Chinese vice premier’s visit to Rice may answer some questions.

China visit may answer questions.

Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. Confucius similarly said that to be fully human we must think about what’s near at hand. Across time and civilizations, the best life is one of contemplation.

So how are university students expected to examine unencumbered in a nation rampant with censorship? How does society think freely when open inquiry can go punished by the state?

These are the sorts of questions that need to be asked today at Rice University’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, where Madame Liu Yandong, vice premier of the People’s Republic of China, is giving the keynote address at a roundtable meeting of the presidents and chancellors of more than 50 major U.S. and Chinese universities.

Chinese institutions of higher learning are increasingly looking toward the Western model of liberal arts education — a model built on a foundation of dialogue, disagreement and debate. It is a way of thinking that doesn’t exactly comport well with the Chinese government’s regime of statecontrolled media and firewalled Internet access. But over the past generation, China has ascended from one of the poorest countries on the globe to one of the richest. In a world where wealth is the highest goal, that kind of success is admittedly difficult to question. How can anyone claim China is doing something wrong when everything is turning out right?

That’s a reality we also have to confront stateside, where pundits and lawmakers seem to relish in denigrating students who followed society’s advice and pursued a liberal arts education only to find the job market lacking. STEM fields help us understand what humanity can do, yet it is equally important to explore what humanity should do.

As we pursue the life worth living, there must be values beyond money and worth beyond profit. There has to be something more than yuan and dollars. Philosophers ask, “How, then, shall we live?”

Humanity studies the liberal arts in search of an answer.