Andrew Delbanco recalls teaching a class about Abraham Lincoln at Columbia University several years ago and having a student challenge his regard for the Gettysburg Address. The young Black woman wondered how he could expect her to share his respect for a Civil War speech that never mentioned slavery. “That’s a really hard question,” Mr. Delbanco says.

He recalls answering her by first noting that Lincoln’s contempt for slavery was implied by his call for “a new birth of freedom.” He then explained that Lincoln was trying to rally the public behind the war before an election against a rival who was pushing peace, and “slavery wasn’t top of mind” for most Northerners. But the moment highlighted important contrasts in the experience of American history in the classroom. “She was listening and I think learning through our conversation, but so was I,” says Mr. Delbanco, 68.

Mr. Delbanco, the Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia, describes teaching as a moral activity. “I have this old-fashioned view that the classroom experience can actually give young people a better self-understanding and a greater awareness of the world around them,” he says. When students read great texts together, whether they are wrestling with the difference between love and desire in Shakespeare or considering Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism, they ultimately learn how to think and listen to competing points of view. This makes them better able to function in a democracy, he says, “which, as we are often reminded of now, is a hard thing to do.”

Too many students leave college without these skills, Mr. Delbanco says. As the price of college rises and the job market contracts, young people are wary of pursuits that could delay paying off their debts. In search of marketable degrees, many are neglecting the humanities. To study philosophy or English literature in 2020 is basically conspicuous consumption.

Mr. Delbanco thinks that he has a solution. As president of the Teagle Foundation, which supports liberal-arts education, he is working to revive a humanities-based general education on college campuses across the country. Together with the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Teagle Foundation is sponsoring a $7 million grant program over five years to expand access to classroom experiences that reckon with the purpose of life.

The program is modeled after a successful experiment at Purdue University, where first-year students have discussed everything from Thucydides to James Baldwin in classes capped at 30 students. At least half the assignments come from a faculty-generated list of classics covering a range of eras and ideas ( Plato, Mary Shelley, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison ), which professors supplement with their own choices. What began as a small-scale pilot in the fall of 2017 now enrolls more than 2,000 students each semester, most of whom plan to pursue STEM fields. “Learning how to read critically, learning how to pay attention to meaning and ambiguities—these skills are transportable to every other sphere of life,” says Mr. Delbanco.

He hopes that the program will also reduce academic attrition. Around four in 10 students don’t graduate six years after starting their degree, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Mr. Delbanco knows that college can be intimidating, especially for the growing number of students who are the first in their family to attend. Putting these students in a classroom of peers who are reading the same books and addressing the same questions, he thinks, will help “anchor them and make them feel like the institution cares.”

Mr. Delbanco has long criticized the way America’s higher-education system both reflects and exacerbates socioeconomic inequalities. Private nonprofit universities, where students tend to be relatively affluent, can spend more than $60,000 a year to teach, house, feed and support each attendee (and the wealthiest institutions spend nearly double that), while community colleges, which often serve mostly minority and first-generation students, spend up to $15,000 a student, according to the NCES. Mr. Delbanco says it is partly because community institutions have fewer resources to spend on financial aid and academic support that graduation rates are the same for low-income students with high test scores as for high-income students with low scores—“not the picture of a just society,” he notes.

Under Mr. Delbanco’s stewardship since 2018, the Teagle Foundation is particularly interested in helping less privileged students. It has supported colleges that invite underserved highschool students to spend several weeks in philosophy and literature seminars. (Early data from the first program at Columbia found that attendees were more likely to go to college.) The foundation is also joining with the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations to make it easier for students to transfer from two-year community colleges to four-year independent colleges.