or two for So I now see there are great advantages to meeting in the chapel. It seems to be welldesigned architecturally for this kind of thing. Unfortunately, not so well designed for me to get feedback from you because we in the past I've used a system on your phone where you can enter three things and I can show you a word cloud of what people said. I'm not able to collect the answers but I hope you found interesting answers and I will share with you some of the answers that Yale college students have shared with me in previous years. Uh this is reasons to go to Yale. And I arranged them sort of from the more general to the more specific and a little bit from the um uh the things that might be in a sense general about college to the things that might be specific about Yale. Uh people often say they come here for the community, the people, obviously the academics, the kind of education we offer, the liberal arts. Um but also there's the dimension of opportunity that Yale represents the prestige acrewing to Yale and its name and its brand as it were. Uh some people focused on athletics. The residential college system is one of those things that's very important to the Yale identity and often a draw for students and more broadly student life. And then when I ask students the broader question which I asked you about why attend college at all and I'll be interested to know maybe in later feedback to what extent these are the topics that came up with you and I meant to ask you also why you came to the deain lectures but maybe I'll get another chance to ask you about that here that the answers were I would say obviously not Yale specific because that was the point but why do people go to college in general and I've arranged these answers they're not in terms of frequency but they're in a sense from the more goal orient oriented ones like having a better career opportunity which was on the other one as well. Developing academic skills to some that are a little bit more social. My family expects me to go to college. I never even thought of not going to college. It was just a built-in expectation or I want to have a better future than my parents had. They didn't go to college. I'm first generation and this is opportunity for me as well as broader subjects that we already saw like community leadership athletics and then some that were more of a philosophical character to become more open-minded to become a better person uh to have more well-rounded knowledge. Um I think all of these are good reasons to come to college. I'm going to focus in the first twothirds or threequarters of the course, the months of September, October, and November on my what I think of as the internal purposes of education. That is to say, the things that education offers you that are intrinsic intrinsically valuable in themselves regardless of what they gain for you afterwards. They do also sometimes gain things for you afterwards. And then in the last couple of weeks of the semester after Thanksgiving, I'm going to talk a little bit more about the social context and the economic context uh for higher education. So the first topic for the first month or so is uh or first few weeks is character. The educa education of character and some of you may have heard me speak at the opening assembly last week or at a similar address I gave about a year ago on the topic of character education and the debate essentially to what extent is it the job of universities to help students develop moral rightness and ability to make moral decisions. uh and also to what extent are we even capable of doing that? Do the 18 year olds who are sort of the median age of students who arrive here or 19 or 20 year olds or older students who arrive are they actually ready to be shaped by the institution or are they basically already have their characters already formed? I remember we were discussing a candidate for tenure from another institution in the English department. I'm an English professor by the way uh some 20 years ago. I wasn't yet 40 and we were talking about well this person you know we don't really like the work they did but they might change you know they've got another phase of their career coming and one of my older colleagues said to me people don't change after the age of 40 so there's that interesting question when do people change I tend to believe that people change all through their lives and obviously if we believe that part of what college is doing is educating you in character then in particular the college the typical college age is one of those obviously When my predecessors were ministers, they had a kind of moral authority to tell students how to behave that maybe a PhD doesn't automatically grant anymore. I would also say that we do have from psychology an understanding of the fact that young adults 18 to 25 still have uh their their minds are still developing, their brains are still developing. And that um development means that they're plastic. there is they're neurologically plastic more capable of being reformed and that's also why uh the college has to act in some extent in locarentus in the place of a parent and handle disciplinary issues and so on that are of a slightly different type than my colleagues the deans of the graduate and professional schools have to encounter because young people are still developing in all kinds of ways. So one of my favorite I'm going to give you one favorite quotation for