The Quest for Purpose

The Collegiate Search for a Meaningful Life

Perry L. Glanzer, Jonathan P. Hill, Byron R. Johnson

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781438466842, 9781438466859
• eBook ISBN: 9781438466866
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

While the search for meaning and purpose appears to be a constant throughout human history, there are characteristics about our current time period that make this search different from any other previous time, particularly for college students. In this book, Perry L. Glanzer, Jonathan P. Hill, and Byron R. Johnson explore college students' search for meaning and purpose and the role that higher education plays. To shed empirical light on this complex issue, the authors draw on in-depth interviews with four hundred college students from different types of institutions across the United States. They also analyze three sets of national survey data: the National Study of Youth and Religion, College Students Beliefs and Values, and their own Gallup-conducted survey of 2, 500 college students. Their research identifies important social, educational, and cultural influences that shape students' quests and the answers they find. Arguing against a utilitarian view of education, Glanzer, Hill, and Johnson conclude that colleges and universities can and should cultivate and aid students in their journeys, and they offer suggestions for doing so.

PART I

THE CONTEXT OF THE QUEST

Chapter 1

Are Colleges Giving Up on Life’s Meaning and Purpose?

The Historical and Cultural Context

Beyond academic and research excellence, universities have forgotten their main purpose, which is to help students learn who they are, to search for a larger purpose for their lives, and to leave college as better human beings.

—Parker Palmer and Arthur Zajonc1

Most students, especially those enrolled in liberal arts programs, have a passionate (if intermittent) interest in the question of what makes a life valuable and fulfilling … But like their teachers, they regard the question as a personal one that cannot usefully be studied in a public way.

—Anthony Kronman2

An increasing chorus of scholars today laments that colleges and universities fail to help students grapple with issues of meaning and purpose.3 For example, one recent scholar argued that universities

have forgotten that the fundamental job of undergraduate education is to turn eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds into twenty-one and twenty-two-year-olds, to help them grow up, to learn who they are, to search for a larger purpose for their lives, and to leave college as better human beings.4

Often these scholars claim colleges and universities used to give attention to educating students about life’s meaning and purpose, but that today’s educational leaders fail to provide help to students eager to discuss these issues. The reasons offered for this failure, though, like the quotes above, diverge.

The purpose of this chapter is to outline the common scholarly narrative explaining higher education’s lack of attention to purpose development, examine this narrative critically, and explore three areas where this narrative falls short: (1) explanations of why professors gave up on life’s meaning; (2) claims regarding how secular humanists provided and can continue to provide a way forward; and (3) the role that growth, pluralism, and diversity played in the current failure.

To What Extent Was Education about Purpose a Part of Early American Colleges?

Stories of decline sometimes tend to romanticize the past. Because of this tendency, it is helpful to briefly revisit the extent to which scholars believe early American colleges actually focused their educational efforts on developing purpose in students. Since the early American colonists established liberal arts colleges without a graduate faculty of theology, law, and medicine (such as in Europe), the opportunities for exploring these matters resided only in the liberal arts college. Still, the absence of specialized theological faculties did not prevent the generalized integration of theological beliefs within the liberal arts curriculum and the colleges as a whole. Harvard College’s early college laws actually stipulated, “Every one shall consider the main end of his life and studies to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life. John 17:3.”5 Faculty did not expect students to develop their own conceptions of purpose or to select from a menu of available options. The liberal arts curriculum involved further developing and bolstering one’s Christian identity and life purpose. Harvard was not alone. From the founding of Harvard in 1636 to the period before the American Civil War, American institutions of higher education were largely Christian, and their professors shared the belief that they “possessed authoritative wisdom about the meaning of life.”6 Professors were expected to supply students with the intellectual, moral, and spiritual resources to fulfill a life journey with a particular type of meaning and purpose. In this sense, helping students understand their purpose was clearly at the forefront of early American higher education but in a way that would seem foreign to many college students and faculty today.

It should be recognized that this shared endeavor existed in, what was at the time, a radically pluralistic context. The sixteenth-century Reformation had produced deep theological divisions that created an atmosphere of significant theological and metaphysical disagreement over a whole host of religious beliefs. Moreover, colonial and early antebellum America had the most ideologically diverse system of colleges in the world. Nowhere else on the planet would one find colleges supported or started by Congregationalists, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Reformed, Lutherans, Baptists, Quakers, Methodists, Deists, and Moravians in the same region.

Despite this theological and institutional plurality, what undergirded how American colleges approached meaning and purpose in life can be summarized by two shared metaphysical beliefs. First, the leaders of these institutions, even the Deistic founder of the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, shared a belief in what could be considered Judeo-Christian metaphysics: the idea that God set up both a moral and natural order and the two are fundamentally inseparable. Therefore, one can discern human purpose through study of the natural order, and one can come to understand the natural order through nature, including human nature. This view tied together the “is” and the “ought” and served to unify the whole curriculum. It particularly shaped the moral philosophy capstone course that students took in virtually every college. In his study of moral philosophy professors, D. H. Meyer observed that the idea that “the entire universe is presided over by a wise, benevolent, and all-powerful deity who has ingeniously contrived the whole operation to serve some moral purpose … met little responsible opposition in the early nineteenth century.” He also adds, “The belief that man was psychologically adapted to fit into a morally purposive universe seemed, in fact, to have the universal assent of mankind.”7 Where college leaders differed was over the degree to which one could use reason or revelation to discover this moral purpose. Whereas Puritan Congregationalists and Presbyterians tended to distrust human reason and experience, progressive Protestants such as the Quakers and Anglicans placed more faith in both as means of discovering truth and goodness. Deists looked to reason almost exclusively.

