As a sophomore at Williams College in 1965, Sterling Professor of Law and former Dean Anthony T. Kronman ’75 enrolled in a course that changed his life. The seminar was called simply “Existentialism.” Williams College philosophy chair Nathaniel Lawrence welcomed Kronman and other students into his home once a week for the fall seminar. With Mrs. Lawrence’s tea and homemade cookies at the ready and the Lawrences’ two golden retrievers sleeping nearby, the professor led his students in passionate discussions about the meaning of life. Kronman spent the fall exploring the ideas of Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Gabriel Marcel, among others, and his view of the world—and of education itself—changed as a result. Among Kronman’s most exciting discoveries was that the meaning of life is a subject that can be taught in school.

Fast forward to 2007. Now a professor in Yale College’s Directed Studies Program as well as the Law School, Kronman is raising questions about where the most fundamental of all subjects—what living is for—has gone in higher education. It’s a question he takes up in Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life, a 308-page book in which Kronman criticizes what he calls the “research ideal” and calls for the return of a more traditional conception of liberal learning to the heart of undergraduate education.

“A college or university is not just a place for the transmission of knowledge but a forum for the exploration of life’s mystery and meaning through the careful but critical reading of the great works of literary and philosophical imagination that we have inherited from the past,” he writes.

Kronman traces the history of the question of life’s meaning as a subject of academic study, examining the causes for its marginalization through what he identifies as three eras of American higher education. Kronman begins with the prescribed curriculum of classical Greek, Roman, and Christian texts that dominated college curricula from the early 17th century through the Civil War, when it was considered a faculty’s duty to convey to its students the knowledge of how to live. After the Civil War, the focus shifted away from classical texts as American schools began to model themselves on German universities, taking on a decidedly more research-oriented approach. Kronman argues that since 1960 the emphasis on research has continued to grow, and that what remained of the previous era’s secular humanism has been continually eroded by careerism and political correctness.

It is the modern research ideal (and its attendant pressures that keep faculty members focused on their own scholarship rather than teaching) that Kronman sees as the real culprit in American higher education.

Ultimately, Education’s End calls for colleges to again be spiritual leaders; to restore the academic pursuit of spirituality and to give renewed attention to life’s big questions. In the book’s final page Kronman writes, “With wonder and sobriety and the courage to face our mortal selves: let our colleges and universities be the spiritual leaders they once were and that all of us, teachers, students, parents, citizens of the republic, need for them to be again.”

To naysayers who argue that the classical tradition is irrelevant to today’s society, Kronman points to the experiences of his Directed Studies students at Yale who spend their freshman year studying the great texts of Western civilization. “The writings of Plato, Descartes, and other long-dead authors touch their lives and speak to their personal struggles,” Kronman says. “These works become a storehouse of ideas and images on which the students who study them in college will be able to draw for the rest of their lives as a perennial source of strength and wisdom.”