each of the topics just to get us started. One of my favorite quotations is from the novelist Marcel P. And this is a a saying by a painter who um whom the narrator, this is a very long book, 3,000 pages or more. And the narrator meets up with this painter at different stages in his life, and only realizes partway through the book that this painter is the same character. He's heard terrible stories about from when the painter was a young man. I think the students may have had a hard time locating the chapel. So um everything is on will be online so you can catch up there and we'll also have the slides on the website immediately after the class if anybody'd like to review any of this. So here's what Puce uh painter says. There is no man however wise who has not at some period of his youth said things or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly if he could expune it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unh wholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded. So the notion here is that all the mistakes you make in your youth, Hamlet has a similar kind of saying, all the mistakes and and misbehavior you make in your youth shape you turn you into who you are and in some sense you wouldn't want to give them up because you've in some in some way learned from them. You've also been shaped by them in other senses. That is to say your current predicament is partly a result of how you behaved when you were young and everything you went through when you were young. I think that college when many many I see many people whom I take to be my contemporaries or a little bit more than my contemporaries. I graduated from college in 1990. At that time there was no social media. There weren't even cell phones etc. And all of the foolish things that I did in college were not recorded by me or my friends except perhaps in notebooks that I subsequently burned. So uh young people today have a more difficult time going through this process of learning from their errors because their errors are likely to um stay with them. Uh and indeed we often have kids who come here at 18 and are embarrassed by something they wrote on social media when they were in high school. Although I what I fear is that more and more uh even high school students are needing to curate their identity as it's represented by social media. I'm not a totally antisocial media person. follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn. But um but I think these are consequences of our current situation. So the question about character is to what extent may college change who you are and how you live. And as I say, we'll come back to the debate about whether it really can do that, whether education and especially formal education can do that. Another debated topic is community in general. uh people like me, deans and uh political leaders and university leaders and religious leaders um CEOs uh extol community and say what a wonderful thing community is how great it is to belong to a community which I I don't disagree with. There is much positive aspect of a community. But we're also going to look at some of the possible downsides of community like a community that's too uh rigid in its enforcement of norms and and causes people to be conformist for example or uh ways in which a community in addition to including people can also exclude people. How do you define a community in relation to inclusion and exclusion and who gets to be part of it here? Although we're going to cover Mill, John Stewart Mill, the liberal 19th century liberal philosopher primarily under conversation a little bit later in the course. I'd like to refer to this passage from on liberty in which he says as it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions. So is it that there should be different experiments of living that free scope should be given to varieties of character short of injuries to others injury to others and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically when anyone thinks fit to try them. Now Mill was speaking in a time of great conformism. Vi Victorian era. He was a feminist and he was uh at least reluctant to affirm belief in God. Uh and he was also involved in a important extrammarital relationship. We might talk more about that later on. Uh but he wanted a more liberal society in the sense of one that permitted people to behave in a broader way range of ways. One of the things I think it's almost uh despite what I just said about the problem of young people's possible mistakes following them uh after they graduate from college. I think it is also the case that the American system of college education where students have four years to to at least in the case of colleges like Yale and many peers to live on campus to be in a community uh to be to some extent relieved of the responsibility of earning their own uh living that they haven't yet gone on to full adult uh status in some ways and they may be technically adults. Some are serving in the military. they get the right to vote. But in other ways, you know, especially if you live live on campus, your meals are prepared for you. You're not entirely living the full out adult life out there in the world. And an advantage of that is that it gives students some time during those four years to think about the kind of life that they want to live to to do what Mill calls experiments in uh in living. Uh again, I worry that while those of us