The Purpose of a University

For many years, my Catholic university sponsored something called “The Last Lecture Series,” whereupon a senior faculty member would present what he would want to say if he were giving the final presentation of his academic career. I have no immediate plans to retire, but for several years now, at the midpoint of every semester, I have been giving the following lecture to every class I teach. I consider this to be my last, my only real bit of wisdom for young people today.

If you have come to this university for job training, you are wasting a considerable sum of money. You may as well have stayed at your local community college or state university. But I suspect that their preparation would also prove to be of little practical value. Employers themselves are increasingly taking on the task of all specific training of employees, and this process is going to accelerate. With the meteoric growth of “Artificial Intelligence,” few people in industry and science, and no one in academia, has any clue what most professions will be like 10 years from now. But most of the significant preparation for those professions will occur outside universities.

I know many of you are concerned about how—or whether—you will fit into the emerging economic revolution. You need not be. Anyone reasonably intelligent and capable of learning will find some tolerable work that will provide them with an adequate income. In this respect, the only practical value of a university degree is that it should indicate that you are capable of learning and capable of carrying a significant project to completion. Therefore, what you choose to major in is not of much importance.

I do not mean to suggest that all college courses oriented toward specific professions are of no use. Obviously if you hope to be a CPA or an M.D., you are going to need training in accounting or medicine. But such aims are not sufficient justification for attending a very expensive university. From what professionals in numerous fields have told me, even such very specialized training is going to be shifted to as yet unforeseen AI modalities of learning that will not require the expensive infrastructure of a university. Moreover, much of what CPAs and M.D.s are doing today will be performed by—you guessed it—artificial intelligence systems and humanoid robotics.

So, why go to college in the first place? Well, I am a French professor, but I would be the first person to tell you that studying French is absolutely useless. There is no need to learn French for travel, business, or technical research. The average smartphone can now make a flawless French translation, with perfect pronunciation, of anything you wish to communicate of a quotidian nature. Rather than rage against this reality, I celebrate it, as it frees the study of language from all practical and professional considerations.

Yes, studying a foreign language is rather useless, but it is not worthless. In fact, it is of great value and is still one of the best ways to exercise your intellect. It helps to free you from yourself, from your lazy mental habits, from your narrow perspectives and habitual formulas of expression. It is liberating in the way that all the liberal arts should be.

And the language is beautiful, as is its literature. For the properly ordered mind, there is just something joyful and deeply satisfying in being able to read a poem, a play, or a novel in its original language. No, knowing French will not help you find a job; but it will further your self-discovery and your appreciation of others—and your realization that thoughts beautiful and noble (or ugly and false) can be rendered in unforgettable words.

The real mission of a Catholic university of liberal arts and sciences is not to train you for a professional activity. In fact, the only mission of such an institution should be to train you for leisure, to teach you how to make salutary use of your free time. And this mission is of greater importance than ever before in human history because no generation has ever had the amount of leisure that you are going to possess during your adult lives. What to do with your free time is almost certainly going to be the greatest burden that will confront most of you throughout your lives.

The choice that confronts you is this: to develop your human capacity for learning, imagining, creating, and loving; or to become mere consumers of “virtual realities,” facsimiles of living, and vicarious adventures, experiencing the world through Hollywood trash, the fantasies and distorted visions offered by Silicon Valley, Fake News, and the wasting effects of social media. Without a grounding in the liberal arts, you will have a greatly diminished capacity for seeking and recognizing the truth. Fake Life will be all that you will know. Without even realizing it, you will become a commodified slave without distinction.

To combat the intensifying assault on what it means to be human, the most important studies you can make are in the liberal arts—such as history, biography, literature, music and art, philosophy and theology. And use your free time to learn to speak a foreign language, or several of them. Learn about gardening and the many subjects required to become proficient at it. Learn to work with your hands with enough skill to at least maintain your own hearth and home. Learn a musical instrument, or several of them, to make your own music; and sing, whether your voice is strong or weak, your ear true or faulty.

Play sports not to win but to know the joy of health and the challenge of injury. Travel, climb hills, swim in lakes, and seek out the darkest skies to observe the true brilliance of the stars. Plan your entire life around the real world. And learn how to play, how to imagine, by engaging with children who have not yet been corrupted by the wasting effect of technology.

Learn how to ask the most basic and fundamental questions about human nature and learn to find satisfaction and meaning in this process of interrogation. Above all else, cultivate the ability to do nothing, to be at repose, to appreciate, to contemplate, to sit in silent wonder before the miracle of life, the sheer fact of existence. This is the necessary preparation to enter into prayer, the conversation with God. Anything short of this is to live a failed life of unfulfilled human potential.