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Why most American universities

have given up on human purpose and
meaning: a Critical exploration of the
historical story
a b
Perry L. Glanzer & Jonathan P. Hill
a
Department of Educational Administration, Baylor University,
Waco, USA.
b
Department of Sociology and Social Work, Calvin College, Grand
Rapids, USA.
Published online: 12 Nov 2013.

To cite this article: Perry L. Glanzer & Jonathan P. Hill (2013) Why most American universities
have given up on human purpose and meaning: a Critical exploration of the historical
story, Journal of Beliefs & Values: Studies in Religion & Education, 34:3, 289-299, DOI:
10.1080/13617672.2013.828951

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 Journal of Beliefs & Values, 2013
Vol. 34, No. 3, 289–299, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13617672.2013.828951

Why most American universities have given up on human purpose

and meaning: a critical exploration of the historical story
Perry L. Glanzera* and Jonathan P. Hillb
a
Department of Educational Administration, Baylor University, Waco, USA; bDepartment of
Sociology and Social Work, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, USA

Recent scholarship claims that American colleges and universities give less and
less attention to the meaning of life. In this article we critically evaluate the
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historical arguments for this claim, focusing primarily on the account given by
Anthony Kronman. We argue that Kronman’s history proves particularly
problematic if one wants to understand the reasons for American higher educa-
tion’s treatment of matters of meaning and purpose. His historical analysis of
the rise of secular humanism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century,
followed by its decline over the last half century, is missing key components.
Because of these missing elements, his prescription to return to the golden age
of secular humanism is ultimately misguided.
Keywords: Purpose; meaning; secular humanism; Anthony Kronman

American colleges and universities appear to give less and less attention to the
meaning of life. At least this is what some recent scholarship addressing matters of
meaning, purpose and spirituality in higher education concludes (Astin, Astin, and
Lindholm 2011; Nash and Murray 2010; Palmer and Zajonc 2010; Kronman 2007;
Lewis 2006; Parks 2000). Although all of these scholars offer brief historical expla-
nations for this phenomenon, only one scholar, Anthony Kronman, provides an
extensive narrative explanation for this change.
The purpose of this article is to subject the various historical explanations,
particularly Kronman’s historical narrative, to critical analysis. While these authors’
identify some of the important historical factors, we contend that they also miss
other important developments that contributed to this change. We argue that
Kronman’s history proves particularly problematic if one wants to understand the
reasons for American higher education’s treatment of matters of meaning and
purpose. His historical analysis of the rise of secular humanism in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth century, followed by its decline over the last half century,
is missing some key components. Because of these omissions, his prescription to
return to the golden age of secular humanism ultimately proves misguided.

Have American universities given upon meaning and purpose?

Discussions about what Aristotle identified as the telos or end of human life have
been central to education since its beginnings. In fact, the first two centuries of

*Corresponding author. Email: Perry_Glanzer@baylor.edu

Ó 2013 Taylor & Francis

 290 P.L. Glanzer and J.P. Hill

American higher education saw the substance of this meaning or purpose as explic-
itly religious and prescriptively mandated. 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)’ (Morison 1935, 333).
While contemporary institutions of higher education have obviously moved far
from early Harvard’s prescriptive approach, some scholars now fret that the purpose
of life is not even a subject for conversation and intellectual reflection in American
higher education. Scholars differ slightly in how extensive a claim they make.
While the title of Kronman’s book (2007), Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and
Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life, gives the impression that he is
making a grand claim about all of university life, he largely restricts his critique to
curricular instruction in the humanities. Regarding the question of life’s meaning,
he writes, ‘I have seen this question exiled from the humanities, first as a result of
the growing authority of the modern research ideal and then on account of the cul-
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ture of political correctness that has undermined the legitimacy of the question itself
and the authority of humanities teachers to ask it’ (2007, 7). Others, however,
believe the question has been exiled from nearly all corners of the university. Nash
and Murray claim that ‘there are few opportunities on most college campuses –
either inside or outside the conventional classroom, and as curricula become more
vocational and professionally driven – for students to develop these strong back-
ground beliefs and ideals’ (2010, xiv–xv). In other words, universities do not set
forth a particular substantive human end or ends, and they do little to assist students
with the process of thinking about the question of life’s meaning and ultimate
human purposes. Or as Sharon Daloz Parks simply laments of young adults, ‘They
are not being asked big-enough questions’ (138).
The authors critiquing this trend have assembled a list of historical issues behind
the problem (Astin et al. 2011, 137–40; Nash and Murray 2010). For instance, Nash
and Murray (2010) suggest that the career training orientation of higher education
and faculty scepticism of the maturity level of students has resulted in the question
being avoided (xxvii–xxviii). Only Kronman, however, supplies a longer historical
narrative that attempts to explain the problem. While Kronman’s narrative provides
some reasons for understanding this change, he leaves out some important elements
in the retelling of his story, a number of which Astin et al. (2011) mention. The
following section critically analyzes the historical narrative provided by Kronman,
as well as some of the other scholarly explanations, and attempts to fill in some
important gaps.

