A Vision for The University

Chapter 22: A Vision for The University

The main difference between those who go far and those who don't is simple. Some people have a vision and others don't, so they can only react to whatever is happening right in front of them.

Richard Hamming, in his reflections on what separates productive scientific careers from merely busy ones, put it this way: a drunken sailor taking random steps will end up about √n steps from where he started. But if there is a pretty girl in one direction, his steps will tend to go that way and he will travel a distance proportional to n. The vision, not the effort, accounts for most of the difference.

In a lifetime of many, many independent choices, small and large, a career with a vision will get you a distance proportional to n, while no vision will get you only the distance √n.

— Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering

If we don’t know what we want, we don’t go anywhere.

So, what is our vision? What is the “pretty girl” we’re after?

After being discussed privately among several faculty members, leadership, and people who still believe the university can become more alive, it seemed worthwhile putting these ideas into writing for broader consideration.

What follows is offered not as a finished plan, but as a starting point for a conversation that seems worth having. Those who have something to add, correct, or improve upon are warmly invited to do so.

0. VISION

A university should be one of the holy places in the history of the human spirit, not a credential factory, not a bureaucratic maze, and not a four-year waiting room before you “start your real life.”

A university is:

• A place to discover what is true, what is beautiful, what kinds of work are worth giving yourself to, and what problems rightly claim your life.
• A place that puts learning over schooling, lifework over homework.
• A place where students and professors actually build things together that change the world, not assignments that vanish.

Right now, most universities are:

• Obsessed with degrees, rankings, enrollment, fundraising, compliance, and brand management.
• Full of administrators who don’t talk to students and students who don’t talk to each other.
• Governed as if risk, controversy, and student initiative are threats to be managed before they are possibilities to be understood.

The vision is simple:

A university where every person is here for the students, not the other way around.

Everything that follows is what happens when you take that seriously.

PART I — FIRST PRINCIPLES (THE WHY)

1. The Philosophy of a University

1.1 What is a university for?

• To help you figure out:
  • Who you are
  • What inspires you
  • What kind of work makes you feel alive
• To grow your mind and your courage, not just your résumé.
• To expose you to:
  • Big ideas
  • Real people
  • Hard problems
  • Beauty (music, art, science, math, stories)
• It is not mainly about:
  • Getting “a job”
  • Getting “a good GPA”
  • Getting “into grad school”
  • Checking boxes so you can legally say I am successful.

1.2 Learning vs. Schooling

• Education (as currently practiced) = finish line, degree, done.
• Learning = infinite game. You’re never done.

The university should:

• Replace indoctrination → critical thinking
• Replace cramming → curiosity
• Replace grade-chasing → competence
• Replace resume-padding → projects

We should stop teaching people that life is one giant homework assignment with a rubric.

We should start teaching them that life is a series of questions, experiments, and projects.

1.3 Universities Have Become Businesses

We accidentally built:

• Universities that behave like risk-averse corporations, optimized for:
  • revenue
  • rankings
  • yield
  • branding
• Students optimized for:
  • safe choices
  • risk-free careers
  • pleasing admissions, professors, employers, parents

Federal policy, including the Bayh-Dole Act’s framework for university ownership of federally funded inventions, helped make commercialization a more central part of university life. That is not the whole story, but it is part of the shift.

Instead of being places where ideas roam free and talent is cultivated for its own sake, many American universities began acting like IP factories:

• spin out startups
• secure patents
• build “innovation centers”
• chase licensing revenue

In that model, the institution is the protagonist.

The student becomes an input. Learning becomes a side effect.

There is another way to think about this.

A better model would treat students and scholars less like assets to be monetized immediately and more like long-horizon investments in human beings.

• They do not try to own every idea or every line of code.
• They invest in minds and relationships
• Their “return” comes decades later, when former students give back through discoveries, reputations, philanthropy, and cultural impact.

The dominant American, business-school-influenced model asks how much intellectual property the university owns and how many startups it has produced.

The alternative asks what kinds of people the institution has launched into the world, and what those people have gone on to do.

That is the shift we need: from universities as corporations that accumulate assets to universities as stewards that back people.

Not a business that extracts value from students, but something closer to a patient investor in human potential.

1.4 Attitudes Towards Young People

A university’s posture toward young people is its true philosophy.

Everything else—curriculum, culture, policies—is downstream from this.

Most institutions get this wrong.

They treat students as:

• novices to be managed,
• liabilities to be controlled,
• problems to be prevented,
• or products to be processed.

But a serious university starts from a different premise:

Young people are not unfinished adults; they are fully human minds at the beginning of their arc.

That premise carries four implications.

1. Respect

Not the polite, institutional kind. Respect means recognizing that each student has an interior world as deep and complex as any professor’s. It means speaking honestly, listening seriously, and engaging students’ ideas as ideas. not treating them as practice exercises or inconveniences.

2. Trust

Young people rise to the level of trust they are given. Treat them like children, and they will act like children. Treat them as emerging adults—with agency, responsibility, and room to act—and they will astonish you. Universities should default on trust, not suspicion.

3. Learning Both Ways

Teaching is not one-directional. Students bring new intuitions, new sensibilities, new technologies, and new forms of courage. Faculty bring depth, context, and intellectual tradition. A university is an exchange, not a hierarchy. Both sides should leave changed.

4. Mentorship, Not Control

A mentor is not a boss. A mentor does not force or prescribe a path. A mentor listens, challenges assumptions, points out possibilities, and then steps back.

You do not know better than a student what their life should become. You can only walk alongside them as they discover it.

The university has to adopt this posture consistently. Respect, trust, mutual learning, and non-coercive mentorship are not “student services.” They are the foundation of any institution that takes young minds seriously.

1.5 The New North Star

Follow your curiosity

That’s the core commandment.

A university aligned with that:

• Helps you find the questions that won’t leave you alone.
• Introduces you to the frontier: the problems, mysteries, and unsolved challenges that define our age.
• Surrounds you with people who are fully alive: students and faculty who think deeply, act with conviction, and care intrinsically.
• Treats you as a mind in motion, not a product to be shaped or measured.

PART II — PEOPLE & GOVERNANCE (THE WHO)

2. Governance: Who Runs the University?

2.1 Faculty Must Lead

A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.

— John Ciardi

The university’s center of gravity has shifted away from the people who actually teach and think.

The people closest to ideas, students, and teaching and research should have the most power.

Instead, we built a system where:

• Power gradually migrated upward into deans, provosts, vice presidents, and sprawling administrative offices no one can name.
• Administrators became guardians of risk, optics, liability, and “institutional messaging.”
• Committees that live by the CIA sabotage manual:
  • Create as many meetings as possible
  • Insist on “consensus”
  • Propose further study
  • Never decide

Faculty were pushed into:

• grant-chasing,
• metric-driven productivity,
• constant reporting
• professional insecurity,
• and a culture of chronic risk-avoidance.

This centralized model claimed to be “student-centric,” but in practice it dismantled the conditions that made faculty autonomy, intellectual diversity, and genuine debate possible. Departments were merged, disciplines diluted, and senior faculty sidelined.

The result is a university that:

• treats students as customers,
• treats faculty as service providers,
• and treats scholarship as content generation.

Metrics became the ultimate authority:

• retention rates,
• learning outcomes,
• impact scores,
• enrollment targets.

The only fix is structural: move power back down.

A university must:

• Restore faculty as the intellectual core of the institution.
• Return autonomy to departments
• Limit central administration to what it is genuinely needed for:
  • legal compliance,
  • basic infrastructure,
  • true edge cases.

Everything else—curriculum, hiring, research direction, academic standards—belongs with faculty.

The professors must lead the university.

Not the staff. Not the administrators.

Faculty.

It’s the only governance model that protects:

• intellectual diversity,
• academic standards,
• real scholarship,
• and the freedom to think.

2.2 Money, Transparency, and Incentives

Money is not separate from the soul of the university.

Where money goes shows what the institution prioritizes.

1. First Principle: Every Dollar Has a Cost

Every extra office, fee, and “initiative” means:

• Higher tuition and debt
• Lower-quality housing and food
• Fewer resources for student projects
• Less money for faculty whose primary role is teaching

Even a $1 fee per student adds up quickly at large enrollment levels

Small fees added quietly over years can turn into millions of dollars directed toward programs almost no one can explain

2. Extreme Transparency

You shouldn’t need a PhD in form-filling or a FOIA request to understand your own bill.

At a minimum, the university should provide:

• A live, public, line-item budget
  • Anyone can see where money goes, including: housing, dining, athletics, administration, tech contracts, centers, etc.
• A public FOIA registry
  • All FOIA requests and responses posted and searchable.
  • Requests for information should be treated as routine, not adversarial.

This leads to a simple rule:

If we can’t explain a fee in one sentence, we don’t charge it.

3. Incentives

Warren Buffett once described a proposal for reducing government deficits:

You just pass a law that says that any time there’s a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.

People respond to incentives, not speeches.

Universities are no different. If we’re serious about affordability, we need better incentives.

3.1 Affordability Triggers

Set a small number of public, objective metrics, for example:

• Inflation-adjusted tuition per year
• Median debt at graduation
• Total mandatory fees per student

If any of these exceed a defined threshold (for example, more than inflation plus 1–2% for two years in a row):

• No bonuses or “performance pay” for the president and top administrators that year.
• Administrator evaluations must explain why the threshold was crossed and what will change

No “we care about affordability” slogans. Your pay moves with it.

3.2 Ownership of New Costs

Any time a new cost is added for students (for example, a new mandatory fee or campus-wide service):

• The administrator proposing it must:
  • publish a one-page justification:
    • ￭ what it funds,
    • ￭ why it’s necessary,
    • ￭ how long it will last;
  • specify a sunset or review date (for example, 3–5 years).

At that date:

• If the benefit is not clear, the fee or cost expires automatically.
• The same person or office must publicly recommend whether to:
  • renew,
  • reduce, or
  • remove it.

No more fees that quietly accumulate forever.

3.3 Contracts and Campus-Wide Tools

For large campus-wide contracts (for example, learning platforms, response systems, homework tools):

• Before signing or renewing, the university must publish:
  • total annual cost,
  • alternatives considered,
  • justification for choosing this option, and
  • whether it increases or reduces what students pay out of pocket.

If a tool forces every student in a class to pay extra just to participate (for example, a “required device” or “required online access code”):

• That cost should be counted as part of tuition/fees in our metrics, not hidden as “course materials.”
• Departments should be required to show why no lower-cost or open alternative exists.

3.4 What Leadership Is Paid For

Administrative compensation and advancement should be tied primarily to:

• Affordability trends (tuition, debt, and fees)
• Financial stability without surprise spikes
• Clarity of budgets and communication

and not primarily to:

• vanity rankings,
• growth for its own sake,
• or the number of new “initiatives” launched.

If students are paying more and understanding less, leadership hasn’t succeeded, no matter what the brochure says.

4. End Unnecessary Student Costs

Some student expenses are unavoidable. Others exist only because no one has questioned them.

A university that takes affordability seriously must review, and in many cases eliminate, certain practices.

4.1 Required materials sold through a single channel

When a course mandates a specific textbook or material bundle that can only be purchased through one store at a high price, students have no real choice.

Courses should default to:

• open-access texts,
• widely available low-cost editions, or
• faculty-created materials.

Exceptions must be rare and clearly justified.

4.2 Paid-response systems and pay-to-participate tools

In many classes, students are required to buy a device or access code simply to:

• answer questions in lecture,
• submit homework, or
• prove attendance.

Often these systems cost $30–$100+ per semester and provide no benefit that cannot be achieved through:

• free polling tools, or
• simpler classroom practices.

Before a class requires any tool that students must purchase individually, the department should show:

• there is no lower-cost or free alternative, and
• the tool meaningfully improves learning, not just convenience.

4.3 Locked or proprietary course platforms

When course content is locked behind expensive third-party platforms, students effectively pay twice: tuition plus an additional private fee.

The default should be:

• open materials,
• PDFs,
• department-hosted content, or
• university-supported systems.

Use of pricier platforms requires a public academic justification, not habit or vendor pressure.

Default Rule

If a free and open option exists and accomplishes the same learning goal, we should use it.

The burden of proof is on anyone proposing a costlier path.

5. Talk to People Like Adults

Transparency is not just a spreadsheet. It’s also how you talk.

This requires regular, honest town halls where:

• Administrators explain:
  • Why the highest-paid people in the institution are compensated at their current levels.
  • What coaches and teams provide to the university.
  • Why specific buildings, centers, or programs exist and what they cost.
• Students and faculty can:
  • Ask anything, anonymously or openly.
  • Get real answers

No evasive language. No “you wouldn’t understand.”

If you can’t explain it, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it.

2.3 A New Kind of Leader

Stop hiring:

• Career provosts
• NPC presidents imported from other NPC universities
• People whose résumé is a staircase of administrative titles

Start choosing people who:

• care about students,
• have the courage to change things,
• can speak like a real human being,
• stay grounded in the lived reality of students, not insulated from it.

Stop treating university leadership as a ladder of administrative titles. Do not hire people merely because they have learned how to survive inside the same system that needs changing.

The selection process should feel less like a corporate hire and more like a conclave: students, faculty, staff, and alumni all get a real say.

As President Edmund James wrote in 1918:

Let Illinois become one of the holy places in the history of the human spirit.

That is the standard.

A leader who understands the university, as a place of mind, spirit, and possibility, is the kind of leader worth choosing.

The wrong leaders maintain the status quo.

The right ones expand freedom, raise standards, and protect what makes a university alive.

2.4 Administrators Should Not Fear Students and Students Should Not Fear Administrators

A healthy university depends on openness and trust, but too often administrators and students end up quietly afraid of each other.

Why Administrators Fear Students

Because in a centralized, metrics-driven environment:

• one complaint can become a headline,
• one viral clip can become a crisis,
• one protest can derail a presidency.

So instead of engaging students with honesty, many administrators:

• avoid hard conversations,
• speak in rehearsed language,
• hide behind committees,
• treat students as potential liabilities instead of partners.

Fear makes leaders smaller. Fear makes institutions brittle.

Why Students Fear Administrators

Because students can feel when an institution is built on secrecy and distance:

• vague rules,
• hidden decisions,
• fees no one can explain,
• leaders who appear only in polished videos,
• and a culture where speaking up feels dangerous or pointless.

When leaders operate far above ground level, students learn to keep their heads down and their expectations low.

This is the opposite of what a university should be.

The Culture We Need

A university should be a place where students are neither radicalized by grievance nor dulled by passivity, but instead remain skeptical, curious, alert, and willing to question.

A place where authority is not inherited, but earned.

What Transparency Actually Means

Transparency is willingness of leaders to:

• answer real questions,
• expose real decisions,
• accept real scrutiny, and
• never hide behind process.

Every leader, from president to dean to chair, should expect to be doubted.

Doubt is not disrespectful.

Doubt is the foundation of scholarship.

The Rule

A university is strongest when leaders are not afraid of students, and students have no reason to fear their leaders.

Replace distance with proximity and secrecy with clarity. Reduce anxiety on both sides by building an open, skeptical, and respectful culture where truth has room to breathe.

2.5 Trust Faculty

Universities are full of brilliant minds who see risks and opportunities long before administrators do.

When faculty notice something important, the institution should make it easy, not hard, for them to act.

This is the lesson behind the story of 3 Professors and a $24 Million Miracle.

A small group of faculty recognized that the university’s tuition revenue was dangerously concentrated in a single country. They proposed a financial hedge to protect the institution. They were right, but had to push through significant resistance to implement a solution that ultimately saved the university an estimated $24 million.

If a professor sees a risk or opportunity, let them test it, model it, try it, and build it.

A university is not a bureaucracy to be preserved.

It is a living organism that must adapt, experiment, and enable smart people to try things.

Faculty should not need permission slips, months of meetings, or layers of committees to do the work their expertise uniquely qualifies them to do.

The institution’s first instinct should be, “How can we help?”

A university where faculty are treated as adults and co-builders will outperform one where they are treated as risks to be contained.

2.6 Students as Co-Runners, Not Customers

A great university does not treat students as customers to be served, but as co-runners of the institution, full participants in building, fixing, improving, and imagining the place where they live.

Students are not liabilities.

They are the most underused source of intelligence, creativity, and capability on campus.

A university aligned with this belief would operate differently.

1. Students Help Run Real Systems, Not Simulations

A university is not an abstraction. It is a functioning city with its own ecosystems, infrastructures, failures, and aspirations. Every discipline, without exception, sees a different layer of that living organism.

That means every discipline matters:

• Biologists and environmental scientists help rethink campus ecosystems, water use, lab safety, biodiversity, and health systems.
• Economists and public-policy students redesign incentives, pricing, dining plans, transit, housing models, and transparency tools.
• Psychology majors help design better community spaces, loneliness interventions, and mental-health strategies.
• Statisticians and data-science students analyze patterns in energy usage, dining hall waste, transit flows, course demand, and retention.
• Artists, writers, and designers revitalize storytelling, culture, identity, aesthetics, and the daily emotional experience of being on campus.
• Humanities students sharpen arguments, narratives, ethics, and meaning—the why behind every decision.
• Civil, mechanical, electrical, and architectural engineering students work on real projects: walkway redesigns, heating/cooling optimization, building and designing new buildings, energy use studies, getting permits, managing contractors, and accessibility improvements.
• Computer science, information sciences, and design students build internal tools, fix broken workflows, redesign course platforms, map the campus, improve search systems, and automate processes
• Business students help price, manage, model, and scale solutions.
• Everyone contributes something the others miss.

You don’t need to list every major. The point is that every field sees a piece of the elephant.

2. When Students Create Something Useful, the University Hires Them

If a student creates something that works, whether it is a tool, a system, a redesign, a piece of infrastructure, or a platform that people actually use, the university’s instinct should be simple:

Support it. Fund it. Bring them in.

Not “fill out this form.”

Not “come back in the fall.”

Not “we already have a system for that.”

Hire them.

Give them responsibility.

Preserve their forward trajectory.

A living university recognizes creation as momentum. It extends trust, resources, and responsibility to the creator. It hires them. It brings them into the work. It lets the system evolve through the people who have demonstrated the capacity to change it.

This is what a living university does.

3. Trust Young People

Most universities operate on the assumption:

“Students are too young to be trusted with responsibility.”

This is false and self-fulfilling.

Give students responsibility, agency, access, and the ability to make real decisions, and they will rise to it.

2.7 The Moment Something Becomes Kafkaesque, It Should Be Dismantled Without Hesitation

Kafkaesque does not mean merely annoying. It means a person cannot tell who decided, what rule applies, what evidence matters, or how to appeal. Any process that reaches that condition has failed, no matter how polite its emails sound. The burden should shift immediately to the institution: name the owner, name the rule, name the timeline, name the appeal.

And if it cannot do that, if no one can say who decided, by what rule, on what timeline, with what right.

Press delete.

2.8 One University, Many Minds, Working Together

A university should feel connected, not siloed.

People from different fields should constantly meet, talk, and create together.

This means:

• Professors who know each other across departments and collaborate naturally.
• Students wander freely across disciplines, discovering ideas they didn’t know existed.
• Talks, debates, lectures, salons, concerts, and workshops happening at all hours

A campus should feel like a living marketplace of minds, not a set of isolated schedules.

When thinkers from different fields share space, time, and curiosity, the university becomes stronger, less brittle, and far more alive.

2.9 Scale Is a By-Product

A university should never worship scale.

Big buildings, big enrollments, and big numbers are not the point.

Being large is a by-product of doing things well, not the measure of whether you are doing them right.

When institutions chase scale for its own sake, they hollow out: more students with less purpose, more bodies with less depth, and more growth with less meaning.

Never let “getting bigger” replace the mission of the university.

2.10 Always Increase the Number of Choices

Heinz von Foerster had one rule:

Always act so as to increase the number of choices.

Good institutions create freedom. Bad institutions create closure.

Every decision—academic, administrative, curricular—should be judged by one question:

Did you increase or decrease the degrees of freedom for students and faculty?

If the answer is “decrease,” it’s the wrong decision.

PART III — ACADEMICS (THE WHAT)

3. Academic Reform

3.1 No Majors

Majors are a 19th-century industrial invention, conveyor belts for human beings.

They package students into categories (“psychology major,” “business major,” “computer science major”) that are narrow, premature, and usually accidental.

The Paradox of Majors

A major is supposed to guide you toward knowledge.

In reality, it prevents you from discovering the knowledge you didn’t know you cared about.

When you’re 18, you don’t yet know that:

• Math is a language of the universe.
• Philosophy is training for clarity.
• Physics is a story about how the world holds together.
• Art is the search for what is essential.
• Literature is truth told through human beings.
• Economics is the study of choices under pressure.
• Biology is the study of life learning to persist.
• Music is the movement of human emotion through sound.

You may not know these things.

That’s why the university should show them to you.

The point of education is to widen the field of vision before you narrow it.

Majors narrow first, and usually forever.

The Vision

1. Start With the Whole Universe

A living university introduces you to the big, timeless domains of human understanding: philosophy, mathematics, physics, biology, history, art, music, and literature.

Not because you’ll “use” them.

But because these fields created the ideas, laws, tools, stories, and explanations that our entire world runs on, and because you cannot think clearly without knowing them.

The word university comes from universitas and ultimately from universum, the whole, the entire world taken together. A university was meant to be a place where you confront the full range of knowledge.

You must encounter this breadth before you decide what matters to you.

This is not “liberal arts.”

This is widening the horizon of your mind so you can see more of the world and more of yourself.

**Note:**There will always be people who want to reject everything. People who want to rebuild the world from first principles and figure things out for themselves. And yes, there is brilliance in that impulse.

If someone is like that, great: support them. Feynman didn’t want to wander through every subject. He wanted physics, only physics. Whatever their direction, help them go as far as they can.

So what do you do? You give them room. You give them access to the best people in the field they care about. And you make sure the rest of the university is rich enough, interesting enough, and alive enough that if they ever do become curious about the wider world, they actually have something worth discovering.

2. Then Focus on Problems and Interests, Not Majors

After your horizon has been expanded, you choose problems and interests, not fields.

Majors ask: What category are you?

Problems and interests ask: What are you trying to understand, create, or solve?

And once you choose something you care about, the boundaries between fields stop making sense.

If you want to solve:

• Water → chemistry, geology, public policy, fluid mechanics, design.
• Energy → physics, economics, materials science, ethics.
• Health → biology, computation, sociology, engineering.
• Cities → architecture, transportation, law, ecology, art.
• Meaning → literature, philosophy, psychology, religion.
• Space → physics, biology, engineering, geology, psychology, design
• Computation & AI→ math, cognitive science, ethics, programming, systems engineering.

If you want to create:

• Music → acoustics, psychology, math, culture, technology, performance
• Stories → history, language, emotion, imagination, structure
• Games → storytelling, psychology, math, design, computation
• Art → perception, technique, materials, culture, emotion

This is how the world works.

This is how good ideas work.

This is how breakthroughs happen.

Majors artificially divide reality. Your ambitions re-integrate it.

A university should open the world to you first, then teach you how to shape it.

“But isn’t this just a major with a bunch of electives?”

No.

Majors with electives still assume the class is the basic unit of learning. This vision rejects that premise.

A class is only one way of learning, and often the weakest.

Learning also happens through conversations, apprenticeships, interviews, research with mentors, starting initiatives, independent study, creating things, reading and writing, field expeditions, labs, self-study, experiments, tinkering, observation, and doing the work before you feel ready.

Majors pretend that learning means sitting in a room for 15 weeks.

But learning has never worked that way.

On a problem-based or interest-based path, you don’t “take a class on water.” You try to solve water. And to do that, you go wherever the problem forces you: a lab, a river, a data center, a city council meeting, a book, a workshop, a field site, or a conversation with a hydrologist who answers your email at midnight.

Majors create categories.

Classes create boundaries.

Problems and interests create journeys.

Education is not a sequence of courses. It’s a sequence of encounters with ideas, people, obstacles, failures, and breakthroughs. Classes may be part of that journey, but they are never the whole journey and never the starting point.

This is the difference.

Majors assume knowledge is delivered outward from the university.

This vision assumes knowledge is formed through active pursuit, not passive reception, and that students learn best when they follow the deep, persistent pull of their own curiosity.

3. No Two Transcripts Should Look the Same

No two transcripts should look the same because no two people are the same

If two students graduate with the same transcript, the system failed both of them.

A list of courses and letter grades cannot capture the reality of a fully alive mind.

A transcript should be a living document that shows how you explored the world, what you learned, who you became, and what you created. Essentially, a biography of your learning.

4. Frontiers of Inquiry

Universities were never meant to be factories of credentials.

They began as self-organized communities of people gathered around the hardest and most interesting questions they knew how to ask.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in Bologna, Paris, Oxford, and later Salamanca and Heidelberg, students did not declare majors. They aligned themselves with masters in law, medicine, theology, philosophy, or the arts, and entered a world of lectures, arguments, and disputations that ran for years. Learning meant attaching yourself to a mind, working through ideas that mattered, and wrestling with questions the age had no easy answers for.

