For a long time, I conflated the university with the intellectual goods it happened to house. I assumed that if I cared about reading, teaching, inquiry, and intellectual formation, then I had to defend the university in its present form.
I no longer think that.
My more primary commitment is to those practices and to the possibility of participating in them, sharing them, and carrying them forward. The university has cared for some of those practices for the past couple of centuries. In many ways, it is still materially hospitable to them. It gives us libraries, salaries, laboratories, students, and time.
But it has also become increasingly inhospitable to them.
See Chad’s brilliant new book on this subject.