The search for human purpose in higher education: what undergirded it and
why it disappeared
From the founding of Harvard in 1636 to the period before the American Civil
War, Kronman observes that American institutions of higher education shared ‘the
belief that the first responsibility of college is to provide its students with methodo-
logical assistance in their search for an answer to the question of what living is for’
(2007, 58). In this model, the teachers were the indisputable keepers of this
knowledge and ‘possessed authoritative wisdom about the meaning of life’ (58).
What Kronman does not expand upon is the common metaphysical beliefs that
undergirded this commonality and confidence. It rested on two important tenets that
few scholars make any special effort to note.
 Journal of Beliefs & Values 291

First, the leaders of these institutions, even the Deistic founder of the University
of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, shared a belief in Theistic metaphysics: the idea that
God set up a moral order and that humans, who are made in God’s image, should
follow it in order to flourish. Therefore, one needs to discover the truth about God’s
unified natural order in order to discover meaning and discern his or her purpose.
Every discipline contributed to this endeavour. This view penetrated the whole
curriculum, but it particularly shaped the moral philosophy capstone course that
students took. In his study of moral philosophy professors, D.H. Meyer observed
the conviction 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.… The belief that man was
psychologically adapted to fit into a morally purposive universe seemed, in fact, to
have the universal assent of mankind. (1972, 24–25)
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Where scholars differed was over the degree to which one could use reason or reve-
lation to discover this moral purpose. Whereas Puritans tended to distrust human
reason and experience, progressive Protestants placed more faith in both as means
of discovering truth and goodness.
Second, Christian leaders believed human attempts to fulfil God’s image and
follow that moral order required God’s gracious help extended through the interven-
ing work of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Catholics and Protestants, Baptists
and Presbyterians differed over the details of these foundations but not their general
outline. 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 Christian colleges before the Civil War, which
educated the vast majority of students (Tewksbury 2011). The developments that
would undermine them also helped undermine discussions about meaning and
purpose across the curriculum.

Why scientists gave up on life’s meaning

Kronman’s (2007) argument is decidedly not about returning to this old model of
unified truth across the curriculum. Rather, he makes the case for a return (at least
partially) to an earlier vision of the humanities from the first half of the twentieth
century. ‘But does the study of the humanities offer the only occasion for the disci-
plined study of life’s purpose?’ ask (Palmer and Zajonc 2010, 122). What happened
to the natural and social sciences between the antebellum colleges and the early
twentieth century university that excluded them from questions of the purpose and
meaning of life?
Kronman’s (2007) historical narrative points to the rise of the research or
scientific ideal as the dominant factor that led to the exclusion of these questions
from the sciences during this period. The model of the German research university,
with its emphasis on increasingly specialised knowledge production, eventually
displaced the antebellum model (although not without a fight in some cases).
According to the research ideal, ‘a college or university is, first and foremost, a
gathering of academic specialists inspired by their shared commitment to scholar-
ship as a vocation’ (65). The result of these changes was the deliberate divorce of
 292 P.L. Glanzer and J.P. Hill

scientific fact from human values. This, in turn, led to the ghettoisation of both
morality and religion in the curriculum (Reuben 1996; Marsden 1994). Almost by
default, the domains of philosophy, language, literature, and the arts – what came to
be labelled as the humanities – became the home of questions of human meaning
and purpose.
One of the chief flaws in Kronman’s account is his essentialisation of this
particular historical moment in the early twentieth century. Kronman takes as
unproblematic (and almost inevitable) the fact/value distinction between the sciences
and humanities that arose during this period. In contrast, other accounts, and here
we draw particularly upon Reuben’s (1996) history of American universities,
historicise this development in a way that complicates a clean division between the
sciences and humanities and thus a clean division between fact and value.
An illustrative example of this, and one that is left out of Kronman’s account, is
the important role the emergence of evolutionary models of cultural, societal, and
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ethical progress played in the unity of the curriculum 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 chal-
lenge to the natural theology dominant in the first part of the nineteenth century, it
did not remove questions of human purpose and value from the equation. Quite the
opposite. When evolutionary theory first appeared, Reuben (1996) observes, 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 synthesised into an over-
arching evolutionary philosophy that would offer a comprehensive view of life’
(1996, 139).
Some thinkers even believed a new evolutionary ethics could be developed and
that practices such as eugenics could aid with advances in the moral life and human
survival and growth. Orientation courses in evolution were introduced into the
curriculum as a means to help provide students the moral orientation they no longer
received from religion. In fact, Reuben (1996) observes, ‘The tendency to find a
replacement for religion in an all-encompassing evolutionary theory was common
in the late nineteenth century’ (170).
This view would find classic expression in Dewey and Tufts’ Ethics first
published in 1908 and subsequently revised in 1932. In their view, morality was
not found in the moral fabric of the created order, as in the old natural theology,
but rather in the ever-changing adaption and evolution of society. They write, ‘a
direct influence of science upon morals has come from the general spirit and
method of scientific inquiry, and in particular from the doctrine of evolution as
presented by Darwin and Spencer’ (151). The result, according to these authors, of
applying evolution to ethics ‘places the morals of any given time or people in a per-
spective that renders them less absolute’ (151). Consequently, one cannot refer to a
moral order established by God. Instead, one must be a pragmatist:

The business of reflection in determining the true good cannot be done once for all,
as, for instance, making out a table of values arranged in a hierarchical order of higher
and lower. It needs to be done, and done over and over and over again, in terms of
the conditions of concrete situations as they arise. (Dewey and Tufts 1932, 212)
 Journal of Beliefs & Values 293

In all of this, the research agenda of the natural and social sciences were able to be
tied to notions of moral progress and human welfare that defy a simple fact/value
distinction. This, we think, paints a far more complex picture of the end of the
nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Science and the research
university had not driven out human purpose.
Still, by the first decades of the twentieth century, many young science faculty
began to reject this model. Reuben points out, ‘They began to see the interests of
their disciplines in a model of science that stressed the importance of factual
description rather than constructive adaptation to the environment and that
associated objectivity with the rejection of moral values’ (1996, 176). This new
understanding of science also happily freed the scientists from administrative med-
dling. This is where the conception of science espoused by Kronman, associated
with value-free, detached objectivity has its historical genesis. We see this historical
development as far from inevitable though. These were battles fought in the
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trenches by faculty and administrators over the very definition of what science
would become (Smith 2003).
Not surprisingly, the young social sciences being created around the turn of the
century would eventually demonstrate the same tendencies. While the meaning or
purpose of life has historically not been a course title, the topic of the good life
was covered in early American colleges in the course on moral philosophy, which
was considered the capstone course of the college curriculum (Sloan 1980; Meyer
1972). However, from the late 1800s until the 1960s, the moral philosophy course
and later ethics largely disappeared from the curriculum as a general education
requirement except at certain religious schools (Reuben 1996; Sloan 1980).
The disappearance of the moral philosophy course stemmed partly from the rise
of the objective scientific research ideal and the professionalisation and specialisa-
tion that accompanied it. University leaders in state universities supported practical
majors that would contribute to the country’s economic needs grew and faculty in
these emerging disciplines, such as economics, psychology, sociology and political
science. While initially these fields built upon the ethical perspective of the moral
philosophy course from which they emerged, they also eventually sought to be
more scientific and less freighted with moral concerns (Sloan 1980). In this respect,
the social sciences followed the sciences in marginalising moral concerns from their
discipline in order to be more objective or scientific. The disappearance of required
moral philosophy courses that address the overall question of the good life led to
fewer curricular opportunities for larger conversations about the meaning of life.
When faculty returned formal ethics courses to scientific and social scientific
disciplines in the 1960s and 70s, they merely offered narrow professional ethics
courses such as medical ethics or business ethics. (Davis 1999). Ethics courses that
addressed the whole of life remained absent from the general education require-
ments of students.

Why the humanities did not save meaning and purpose

Kronman claims that the humanities can provide a possible source of salvation for
the study of meaning and purpose in the curriculum or more broadly speaking, ‘the
art of living’ (2007, 71). English can stimulate the emotions and imagination while
provoking one to think about life as a whole. Philosophy divorced from theology
can use reason to evaluate the plurality of meaning systems now offered. History
 294 P.L. Glanzer and J.P. Hill

can provide a catalogue of humanity’s cultural achievements (Kronman avoids

mentioning as well the catalogue of disasters). Overall, advocates of this approach,
what Kronman calls ‘secular humanism’, believe that higher education can still help
one explore the meaning of life even without its Christian foundation and particular
view of human fulfilment.
Kronman contends that this system of secular humanism was a core part of the
humanities from the late nineteenth century into the first half of the twentieth cen-
tury. But two movements from within have dismantled the old system and stripped
away the power of secular humanism since the late 1960s. The first is the research
ideal and professionalisation imported from the natural and social sciences that
undercuts attention to ‘big’ questions of human meaning and purpose. The second
is the caving in to the ‘political correctness’ of the academy that relativises all
accounts of life’s meanings and disestablishes the authority of the Western tradition.
We take up each of these movements shortly, but first we take a closer look at the
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golden age of secular humanism.

We hold that Kronman misrepresents the late nineteenth century and early
twentieth century movement of secular humanism. He downplays the fact that some
of these efforts were driven less by broad humanistic concerns and more by the
nationalisation of the university and the resulting interest in forming citizens. In
Kronman’s narrative, the increasing importance of the state in university life
receives only a brief mention in his overall historical narrative about the importance
of the research ideal for undermining attention to life’s meaning and purpose. While
Kronman mentions the 1862 Morill Land Grant Act which transferred federal lands
to the states for the purpose of creating universities devoted to the more practical
agricultural and mechanical arts, he fails to mention the ideological implications of
the nationalisation of higher education. By nationalisation, we simply mean that the
interests and philosophy of the state came increasingly to dominate higher educa-
tion. While Europe experienced this process earlier (Anderson 2004), the
predominately private and religious nature of American education led to its delay
(and the American belief that higher education should address the subject of life’s
overall meaning and purpose in general education).
Whereas before the Civil War the vast majority of students were educated in
private religious colleges and state universities were the outliers, by 1952, public
institutions began educating more Americans than private institutions and today
over three fourths of students now attend state institutions (Tewksbury 2011; Digest
of Educational Statistics 2011). This nationalisation greatly influenced the purposes
of higher education (Hofstadter and Smith 1961). Instead of shaping the overall
religious outlook of students and seeking to form human beings as a whole, univer-
sities gradually focused upon more limited political and economic goals and less
upon broad humanistic purposes.
Many educators undertook these limitations with the noblest of goals. Whereas
many early state institutions still supported nonsectarian forms of Christianity,
educational leaders recognised (or were forced by the Courts to recognise), that
America’s core principles that prohibited the establishment of religion and protected
its free exercise should be applied to state-funded universities in ways that respects
non-Christian religions (Nord 2010). In other words, state-funded institutions of
higher education should avoid indoctrinating a specific religion, including a specific
conception of life purpose’s and meaning. Instead, they should actively recognise
pluralism, including a plurality of beliefs about life’s purpose. Commonality,
 Journal of Beliefs & Values 295

instead, should be found not in common religious beliefs but in common national
purposes (Sloan 1980).
Education in the great texts served as a secular substitute for religion. As the
1945 Harvard Report on General Education noted,

There is a sense in which education in the great books can be looked at as a secular
continuation of the spirit of Protestantism. As early Protestantism, rejecting the author-
ity and philosophy of the medieval church, placed reliance on each man’s personal
reading of the Scriptures, so this present movement, rejecting the unique authority of
the Scriptures, places reliance on the reading of those books which are taken to repre-
sent the fullest revelation of the Western mind. (Hofstadter and Smith 1961, 957–58)

Required courses in Western civilisation provided a unifying narrative for students

without the metaphysical baggage of old theology or moral philosophy courses.
Instead, the unity came from a focus on this worldly citizenship. Thus, one finds
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language about being ‘concerned with education for effective citizenship in a

democratic society’ (Sloan 1980, 44).
The exception to this approach, a Great Texts curriculum supported by
University of Chicago president, Robert Maynard Hutchins (1936) was grounded in
a broader form of humanism and which sought to ‘draw out the elements of our
common human nature’ (66). Interestingly, this programme was actually opposed
by leading secular humanists such as John Dewey and Sydney Hook. Dewey
believed that Hutchins reliance upon Great Texts and authors such as Plato,
Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas and their appeal to ‘ultimate first principles with
their dependent hierarchy of subsidiary principles’ proved problematic in that it
masked a dangerous form of authoritarianism (1937,104). Not surprisingly,
Kronman does not mention this point. While there were certainly humanities faculty
and programmes that align closely with the secular humanist ideal Kronman paints,
the historical narrative, once again, is more complex.

