“The true college,” writes the African-American author W.E.B. DuBois (in words etched in stone in the walkway at Brooks Residential College), “will ever have one goal – not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.”

In “The Souls of Black Folk,” which contains the most eloquent defenses of liberal education ever written by an American, DuBois opposed the exclusion of African-Americans from the right to vote and from civic equality. But he objected equally to the exclusion of African-Americans from the pursuit of a truly liberal education, to their being limited to a merely instrumental education, and education in a trade.