Second, although not shared among Deists, Christian educational leaders in America believed human attempts to bear God’s image and follow God’s moral order required God’s gracious help extended through the intervening work of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Catholics and Protestants, Baptists and Presbyterians differed over the details about how one acquired God’s grace, but they did not differ regarding this core belief. One’s purpose or meaning involved reconciliation with God and sanctification or recovery of one’s true created purpose.

These two foundational beliefs, sustained and nurtured by these communities, proved essential in sustaining the common outlook shared by the Christian colleges before the Civil War, which educated the vast majority of students.8 Most educational leaders held these two common beliefs and shaped their courses of study in metaphysics as well as natural and moral philosophy according to them.

The Loss of Purpose and Meaning

Although a variety of scholars have discussed what led to the decline of these beliefs and forthright efforts to address meaning and purpose,9 Anthony Kronman has perhaps examined the topic most extensively in Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life. Kronman tells the story in two stages. In the first stage, Kronman’s historical narrative points to the rise of the research ideal as the dominant factor that led to the exclusion of questions of meaning and purpose from parts of the curriculum starting in the late nineteenth century. According to the research ideal, “a college or university is, first and foremost, a gathering of academic specialists inspired by their shared commitment to scholarship as a vocation.”10 Teaching, mentoring, and morally developing students becomes secondary in this paradigm. Imported from Germany, this model of the research university, with its emphasis on increasingly specialized knowledge production, eventually displaced the antebellum college model (although not without a fight in some cases).11 Kronman maintains that the first disciplinary area where scholars abandoned addressing issues of meaning and purpose was science. In the classical curriculum, students in natural philosophy studied how the intricacies and laws of God’s created order could lead to an understanding of God’s character and larger purposes. Kronman argues:

By the end of the nineteenth century, the study of nature had been thoroughly disenchanted, in part because of the intensifying demands of research itself, which could be met only if the investigation of the physical world were purged of all moral and theological presumptions. As a result, the physical sciences ceased to be connected with, or have much to contribute to the search for an answer to the question of the meaning of life.12

The young social sciences, being created around the turn of the century, which hoped to imitate the scientific approach, would eventually demonstrate the same tendencies. In other words, the first shared metaphysical belief of the early American colleges—the unity of nature and morality—began to unravel.

This led to the second stage of Kronman’s story. Since the natural and social sciences gave up addressing meaning and purpose, this change left the humanities to take up the task. Kronman claims that a group of humanities teachers emerged in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century who tried to save the older tradition of addressing the meaning of life in the curriculum or more broadly speaking, “the art of living.”13 The old tradition, however, still needed to be transformed by new approaches and methods. These humanists believed English literature could stimulate the emotions and imagination while provoking one to think about life as a whole. Philosophy divorced from theology could use reason to evaluate the plurality of meaning systems now offered. History could provide a catalog of humanity’s cultural achievements. Overall, advocates of this approach, what Kronman calls “secular humanists,” believed that higher education could still help one explore the meaning of life even without its Christian foundation and particular view of human fulfillment.14

In Kronman’s view, however, two movements dismantled the old system and stripped away the power of secular humanism. First, the research ideal and the associated professionalization imported from the natural and social sciences undercut attention to big questions of human meaning and purpose. Second, the “political correctness” of the academy relativized all accounts of life’s meanings and disestablished the authority of the Western tradition.

While Kronman’s retelling captures part of the story, we believe it leaves out important components. We maintain that we need to think more critically about this narrative and the role that other factors played—including even the role of certain secular humanists—in undermining the university’s approach to meaning and purpose.

Why Scientists Gave Up on Life’s Meaning

A slightly different story of these important changes is told by Julie Reuben in her book, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality. What Kronman fails to address, but Reuben does, is the important role the emergence of evolutionary models of cultural, societal, and ethical progress played in the late nineteenth century. Influenced by the work of Herbert Spencer, evolutionary models broke out of the confines of the biological sciences. Although these theories presented a serious challenge to the natural theology dominant in the first part of the nineteenth century, they did not remove questions of human purpose and value from the equation. Quite the opposite. When evolutionary theory first appeared, the view emerged that the theory, especially forms of theistic evolution, could actually help with matters of human meaning and purpose. Reuben notes, “Because a wide range of disciplines from geology to sociology adopted evolutionary approaches, many intellectuals believed that these disciplines could be synthesized into an overarching evolutionary philosophy that would offer a comprehensive view of life.”15

Some thinkers even believed a new evolutionary ethics could be developed and that practices such as eugenics could aid with advances in morality. Orientation courses in evolution were introduced into the curriculum as a means to help provide students with the moral orientation they no longer received from religion. In fact, Reuben observes, “The tendency to find a replacement for religion in an all-encompassing evolutionary theory was common in the late nineteenth century.”16

This view would find classic expression in John Dewey and James H. Tufts’ Ethics, first published in 1908 and subsequently revised in 1932. In thei...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Searching for Meaning and Purpose in College: A Dying Quest?
• Part I The Context of the Quest
• Part II Figuring Out College Students’ Quest
• Part III Questing in the University
• Part IV The Heart, Hope, and Soul of Purpose
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: Methods
• Appendix B: Interview Guide: 110 Students at 10 Campuses
• Appendix C: Statistical Supplement to Chapters 3 and 10
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover