What should the University do?

[This is part two of a series; part one here.]

Everyone knows that university is an experience that mostly happens far beyond the lecture hall and seminar room: a catalyst and venue for encounters with the world. But that cliche itself holds onto a distinction between inside and outside of those designated areas, between official academic business and the rest of what being a student is about. That distinction should be tested, and perhaps dissolved. For after all, the lecture hall is a place of encounter too, with people and ideas.

The purpose of the university should be to create change, and the core of that is changing students themselves. Not just giving them some skills, or some knowledge, and at the same time (separately) a place for personal and social adventures. Those are all good things, but they are all well-trodden ground in this debate, and they have proven insufficient to justify the system as it exists. Again the radical solution begins with synthesis: what students do inside and outside the lecture hall must be part of the same larger experience.

This is the fundamental point: that university experience should not be an adjustment to the already-existing world, of work and things as they are; it should be a seedtime and a training-ground for thought and action that will make things better. The intellectual adventure of conceiving 'what is to be done' should intertwine with all the other aspects of our lives, enriching each other, so that the woman or man who emerges is not simply 'equipped' with ideas and knowledge, in their special toolbox, but actually makes them part of her or his life; no longer able to separate ethics and politics from life as she is lived, but conscious of their everyday reality.