who went to college in the 20th century probably experimented a lot, um I know I won't go into all the experiments I undertook, but anyway, that um that it's a little harder to undertake those experiments. Now, I'm not referring specifically to drugs, although obviously that might be on people's minds because obviously marijuana has been legalized to some extent and maybe that's changed a little bit. But in other regards, I think we live in a culture that's perhaps a little bit too afraid of making mistakes. We'll come back in about three weeks to Yale's 18th century Puritan heritage, which I think is important not only for understanding Yale, uh, but also for understanding something about the American character and the fact that our country is in general not all that forgiving of people who make errors. And so uh what I hope for for college especially for those of you who are here as as undergraduates is an opportunity to experiment to look around to try new things on and not to feel compelled to be in a box or to be on perfect behavior all the time. I'm not encouraging you to misbehave get just to be clear I'm just encouraging you to to look around and experiment a bit. So the question uh will be what do we learn by living in a college community? um and to what extent is that diminished either by social media, by career pressures, by other phenomena, conformity in the culture. Next, we'll talk about citizenship and especially in the United States, liberal education has often been uh related to preparing people for citizenship. Uh I'm really getting into 18th century Yale now I realize but the New England was a place with a very high level of literacy which was connected to Protestant belief that people should read the Bible daily. Uh but that idea of literacy and then universal primary education and eventually universal secondary education was closely connected to the idea that the colleges would be places to um to develop knowledge. But in addition to the knowledge which was often theological knowledge, knowledge about God but not exclusively, there was also the sense especially in the 19th century once you had the new republic, the the the United States had become a country, it was becoming increasingly democratic that the typical citizen needed to be able to read and write and of course quantify things and do a certain level of math, but particularly to be able to read and write in order to be a well-informed citizen so that when they asked their vote or they served on a jury, they were not doing so in an ignorant fashion. And so, uh, 19th century United States had a pretty strong emphasis on universal literacy and education. And that also shaped ideas about what the purpose of college was. We'll come back to the moral act, which was passed during the Civil War to develop universities all across the country in order to expand higher education. It's partly connected to the economy. There's no doubt about that. in the sense that people needed a certain level of training to be successful economically but it's also largely connected to the question of citizenship here I like to speak about Hana Aren uh who uh said that to be a citizen means among other things to have responsibilities obligations and rights and one of the questions we'll ask during the course is how can college best prepare students to participate in democratic life for example should students be learning about the constitution and the declaration of independent. Should everyone take a course in American history? Should we have some other kind of courses on civic thought or civic engagement? Should we have required community service? Uh or are we in preparing students for citizenship in some much broader way by something like living in a community and learning how to live together and work together. These are debates about the purposes of college education that I hope we can discuss. And the last unit of uh before Thanksgiving uh deals with conversation. Um underlying uh the educational program or sort of the basis of the educational program is a conversation. Uh we'll a lot of the course is going to be engaging with ancient philosophers and particularly Plato who often uh created their arguments in the form of conversations. face-to-face conversation uh is the basis of a lot of education, including a lot of education at Yale. There's a reason that we think that coming all together and speaking, even if this is much more one way than some of the conversations in the seminar rooms, but that we think that in-person education is important, but more broadly, students coming to Yale are also or to any college are also engaging in a broad conversation with the development and pursuit of knowledge. Our mission statement says that we're here to preserve disseminate preserve create and disseminate knowledge or basically to extend the frontiers of knowledge and to share that knowledge with students both through research and through teaching. So participation in that extension of the boundaries of knowledge is has been a part of universities for a long time. I mean, Newton was doing that in the 17th century in Cambridge, but it became a particularly important part of the role of the university a little bit later in its history in the late 19th century with the rise of the research university often on the German model. A lot of Americans went to Germany to get PhDs to learn the new sciences. And the whole idea of the