It was about pursuit and joining a living conversation, not about categories.

These were not passive classrooms. They were frontiers of inquiry.

The early universitas meant guild, community, a sworn association of people learning together.

Frontiers, not departments.

People gathered around problems, not majors.

Communities, not bureaucratic units.

Around questions, not checklists.

Around ambition, not accreditation.

5. The University is Clay

When this University was chartered… it was determined that no degrees should be given to its graduates… from a feeling of dislike to the whole system of degrees, as part of an old monkish system already effete and passing away.

— Emery Kayes, The Illini, 1877

In the 1870s, the University of Illinois was a radically different kind of university. There were no degrees, no cap-and-gown rituals, and no obsession with credentials. Students and faculty believed that knowledge was the point, not the diploma.

The university’s founders saw degrees for what they were: a relic of medieval credentialism, a badge of hierarchy inherited from monasteries and imported by America’s elite colleges.

In the early years, the University of Illinois wanted none of it.

The Illini student newspaper mocked the traditions of Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia as infections sweeping through the East. Students feared that degrees, seals, caps, gowns, and colors would smother the experimental, modern, frontier spirit the young university had been built on.

But eventually, pressure won.

Illinois graduates found themselves competing in a marketplace where employers wanted the symbol, not the substance. The degree became a ticket, and the university reluctantly joined the “old monkish system” it once rejected.

The desire for modernity gave way to the comfort of tradition: official colors, official seals, official ceremonies.

The industrial age demanded uniformity.

And the university complied.

If you want to read the original reporting, the sarcasm, the student arguments, and the cultural tension of that moment, read An Illini Century: One Hundred Years of Campus Life by Roger Ebert.

Start with page 18, where the early fight over degrees, seals, and university identity unfolds in full.

Institutions often pretend that the way things are is the way they’ve always been, and the way they must forever remain.

They speak as if policies were laws of nature, as immutable as gravity or the speed of light.

But these rules are not physics, they’re choices. They were invented by people, at specific moments in time, for reasons that may no longer matter.

And yet, the strangest part is that often students end up defending these systems as if they were sacred, even though they did not create them, do not benefit from them, and often suffer under them.

They inherit a structure and argue fiercely for its permanence simply because it was handed to them, mistaking longevity for inevitability and tradition with truth.

But nothing about the modern university is inevitable. Degrees were a choice. Majors were a choice. Transcripts were a choice.

This entire machinery of credentialism was built, and anything built can be rebuilt.

Remember that.

Nothing is permanent. What looks permanent is only a moment pretending to be a monument.

The university is clay: malleable, contingent, shaped by the hands that hold it.

A model endures only as long as we agree to keep its shape.

Change the hands, change the vision, and the clay follows.

3.2 Retire the Weed-Out Model

Weed-out culture is the educational expression of everything wrong with the industrial university.

The idea behind weed-out classes is simple: “Let’s see who survives.”

But that is not education. That is triage.

Learning requires difficulty that stretches you, demands focus, humbles you, and forces you to think in ways you never have before. Weed-out culture goes beyond difficulty. It introduces fear. It replaces curiosity with anxiety. It sends the message that confusion is failure, that struggle is a flaw, and that if you can’t keep up, you don’t belong.

When a student fails in a weed-out class, nothing is learned from it except shame. When a student struggles in a class designed for learning rather than elimination, that struggle becomes the fuel for insight. A good teacher helps the student climb; a weed-out system waits for them to fall.

Weed-out culture is not an inevitable part of academic rigor. It is a design and cultural choice. A choice rooted in the industrial-age logic of ranking, sorting, filtering, and culling, not in the human project of education.

There will always be difficult classes. There should be. But the “hardness” must come from the ideas, not from the cruelty wrapped around them.

Weed-out culture belongs to the old world of majors, categories, and credentials, a world obsessed with scarcity and competition.

In the university I imagine, difficulty is an invitation to rise, not a weapon to push students away.

3.3 Retire Lectures and Finals as the Default

Large lectures and high-stakes finals are artifacts of a bygone era.

They were designed for a time when information was scarce, professors were human photocopiers, and testing was easier than teaching.

They survive mostly out of inertia.

A lecture hall with three hundred students watching slides is not education.

One person speaks, everyone else pretends to listen, and the learning happens only for those who could have learned it on their own anyway.

This model persists not because it works, but because it scales.

Final exams suffer from a similar illusion.

They measure short-term recall under artificial pressure and reward cramming instead of mastery.

If universities want students who can think, create, question, build, and understand, they cannot rely on structures designed to mass-produce passive receptivity.

There are better models:

• Continuous assessment, where learning is a process rather than a single performance.
• Projects and prototypes, where understanding becomes visible through creation.
• Oral exams and defenses, where students must explain their thinking, not repeat it.
• Studios and labs, where knowledge develops through sustained practice.
• Discussion-driven courses, where ideas are tested and refined in conversation.

These approaches require more from both students and teachers: engagement, feedback, and sustained presence. In return, they treat learning as an ongoing encounter, not a one-time display of memory.

