In a culture saturated with messages about self care and “finding yourself,” University of Austin President Carlos Carvalho challenged the new class of students to be counter-cultural.
“Forget yourself” and be “absorbed in something greater,” he told students in his convocation address Sunday to kick off the academic year. The University of Austin is a private, classical education-focused institution in Texas.
In recent years, Carvalho said many academic institutions have steered students in the wrong direction. Instead of “cultivat[ing] a free and virtuous citizen,” universities “pretend that all ideas are equal and promise a curriculum to ‘reflect’ your interests,” he said.
“They’ve traded the question of ‘what is true and good?’ for the question ‘how does this make you feel?’ Universities keep offering a self-affirming mirror when what you need is a window,” Carvalho said.
He continued:
The pilgrims and pioneers were the most self-reliant people on earth. They persisted against nature and starvation to set up the colonies; they headed West on wagon trains even as they buried their children on the Oregon Trail. They formed volunteer fire brigades before any government services existed. They ran their own towns without deferring to a distant capital. They carved farms and opened shops and built railroads. They turned wilderness into civilization. Their grandchildren stormed the beaches at Normandy, and their great-grandsons walked on the moon.
That kind of relentless pursuit of greatness was self-uninvolved. It was strong and persistent, and the opposite of introspective. America’s self-reliance and rugged individualism produced achievements that were only possible because we escaped the old aristocratic order and its unmeritocratic privileges of birth.
These great achievements begin, however, with the recognition that there’s something greater beyond us, that much of life’s meaning comes from duties imposed on us and loyalties we did not choose. To strive beyond ourselves we first need to understand ourselves, and that means fully understanding our inheritances before we presume to improve or criticize them.
Greatness starts with recognizing that we incurred a debt to the past, to the family that raised us, to the founders of our country, to the dead who built everything around us and fought our enemies so that we can live in freedom and prosperity. Greatness starts with the recognition of virtue.
Read his full speech on the University of Austin substack.
