For the past twenty-two years I have taught English literature at the University of Dallas, a Catholic school grounded in the Western intellectual tradition. A year and a half ago, in a fit of insanity, I also became the dean of students. As dean, you quickly get a crash course in a number of things, and the revelations can be surprising, dispiriting, and cheering. One thing I have learned is that most students come to us steeped in the anthropology that Robert Bellah and Charles Taylor termed expressive individualism, in which autonomy becomes the highest good to which all other goods are subordinated. And often, those of us in the student life office—even at places like the University of Dallas—don’t do enough to help our students combat this way of thinking, and might even make it worse. After only seventeen months in the job, I do not pretend to have all of the solutions. But the following eight rules are quite clear to me.