In a reimagined university, students should leave behind a body of work: papers worth reading, code that runs, films that move people, experiments that uncover something new, companies that solve problems, art that lives beyond the classroom.

These are the true proofs of learning, not bubbles filled in on a Scantron.

3.4 Tear Down the Walls Between Universities

Higher education behaves like a collection of isolated kingdoms.

Each university builds its own courses, its own content, its own curriculum, its own version of Calc I, CS 101, Physics 212, Psych 100. Everything is reinvented from scratch, slightly different, and jealously guarded.

In any other field, this would seem absurd.

If the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s CS 101 is the best in the country, why shouldn’t a student at the University of Illinois be able to take it?

If the University of California, Berkeley builds a world-class operating-systems project, why should every other school spend decades rebuilding something inferior?

If one university discovers a better pedagogy, why should that discovery remain trapped behind campus borders?

The educational sector is one of the only major industries where collaboration and shared infrastructure are almost nonexistent. Every university creates its own version of everything, not because it is better, but because the culture assumes teaching must be inward-facing, self-contained, and proprietary.

The result is a strange landscape:

• No one knows whether their class is actually good.
• No one knows how their students compare to students elsewhere.
• No one knows which approaches work best, because no one operates under shared conditions.
• Universities “feel good” about what they produce because they never have to play on a common field.

It’s like a baseball league where every team invents its own rules and refuses to play any other team. You can brag about being undefeated when you never compete.

This isolation hurts students the most.

Imagine a system where universities behave less like fortresses and more like organs in a single organism, each specializing, each contributing, each sharing its strengths with the others.

A national, or even global, learning commons.

No more pretending that boundaries drawn on a campus map correspond to boundaries in knowledge.

Knowledge should flow, not stagnate.

And universities should be connected, not confined, in the collective project of human learning.

3.5 Teach Worlds, Not Skills

Universities teach perishable skills as if they were permanent.

The things that truly change a mind and stay with you for decades are not skills. They are worlds: philosophy, mathematics, biology, physics, literature, art, history, computation, music, design, language, ideas.

These are not “foundations.”

They are maps of reality and different ways of seeing the world: how people think, how nature works, how societies evolve, how ideas spread, how meaning is made, and how systems behave.

A university should open world after world after world to you. Not because you will “use” them in your job, but because once your field of view expands, you never shrink back.

Skills emerge from doing: from projects, apprenticeships, building things, breaking things, trying things, and watching practitioners work.

Universities collapse when they confuse themselves with job-training centers. Skills learned in lectures evaporate. Skills learned through doing persist.

But the worlds you discover through learning shape everything that comes after. They give you discernment, judgment, curiosity, ambition, weirdness, and courage. They make you capable of learning any skill you ever need.

So don’t teach “skills.”

Teach worlds, and skills will emerge from authentic pursuit, not from isolated drills.

3.6 No Grades: Measure Progress, Not Points

If I ran a school, I'd give the average grade to the ones who gave me all the right answers, for being good parrots. I'd give the top grades to those who made a lot of mistakes and told me about them, and then told me what they learned from them.

― Buckminster Fuller

Learning is not a performance of correctness, but a process of transformation.

Grades were never designed to capture that transformation.

They were created for a simpler task: to make teaching legible to institutions, to allow administrators to sort students quickly, and provide a universal shorthand for something that was never meant to be compressed.

As soon as numbers began standing in for learning, the purpose of education shifted. The classroom turned into an arena where the student’s goal was no longer to understand the world, but to survive the metric.

Once grades enter the room, curiosity changes shape. Risk becomes dangerous. Originality becomes optional. Students stop exploring the edges of their thinking because they cannot afford to be wrong. The fear of being measured replaces the desire to go deeper.

This is not a failure of students. It is a failure of the instrument.

Even in 1883, long before standardized testing and GPA anxiety took over the culture, The Illinicriticized the entire examination system as outdated, shallow, and unworthy of a true university. The writers imagined a future in which “our institution shall become a university, a center of higher education, where the student must be a man, laboring not for high marks, nor college honors, but for knowledge for its own sake.”

They expected examinations would eventually be relegated to high schools, never imagining that universities would instead double down instead.

Grades break down completely the moment you redesign the university around problems and interests instead of majors and checklists. When students spend their time investigating water systems, building rockets, writing essays, creating tools, designing experiments, or testing ideas that might fail, there is nothing to “grade.” There is only progress, attempts, iterations, and reflection.

You cannot score a breakthrough. You cannot bubble in a hypothesis. You cannot grade the courage to try.

What matters is the genuine attempt to make progress on something that moves you.

This kind of learning cannot be gamed, because the world itself becomes the evaluator.

Either the experiment worked or it didn’t. Either the code ran or it didn’t. Either the argument sharpened or it remained blunt. Either the idea evolved or it died. Proofs of work speak for themselves.

A university built on problems and curiosity has no use for traditional credentials. Its measure is what the student creates, discovers, performs, or brings into the world.

3.7 Professors Should Be Better Than Snowmen

57. Professors should be better than snowmen. Snowstorms cancelling class tend to bring more joy to students than learning new ideas. What a strange service! Higher education, root canals, rectal exams, and schooling are the only services that consumers rejoice in having cancelled.