university as the engine of research took off then and was really expanded by the expansion of federal support for scientific research in particular after the Second World War. Um and so Yale College, which was founded in 1701 to to educate undergraduates, is now of course Yale University. It became that midway through the 19th century. and the college education takes place in the context of this much broader conversation which represents research. So um here I like to quote Confucious who says at the beginning of his analcts uh which basically means conversation uh the master said there are series of quotations and dialogues with confucious. Is it not a pleasure to learn and when it is timely to practice what you have learned? Is it not a joy to have friends coming from afar? Is it not gentlemanly not to become resentful if no one takes notice of your learning? So in a sense, this notion that learning is about conversation and recognizing another person and their knowledge and being able to exchange with them is uh key to education going back to Confucious and Plato and Aristotle whom we'll talk about in the next couple of weeks. uh but also I think remains particularly important now and in a sense perhaps as we'll see at the end of the course eclipses the more traditional uh idea of education as character building or participation of community or preparation for citizenship with the idea that uh our main goal is the pursuit of knowledge and the dissemination of knowledge. So we'll come to a little bit more of that. Now as I mentioned towards the end of the course we're going to talk about some of the other contexts of of higher education. You'll see that I've talked about these first four as purposes because they are um they're sort of internal intrinsic features of an education. Uh the next ones are not exactly exttrinsic but they're to some extent the the conditions around which education is um made possible. So the first question in that area is going to be about the curriculum. What should students learn? Obviously, this is something that educators, professors are particularly interested in. We spend a lot of time debating what students should learn, probably more of on that than how they should learn it, for example. Um, but that question of the curriculum is to a large extent a negotiation between the the purposes of the college education, the goals of the students and and their parents um and perhaps their future employers and the idea of the faculty about what knowledge really is. So we'll look at the history of the curriculum a little bit in late November and then we're going to turn to some of the social and economic contexts of higher education. What is the role of higher education with respect to social class? Uh does it reinforce social class? Does it allow people access to the middle class who wouldn't otherwise have it? Why does education cost so much? And to what extent does education prepare you for careers? Now, when I'm speaking to parents of newly admitted students, I um I start with this these ones because those are very much on their mind when they're thinking, should I send my kid to Yale or some other university? Look, it costs a lot. Are they going to get a job afterwards? And that kind of thing. Uh but for now, I'd like to sort of bracket those economic and sociological considerations and focus more on on the philosophical topics. Okay. A little bit about the structure and content of the course. If you're a student, can you just raise your hand like a an enrolled student? Oh, there's quite a lot of you, but you've just hidden yourselves very effectively there. And can you hear me at the back? All right. Yeah. Okay, great. So, this is primarily for you. Um, why am I teaching this course now? Well, um, it's 325 years of Yale College. Maybe you know that we Yale was founded on October 9th, 1701 by an act of the legislature. In those days, the Connecticut colony legislature met both in Hartford and New Haven and had a meeting in New Haven on October 9th, 1701 where it approved an idea promagated by 10 ministers of the Congregational Church to found a college. And so we'll learn a little bit about that. So I thought that was a good time to do it. But it's also a time when there are a lot of debates out there about what is the purpose of higher education. And I think many of you are probably aware of the problem of trust in higher education. and President McKinnis uh established a committee chaired by Beverly Gage and Julia Adams, two faculty and with eight other faculty members on it to investigate why is there been a decline in trust in higher education that's quite measurable in opinion polls left and right, Democratic and Republican over the last decade or or a little bit more than a decade now and what's the source of this? And I thought that's another good reason to talk about the purposes of higher education. It's also just something I'm interested in. I want you to know that I am not an expert on Plato. Um I I'm somewhat of an academic expert in some other things. I'm going to tell you more about myself in a little bit. Uh but the main reading for the course is Plato's Republic because it's the most important book on the philosophy of education and also because I think my after 28 years of teaching at Yale, my view is that it's important when you're a college student to read a hard book. It's important to read hard books in general, but it's also