Yale's DeVane Lecture series, open to the public, turns in this session to Plato's Republic as the founding text on the philosophy of education. The lecturer reads Plato alongside Aristotle, Confucius, John Stuart Mill, Virginia Woolf, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King to ask what college is actually for: building personal character, preparing people for citizenship, inducting them into a community of conversation, or serving broader social and economic functions. The lecture also places this inquiry inside Yale's own history, marking the university's 325th anniversary by tracing how its founding documents and conception of a college education have shifted over the centuries. Running just under fifty minutes, it treats The Republic not as a historical artifact but as a live argument about what a university owes the young people who pass through it.