It’s Orientation season again on our campus—the summer ritual (conducted on this particular day amid an Excessive Heat Warning) of welcoming our roughly 2,600 incoming freshmen and their parents with two days of information overload, placement tests, registration advice, fun and games, more and quite possibly better food than they will find in the fall, and my little bit about the liberal arts.

My little bit is a twenty-minute presentation called “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, or, Why Go to College?” which I have the pleasure of giving about ten times during the month of July, to the parents in the late morning and then, about an hour later, to the students. The purpose is to place the General Education program – with which incoming students are just beginning to wrestle, and which is too often pitched as a series of required hurdles to jump before the real work of the major can begin—in the larger, loftier, but intensely pragmatic framework of a modern liberal arts education.

In making the pragmatic case, which speaks directly to Life — the first term of Jefferson’s famous triad — I’m helped enormously by the workforce survey data gathered by AAC&U’s Liberal Education and America’s Promise  (LEAP) initiative, among others. It surprises some parents and most students, I think, that the people who run some pretty serious companies declare their strong preference for liberally-educated (critical-thinking, communicative, curious, collaborative, adaptable) college graduates. And it always gets a rueful laugh, from the parents anyway, when I talk about the impracticality (and the expense!) of getting a degree in everything one might possibly end up doing in one’s professional life.

But the real heart of the talk is the attempt to recast general education as something both fundamental and far-reaching in its impact on individuals and society, where Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness play. Jefferson himself, as you might expect, is pretty good on Liberty. In the snippet below, from 1779, he persuasively links liberal education and citizenship, and after the ellipsis issues a challenge that inspires me anew every time I read it out loud, and resonates with the core values of an institution like Mason:

“Those persons, whom nature has endowed with genius and virtue, should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens; and . . . they should be called to that charge without regard to wealth, birth or other accidental condition or circumstance.”

Addressing the Pursuit of Happiness, I like to point out that many parents are worried about that very thing breaking out a little too often at college. A quick reframing of the idea, however, leads to a deeper consideration of happiness—as an informed embrace of the new and the foreign, as a call to service, as motivation for accomplishment—and the enabling role of liberal education therein. As an admittedly minor example of how learning leads to happiness, I confess my own complete boredom, until the World Cups of the last two years, with the game of soccer—boredom born of ignorance, born of wondering why such energetic athletes could aim a ball at a huge net for what seems like an eternity and never score, why officials could just decide that a game should be longer, and other points of confusion. But then, as the competition narrowed and teams I cared about kept winning, I actually started to listen and watch and learn something about the game… and boredom turned to engagement, which turned to enthusiasm, which created happiness. For “soccer” read “Physics” or “Beethoven,” I say, and you catch the obvious happiness-enhancing point.

Finally I spend a couple of minutes articulating the “triple pillars” of our general education program (Foundation, Core, and Synthesis) not because I expect a single student or parent to remember that structure, but to make the case that there is a design, an intentionality created by reasonably thoughtful people operating within a set of deeply-sourced principles, behind it. Too often we hear that students find the general education experience to be formless and “random” (to use a word whose meaning seems to ramify daily); and for some, I fear, it is. But the more we can articulate – early and often, like voting in Chicago— its core values, its utility within the larger scheme of liberal education, and its connection to the world outside the academy, the less traction that perception is likely to gain.

The payoff of these talks will be hard to discern in metrics that our accreditors would trust, but I am convinced that over time, through this vehicle and others, we’ll reach enough students and parents to change the discourse about general and liberal education hereabouts. Meanwhile I take solace in the occasional grateful email, and this one remark from a parent who stopped me in line at the coffee shop: “Thanks for your talk. Now I finally understand what I was doing in college.” On a 115 degree Heat Index day, I’ll take that to the bank. Or the pool.