important to read a hard book that you might not otherwise read. And there really isn't a better one than Plato's Republic. There are you're going to see that I don't agree with everything Plato says, but he raises a lot of questions that are very, very important. Uh, and even though you might think, well, he wrote it in the 4th century BC. How relevant are they today? They remain highly relevant today. But reading Plato is not easy. Um, and we're going to read one book per week. A book is about 35 pages. You should. Here's the co the translation we're using by Alan Bloom who was a professor at the University of Chicago. Uh so please get this book. It only costs 12 or $13. It's definitely worth the investment and read it along with me. Uh there are footnotes in the back that are worth reading. I'm going to come to our AI policy. There's nothing wrong with asking AI or Google or some website to summarize some of what's going on in Plato. It'll make it hard easier for you to follow. But do read every word. And my advice if you want to get to be a better reader is read the Plato first and then as then go to the um other sources. Although sometimes there's an argument read the footnotes in the back of the book first so that when Plato refers to something that happens in Homer or whatever you know what it is. I recommend for everybody this other book that goes that for me goes along with it which is Julia Annis's an introduction to Plato's Republic. But I do want to warn you that it's not an introduction of the kind that's like uh this is a fun short introduction. This is going to be easy. It sort of assumes you know quite a lot about philosophy. So I've worked through it a couple of times. I found it's very meaningful and um useful. But there may be other sources that we'll recommend over the course of the semester if you want to have u other ways of introducing yourself to to the republic. But the main thing is to read the republic. We're also going to talk a little bit about the history of education, the development of liberal education, in particular Yale College. I have about five or six lectures planned on different aspects of the history of Yale College and to some extent the broader university. They are interspersed with the other units. We're going to look at the sociology and the economics and the politics of education. As I say, a lot of that is going to be in the last couple of weeks because I'm trying to bracket certain questions for the start, but it's not exclusively there because many of the questions Plato is asking are in fact sociological or economic or or political questions and we will be reading other we'll be referring at least to other thinkers who have views on these matters. There is some literature, music and art uh for context and uh and for illustration. I'll say that the literature is the stuff I actually have some expertise in, but it's not what I'm going to spend most of the time on. So, just this is just sort of truth in advertising. So, now turning to Plato. Um Plato was born around 428 B.CE. in Athens, which was during the Pelpeneisian War. He came from an aristocratic family. He was a follower of the philosopher Socrates. Socrates is the main character in most of Plato's dialogues which are referred to as Socratic dialogues. It's Socrates having a conversation with other people. You'll see that most of the republic is Socrates having a conversation with two brothers of Plato himself. Um Socrates was dead by the time Plato wrote um the republic. He he drank hammlock to commit suicide as his punishment for corrupting the minds of the youth in Athens. Um the charge was impioty that he'd gone against the Greek the Athenian gods. Uh but there are is speculation to what extent was it religious versus political in the sense that he was a an oppo opponent of the democracy that was in place for a little while at the time that he was tried and and found guilty. Uh but it's also the case that it's not easy to make a distinction between politics and religion in ancient Athens anyway. But but that's who Socrates was. Both Socrates and Plato are critical of Athenian democracy. And although Athenian democracy was not a lot like uh modern American democracy, their criticisms of Athenian democracy remain relevant today as we look at our own democracy and try and justify it. An important feature of the republic which is as it says here a dialogue about the city but also a dialogue about the soul is uh socratic irony. Uh so irony can mean a lot of things in the in its most basic sense. It means saying one thing and meaning another or implying another meaning. Uh and very often Socrates says something but he's sort of trying to catch up as interlocutor. And so don't take everything that Socrates says necessarily at face value. Plato lived a nice long life and died in the mid-4th century B.C.E. I mentioned that partly in contrast to Pericles. Now we're going to come to Pericles later in the semester, but poor Pericles died uh of the plague right in the middle of the Pelpeneisian war, which during co I was quite worried about this, but fortunately so far so good. Um so now this is primarily for the students, but you're very welcome as uh other guests to uh to do this. I'm going to ask each student to make a course journal. If you arrived late, we're a no electronics classroom chapel. Uh and you should have two notebooks. One to write your notes for today and for your