The ritual is familiar by now. Students arrive on campus, unpack in dorms, meet roommates, and are told — by orientation packets, by administrators, by the ambient culture of the modern university — that the next four years are about finding themselves.
Carlos Carvalho, president of the University of Austin, used his convocation address this week to say something different. 'Forget yourself,' he told his incoming freshmen, 'and discover the durable joy of being absorbed in something greater than you.'
The argument is not new. It is, in fact, very old — which is precisely the point.
Carvalho reached back to Alexis de Tocqueville, the French aristocrat who traveled across America in the 1830s and admired much of what he found, but also identified a paradox at the heart of the American experiment. As the old ties of class, tradition, and community dissolved, Tocqueville predicted, each citizen would retreat into a small world of narrow concerns — until every American would end up, in his words, 'thrown back forever upon himself alone,' confined at last 'in the solitude of his own heart.'
Tocqueville called this danger individualism. The more independent the citizen feels, he warned, the weaker and less independent he actually becomes. Weak men, he argued, are more susceptible to being governed by others. They are dominated by the ideas and fashions of the majority and look to a government bureaucracy to take care of them. Tocqueville saw this individualism not as freedom but as a path to comfort in servitude.
Carvalho's convocation address is, at its core, a first-principles argument about what education is for. Not affirmation. Not self-discovery. Not the management of one's feelings or the curation of one's identity. Growth, in his framing, is measured not by how seen one feels but by how deeply one engages with what is true.
The University of Austin, where Carvalho serves as president, was founded in explicit opposition to the drift of mainstream higher education — the ideological conformity, the therapeutic culture, the substitution of grievance for inquiry. The editors of The Free Press, which published the address, note that Bari Weiss is a trustee of the institution.
The speech is worth reading in full, and not only by incoming freshmen. The discipline Carvalho describes — looking outward rather than inward, measuring oneself against something larger — does not expire at graduation.
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What Carvalho is really arguing is that the modern university has inverted its own purpose. It promised liberation and delivered a mirror. It promised growth and delivered validation. The student who spends four years 'finding themselves' graduates with a very detailed map of their own preferences and a very limited capacity to subordinate those preferences to anything that matters.
Tocqueville's warning was not about selfishness in the crude sense. It was about the slow erosion of the habits — intellectual, civic, moral — that make self-governance possible. A university that trains students to look inward is not preparing citizens. It is, whatever its intentions, preparing subjects. Carvalho's address is a small but clear act of institutional resistance to that drift. The question is whether anyone else in higher education is listening.