Professionalisation and multiculturalism

Kronman claims that the secular humanist ideal was also undone by the profession-
alisation of the humanities in the same manner as the sciences, and the uncritical
embrace in many disciplines of a political correctness that ultimately undermines
the authority of the Western tradition. Other scholars have listed the ‘career training
orientation of higher education’ (Nash and Murray 2010, xxvii–xxviii) or ‘business
models of education’ (Astin et al. 2011, 140) as one of the factors influencing the
decline in attention to meaning and purpose in contemporary higher education.
While these may be part of the accounts, we believe that Kronman is essentially
correct in primarily laying the blame upon the professionalisation of higher educa-
tion (see also Edwards 2008). As higher education faculty professionalised, they
adopted the attitude described by a contemporary professor when talking about
matters of spiritual development and human purpose, ‘There are many of my
colleagues who would say, “Look, we are at a university, and what I do is math;
what I do is history. Moving into this other area is not my competence”’ (Astin,
Astin, and Lindholm 2011, 141).
Kronman focuses upon the way the research ideal created a professional
academic mentality in the humanities movement. When humanities departments at
 296 P.L. Glanzer and J.P. Hill

universities consumed the modern research ideal, he claimed the ideal worked to
undermine three values that had sustained both the classical tradition and secular
humanism. First, it elevated originality, especially future originality, over the value
of repetition and recurrence that led thinkers to commune with the giants of the
past. Second, it also emphasised that one cannot acquire the knowledge one needs
in four years, such as the knowledge to explore life’s meaning. Consequently, larger
human questions, such as the question of life’s meaning, began to be seen as unpro-
fessional, because it led one to focus on one’s own life and mortality instead of
the larger narrative of one’s discipline. Finally, it particularly undermined the
humanities whose specialty is not new research but the enrichment of our humanity.
Kronman goes on to lament that through the humanities inordinate support to
diversity, multiculturalism, and constructivism, what he labels as expressions of
political correctness, the humanities found themselves unable to produce a justifica-
tion for the necessity of Western literature and values. By granting admission to
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these factors of correctness, professors in the humanities no longer had the confi-
dence to argue their ideas on truth. Now, every source has to be considered equal
and pertinent, and a balance has to be achieved by compensating the formerly
persecuted minority. As a result, dialogue becomes group representation. Lost, he
laments, is ‘the notion of an old and ongoing conversation that gives each entrant a
weighted and responsible sense of connection to the past’ (2007, 194).
While we would agree that these forces work to undermine the authority of
secular humanism, we think he is underestimating their cultural power. By labelling
this ‘political correctness’ he fails to recognise the popular epistemological shift that
has taken place. We are not suggesting that most faculty, administrators, and
students are consistent radical constructivists, although some that discuss solutions
to addressing issues of meaning and purpose are (see for example Nash and Murray
2010). We are simply arguing that the academic community (and the associated
foundational assumptions) that supported secular humanism has been slowly
dismantled over the past half century not merely on the basis of a fad but due to a
new epistemological tradition. Because of this change, the assumed authority and
weight of the Western tradition can no longer be taken for granted. This can be
seen in what one commentator calls the ‘new epistemology’ (Clydesdale 2009)
among students. The old authorities no longer hold sway. This is more than ‘politi-
cal correctness’. This change involves powerful institutions and cultural narratives
that propose approaching knowledge about meaning and purpose within a new epis-
temological tradition. Secular humanism cannot simply stand as an authority on its
own without the old cultural system that undergirded it.
This is why we are sympathetic to models of higher education that acknowledge
the need for universities to rely explicitly on existing traditions that validate
particular visions of human purpose and meaning (MacIntyre 1990). Many faith-
based institutions in the United States would fall under this category, although they
are not the only type. While these institutions vary substantially in how they incor-
porate ideas about human meaning and purpose in the curriculum, they bring an
explicit tradition to the fore that has some level of shared legitimacy between stu-
dents, faculty, and administrators. They are willing to engage in discussions about
purpose and meaning beyond the humanities in the ways that Palmer and Zajonc
(2010) contend we need. They also develop and nurture the ‘moral community’
necessary for sustaining these discussions (Glanzer & Ream, 2009; Hill, 2009).
Kronman’s portrayal of religious-based education as necessarily dogmatic is unfair
 Journal of Beliefs & Values 297