sections on and one to keep a little bit of a journal. And the first um assignment is to have three brief conversations a little like the brief ones we had earlier. one with another student uh who's not in the course, one with a faculty member or a staff member or community member, and one with somebody who doesn't have anything to do with Yale, make a phone call or or uh somehow connect with somebody not connected to Yale and think about what are the purposes of a college education or more simply what is college for and please write one or two pages of reflections on that. I'll turn now to logistical details and then I'm going to give you the quick tour of my biography for what it's worth. Um the lectures will be here at 2:30 Monday and Wednesday. Uh there are a couple of exceptions. The most prominent of which is that we are meeting on Friday this week. Monday classes would be on Labor Day. So instead of having Monday classes on Labor Day, we have them on Friday. So if you're interested, please come back on Friday. Uh there will be 26 lectures. Attendance is required. The reading is tough. Um, the first book of Plato is our topic for next Wednesday, September 9th. So, please read the first book of the Republic and think to yourself, do I want to read nine more of these? And I will not be offended if you choose to take another course instead. Students have until uh Friday the 11th to decide what courses they want to take. Um, recording, access to the recordings will be available. For example, one of our classes falls on Yam Kapor. We can get you the recording for that and it will be published eventually, but it may be a little bit delayed. um and bring paper and pen and pencil and put away your electronics. Um students, you have a section that will start next week. We have uh three TFS whom I'll introduce in a moment. And we have um you'll have two one-page response essays, the reading journal that I was just talking about. Um three quizzes and two five-page papers. So, it's a fair amount of written work. And now, I'd just like to ask members of the course team to stand up and and wave. Here they are. Uh, for the Deain staff, we have Jasmine, Nina, and Matthew, whom I I saw Matthew, and I saw Nina and Jasmine back there. And then, um, our teaching fellows are Estraa. Am I saying it right? Estraa, Samantha, and Nicholas. Stand up for a sec so people can see you. And their sections start next week. And then our venue and production staff. Can everybody wave? I hope I got everybody. Just wave. and um and Allison Coleman who's our course coordinator. So if you have questions about anything course related, Allison can help to answer those. And now I'm a rather private person actually and I learned early in my career as an instructor that people that the students actually want to know who their professor is. So this is a little painful for me, but I'm just going to give you like four minutes of my life. So these this is me and my kids uh and my wife at my son's graduation. He was Trumble class of 22. My daughter is Trumbull class of 24. So I have some experience of this from the point of view of what I'd like to call the customer's point of view as the parent. And I one of my mottos as dean is to keep the customer satisfied. Um these are my ancestors. Um my my mother's side came from England ultimately and Scotland and were at at this time in the early 20th century were fairly prosperous. You can see them all in their little sailor suits. The taller boy is my mother's father, my maternal grandfather. My parents were my father's family is Jewish from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, the the pale of settlement. This was taken I think in Pulava or near there in Ukraine. I am probably the eighth cousin of Vladimir Zalinsky because everybody is related there. And the the girl standing up is my grandmother, my father's mother. So that's my great great grandfather with the beard. I'm probably pretty rare among people my age and having pictures of two of my four great greatgrandfathers. My other great great-grandfather that I have a picture of also had a beard of a different type of beard. So anyway, these are my my maternal and paternal grandmothers in Toronto in the 1920s or 1930s, which just shows you that people took better pictures back then. And so I recommend to all of you who are in the bloom of youth to make sure somebody takes a really excellent portrait of you so your grandchildren can have it. Um, and then this is me. You can tell which one is me and my two sisters with my very young mother. Uh, the picture taken by my father in the 1970s. My father also took this picture on the left of me in the colorful shirt. The students usually like to see me with long hair. Uh, the older gentleman here, can you raise your hands if you ever had hair nearly as long as that? Quite a few. Quite a few. Right now, you might think I was some kind of hippie, but I was studying for my PhD. And the magazine I'm reading there is The Economist. It wasn't like Rolling Stone magazine or anything like that. So, I was not exactly a radical at that time. I mentioned that I'm no expert in Plato. I don't want you to be too worried. I mean, I've read the book many times during my life, but I'm not a philosopher by training. I'm a literary critic by training. And a lot of the time I teach another long book, which is Joyce's Ulyses, which you can see in this picture that the Yale Daily