Yale's Vision of a Life Worth Living: Paper 1

Paper 1 - 1,000 word (maximum) paper analyzing the vision(s) of a life worth living that the Yale community advocates or implicitly endorses. (20 percent of final grade)

To provide material for your paper, you should gather university self-presentations—freshman addresses, commencement addresses, website materials, admissions videos, whatever it might be—and other campus culture observations (who gets invited to campus, what alumni are celebrated, who buildings are named after, what ways of life are commended, etc.). And then read them carefully.

Consider questions such as:

• What does the university explicitly articulate about a life worth living? What does it communicate implicitly? How do those relate to one another?
• Which of the three dimensions of the good life (life led well, life going well, or life feeling good) is given highest priority?
• What is being held up as the ideal? Where and how does the University live up to or fall short of its own ideals?
• Are there major disagreements among various constituencies on what makes a life worth living?

Focus your attention on the vision the university community endorses for life beyond Yale: what sort of life counts as a “success”?

Your primary goal for the paper should be “descriptive”—that is, simply a careful analysis of Yale’s culture. But the best papers will offer some sense by the end of what you think of that culture. You do not have space to develop your own vision (and that’s not your task here), but you may want to offer critiques or endorsements of certain features of the university’s vision.

Remember, the paper is very short; you may need to write a longer draft and then work at trimming it down to get at the essence of what you want to say.