How should we change the University?

[This is part three of a series: here are parts one and two.]

• University should be universal. Not everyone will need skills taught by university to do their jobs. But the role of the university is making people better, not teaching them skills. Everyone can benefit from free engagement with ideas and people. Everyone should be encouraged to think
• ... and free. Like the health service and education at school, university should be free at the point of use, and paid for by taxation. Ultimately everyone will be a graduate, so this is no more than an extension of the principle of a 'graduate tax'.
• Learning should be eclectic. As in the American system, students should be able to choose a wide range of different topics to study, including sciences, languages, and humanities. The aim should not be to make students into experts in one field, but to encourage curiosity and versatile thought.
• ... and open. Every student should experience something like the tutorial system. Teaching should start, not end, with lecturing. It should be a conversation that not only imparts knowledge but inspires thought, and also instills the habit of discussion.

None of these proposals are complicated or novel. The central thing is to recast how we conceive the function of the university, which is what I have tried to do in the previous two parts of this thread. Structural changes like these are necessary to achieve that ideal, but it is the ideal itself - not the proposals - that can provide an animating force. Culture and expectation are more real, in this case as in others, than the institutions and the practices in which they are embedded.