News took of me when I was on the tenure track. Um, I often say, you know, with biblical things in mind, I've been teaching at Yale for uh 28 years. The first seven years I was trying to get tenure, which is like the lean years in Joseph's dream. And then uh the next seven years I had tenure, which is like the fat years. It's the reverse of the way it goes in the Bible. So that was 14 years as a faculty as a regular faculty member. And I've now been 14 years in university administration, which believe me, I think counts as 140 years or at least 98 years. Uh, one of the things I did was I was the founding president of Yale N US college in Singapore and I did not design the set for this meeting with the um I'm shaking hands there with the chancellor of the National University of Singapore but the prime minister also oh no this is the sorry I'm sorry he had had been the chancellor of the national university of Singapore but at this point he was the president of the republic of Singapore Tony Tan and he um the prime minister also came to some of these events this is the opening ceremonies if you see those books you probably can't read them. But somebody put together the set and it shows us reading uh the Republic, the Odyssey by Homer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith and the Analcts of Confucious. So it's a little western bias. The curriculum was in fact uh quite balanced between the West and Asia. And that inspires a little bit of what you'll hear from me about Asian philosophy and thought over the course of this semester. That's me at the time sort of Dorian Greyel like and this is me being made dean of Yale College. So I came back from Singapore about nine years ago to work on international strategy for the university and I've been dean of Yale College for four years. So that wasn't too painful but that gives you a sense of my uh administrative and academic background that leads me to be teaching you a course about the purposes of higher education of of college education of liberal education. And I try and draw on my experience both setting up a liberal arts college in Singapore and running a college within a great university here as dean of Yale College to give you some of the some insight into how I think how I think colleges today serve the higher purposes of a liberal education. So I hope you'll find the course use useful and interesting. Um I want to end today's uh lecture with Rilka's poem about the archaic torso of Apollo. Uh this is an a torso in um I believe it's in the Louve that uh it may or may not have been the one that inspired the poem by Rilka. And here is the poem in the translation by Steven Mitchell. I apologize for the size of everything on here. Um, we're, you know, I'm doing what I can to keep the the fonts large and and getting as big a screen as we can. But anyway, I'm going to read you the poem. As I say, I'm not going to spend a lot of time analyzing poetry or for that matter novels in this class. But I do think sometimes poetry gets at certain features of problems that maybe other kinds of discourse don't. So, this is Rilka's archaic torso of Apollo. We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp in which his gaze now turned to low, gleams in all its power. Otherwise, the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared. Otherwise, this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders, and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur. Would not from all the borders of itself burst like a star, for here there is no place that does not see you, you must change your life. And Rilka is talking about a a a torso like this one in which the head is missing. But the point is that the art of the sculptor uh puts the entire personality of the uh of the god into the stone and the stone speaks to you. And what Rilka is telling us is that great art tells you you must change your life. We're not always ready to get that message if you know what I mean. We're not always in the mood to change our lives. But I think that's a message of great art and it's also a message of of the liberal arts and I think of the liberal arts and sciences or liberal education more broadly. It's about changing your life and that's what we'll focus on in the units on character that are to come. So for those of you who are students, I want to say that I encourage you to think of your four years at Yale as an opportunity to learn how to lead a responsible life. This is something I've said in other contexts too. one in which you're responsible for deciding for yourself on what values will guide your actions. And you can remember what Rilka said, you must change your life. Obviously, there's many other things you're going to do here. And some of you may already be worried about what job you're going to have when you graduate or going on to graduate school or what what have you, but um thinking about what you want your life to be is the sort of distinctive characteristic of this four years of college education. And for those of you who are perhaps more at my end of the spectrum than at the students end of the spectrum, I still think there's time for us to change our lives. So I hope that you will find this an interesting opportunity to meditate on that, to meditate perhaps on your own education and on what there is left uh still to learn in our futures. Thank you all very much for being here. I look forward to doing this course with you.