and inaccurate, because every tradition, including secular humanism, must rely upon
certain first principles. Having a religious system that legitimates human meaning
and purpose is far from having a settled position on the particulars. There is ample
room in many traditions for debate and critical reflection (MacIntyre 1990).
In fact, it is not at all clear that ‘our’ universities have given up on the meaning
of life. It all depends upon which universities a person wishes to claim are associ-
ated with one’s identity. Kronman likely means American universities but even then
this claim is suspect. It is doubtful that American religious universities or colleges
would acknowledge the title’s assumption. Compounding this concern, Kronman
provides little empirical evidence to support his claim. What becomes clear in
Kronman’s generalised narrative is that he is referring to the secularised Protestant
institutions that once dominated American intellectual life such as his own Yale
University and contemporary state institutions (Marsden 1994).
We would suggest that the marginalization of meaning and purpose was
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reinforced by the fact that more and more students were being educated at state
institutions. Faced with an increasingly pluralistic student body and country, many
faculty and administrative leaders teaching these students in this context believed
that subjects such as the meaning of life or spirituality fall outside the purview of a
neutral liberal democracy and state institutions of higher education. While educators
in the liberal education tradition still emphasise the need to expose students to
diverse perspectives, worldviews, individuals, etc., in order to help students under-
stand various options and experience the cognitive dissonance necessary for growth,
to avoid immoral or unconstitutional forms of favouritism professors increasingly
believed they must avoid matters of purpose and meaning and remain merely
presenters and caretakers of an ideological buffet (Nord 2010).
This legal and academic atmosphere also fostered an American cultural
distinction between private and public whereas ‘the spiritual dimension of one’s life
has traditionally been regarded as intensely personal and private’ (Astin et al. 2011,
139). Thus, one finds an author commenting that ‘higher education is not specifi-
cally charged with enhancing adults’ ability to function in their private lives’
(Baxter 1999, 268). This view could only emerge when a system of higher educa-
tion becomes funded and governed largely by the state for what are seen as public
purposes. Politically relevant identities become the only identities that receive
significant academic attention versus other ‘private’, meaning-related identities and
purpose.

Conclusion
We need an accurate understanding of the historical reasons why the exploration of
the meaning of life has disappeared from American colleges and universities if we
want to address the problem. Unfortunately, Kronman downplays the important role
that logical positivism and state-funded higher education played in removing
purpose from across the curriculum. He also overstates the role that secular human-
ism, as Kronman has defined it, can play in supporting a return to human meaning
and purpose in today’s universities. Kronman’s position strikes us as nearly identi-
cal to the New Humanist movement a century ago (Reuben 1996). This movement
drew a sharp distinction between the value-free sciences and a vision of the human-
ities as a repository for the best of human culture. The humanities could rescue
human value in the academy. But, as we have shown here, the historical record is
 298 P.L. Glanzer and J.P. Hill

more complicated. The distinction between fact and value in higher education is an
unstable historical development, not an essential characteristic of the disciplines.
Moreover, universities in a liberal democracy do not respect the plurality of world-
views by trading the disestablishment of the old liberal Protestant order for a form
of secular humanism.
Because of this problem, we think questions of human purpose and meaning are
best addressed through institutions with a shared moral framework. Although we
see faith-based institutions as the most obvious example of this in action, this
shared moral framework does not necessarily have to be religious. The difficulty
with Kronman’s secular humanism is that it assumes students can evaluate compet-
ing visions of life’s meaning without the tools of a tradition. This, we believe, is
simply not possible.

Notes on contributors
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Perry L. Glanzer is Professor of Educational Foundations at Baylor University and a

Resident Scholar with Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion. He is the co-author with
Todd Ream of The idea of a Christian college: A re-examination for today’s university
(Cascade, 2013), Christianity and moral identity in higher education (Palgrave-Macmillan,
2009), and Christianity and scholarship in higher education (Jossey-Bass, 2007). In
addition, he has published over fifty journal articles and book chapters on topics related to
religion and education, and moral education.

Jonathan P. Hill is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Calvin College in Grand Rapids,

Michigan. His research focuses on the role of higher education in shaping religious beliefs
and practices and the relationship between religion and charitable giving. He is the coauthor
of a forthcoming book on Catholic emerging adults in the United States.

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