As students settle into campus this week, unpacking in dorms, meeting new roommates, and stepping into the familiar ritual of “finding themselves,” it’s worth reconsidering what college is actually for.
At a moment when most universities promise affirmation and self-discovery, Carlos Carvalho, president of the University of Austin—of which Bari is a trustee—offered his incoming freshmen a different message at convocation this week: “Forget yourself and discover the durable joy of being absorbed in something greater than you.” He argues for a return to the first principles of education, asking students to look outward rather than inward, and to measure growth not by how seen one feels but by how deeply one engages with what is true.
Whether you never went to college, graduated decades ago, or are about to start your first semester, President Carvalho’s speech is worth your time. It is a clear argument for a different way of thinking about learning, and a reminder that the discipline it describes does not end at graduation but carries into how we think and live long after. — The Editors
In the 1830s, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville traveled across America and admired much of what he saw. But he observed a dangerous paradox in the American love of equality. As the old ties of class, tradition, and community dissolved, he predicted, each citizen would retreat into a small world of narrow concerns—until every American would end up “thrown back forever upon himself alone,” confined at last “in the solitude of his own heart.” A man with nothing above or beyond him has nothing important to strive for and becomes focused on himself alone.
Tocqueville called this danger individualism. Paradoxically, he worried that the more independent the citizen feels, the weaker and less independent he actually becomes. And weak men are more susceptible to being governed by others. They are dominated by the ideas and fashions of the majority and look to a government bureaucracy to take care of them. Tocqueville saw this individualism as a path to comfort in servitude.
America’s version of individualism led to something quite different.
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