What College Is Actually For

I dropped Declan off for his freshman year at Texas State this month. Unloaded the car, made the bed, tried not to make it weird (you know that might be tough for me). And then drove away.

That drive home is a particular kind of quiet, like 4 hours of windshield time. You replay eighteen years in forty-five minutes and wonder if you got the important stuff right. Newsflash: none of us is perfect.

As I came across a piece in The Free Press (paywalled, but worth the read) from Carlos Carvalho, president of the University of Austin, delivering his convocation address to the class of 2030, his core message wasn’t what most universities offer incoming freshmen right now. He didn’t promise self-discovery. He said: “Forget yourself and discover the durable joy of being absorbed in something greater than you.”

That landed differently with a recent drop-off still fresh.

Declan isn’t at the University of Austin. Texas State is a different institution with a distinct culture and student body, but the thing Carvalho is pointing at isn’t unique to any one campus. It’s a question any 18-year-old faces, at any school, the moment they stop being a high school kid and start being something else.

I want a lot for Declan over the next four years. I want him to find his path and his voice. But more than anything, I want him to develop the capacity to think critically and to engage civilly with people he agrees with and people he doesn’t. That combination, the ability to hold a real position and still genuinely listen to someone who holds the opposite one, is rarer than any technical skill I can name. And I’ve sat in enough rooms to know which person everyone quietly turns to when something serious is on the line. It’s usually not the loudest one. It’s the one who can think.

Carvalho frames it this way: universities have traded “What is true and good?” for “How does this make you feel?” That’s not just an observation about higher ed. It’s a description of what happens to thinking when we stop practicing it.

College is four years to practice. Hard, uncomfortable, worth-it practice.

Declan, if you ever read this: don’t just find yourself. Find something worth being absorbed in. And then give yourself fully to it.