— 1517 Fund, The New 95

Students should walk across campus because they’re drawn to what’s happening in the room, not because attendance is required.

If a snowstorm is more exciting than your class, don’t blame the weather. Fix your class.

3.8 Teach the Big Problems First

Every field is defined by a handful of difficult questions. They show us where knowledge ends and mystery begins.

Yet universities rarely show these problems to students. They teach the foundations first, the frontiers last, and often never reach the frontiers at all.

This inversion weakens the imagination. It reduces education to a staircase of prerequisites, as if understanding must always be built upward from the smallest facts rather than outward from the largest questions.

What we call foundations are the pathways that people most commonly take, the famous ones, those lines of reasoning that most people in the field will understand, making them common grounds for sharing information and debate.

— Christopher Xu, Towers of knowledge have no foundations

But the mind does not awaken from the bottom. It awakens from encountering what is not yet known.

The Feynman Method

Gian-Carlo Rota once revealed a small but decisive secret behind Richard Feynman’s brilliance:

You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!

— Gian-Carlo Rota, Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught

People called it genius. In reality, it was orientation. His mind was shaped by the gravitational pull of the biggest questions he knew.

The Wall of Important Problems

Every department should make its frontiers unavoidable.

Imagine walking into the main hall of physics, computer science, ecology, literature, economics, or music, and seeing a large board listing the ten hardest unsolved questions in the field. The problems the field still doesn’t have answers for.

Such a board produces two effects at once: humility and orientation.

Humility, because even the most senior scholars must confront what they cannot yet answer.

Orientation, because students immediately see the shape of the discipline, not as a completed structure, but as an unfinished one.

Students should know the frontier from the moment they enter. Without the frontier, the curriculum collapses into a sequence of techniques detached from the reasons those techniques exist. With the frontier, every idea gains context; each method becomes a way of possibly answering the question no one knows the answer to.

Attempts Matter

Not every student will solve an open problem, but that is not the point. The point is to invite them into the conversation earlier.

Assignments should reward attempts: partial, naive, or wildly speculative. A student who draws an imperfect connection between a homework problem and a frontier question is actually thinking. You never know who will stumble onto something precisely because they have not yet learned to be intimidated by it.

Often, breakthroughs come from minds that have not been disciplined into the field’s blind spots. The history of science is full of novices solving what experts considered indomitable.

Huffman and the Exam

In 1951, MIT professor Robert Fano gave his information theory class a choice: take the final exam, or skip it entirely by solving a real open problem: find the most efficient binary code.

David Huffman chose the problem. He failed for weeks, nearly quit, and then, in the moment of surrender, saw the structure that became Huffman coding. A foundational algorithm emerged because a student was invited to try something the field itself had not yet solved.

When you enable students to touch genuine uncertainty, you create the conditions where unexpected minds do unexpected things.

You don’t need to declare how hard the problem is. You simply place it within reach. Let the confident, the curious, the reckless, the hopeful take a swing.

• Put one open problem on the exam.
• Slip a frontier question into the homework.
• Offer an alternative: “Solve this, and you’re done.”
• Don’t preface it with fear. Don’t warn them.
• Just let the possibility exist.

What matters is not the difficulty of the task, but the assumption that a solution must exist. When students believe the frontier has already been crossed, they strain to follow.

A professor at Cambridge University has by far the most brilliant class of graduate physics students ever. He divides the twenty of them into four teams of five and assigns his hardest homework problems. Since the class knows he has the answers, they persist until they can answer every question. Finally, to stump them, he says, untruthfully, that the Russians have discovered how to neutralize gravity, and their job is to show how it's done. A week later two of the four groups present solutions.

— Ed Thorp, A Man for All Markets

This story traces back to Raymond F. Jones’s 1952 Noise Level, which presents a scenario in which people are convinced a breakthrough already exists, and some make it real.

Universities could go further. Create challenges with disproportionate stakes:

• Solve this problem and skip the final.
• Solve this problem and earn a full year of free food.
• Solve this problem and earn $100,000 as prize-money.
• Solve this problem and we hire you as a full-tenure professor.
• Solve this problem and you graduate tomorrow.
• Solve this problem and you get a brand-new car.
• Solve this problem and we erase your tuition… and your roommate’s too.
• Solve this problem and we’ll name the department after you.
• Solve this problem and you earn the right to break one rule of the university.
• Solve this problem and you receive a perpetual annual dividend from the university endowment.

Human history is full of prizes, bounties, and challenges that pulled new ideas from unlikely places. Innovation has always accelerated when people are given something significant to attempt, and something significant to gain if they succeed.

The reward matters. But the invitation matters more.

Always give students the opportunity to attempt what no one knows how to do. Always let the frontier be visible, present, and unannounced because you never know who will rise to it, especially when they are young enough not to be afraid.

And every so often, if the invitation is truly open, the person who solves it may not be the star student, the prodigy, or the future professor. It may be the quiet one at the back of the room. It may be someone with no credentials at all.

It may even be the janitor.

Order Shapes Imagination

The prevailing model—facts first, problems later—treats students as vessels to be filled before they are allowed to think.

Learning deepens when the order is reversed: problems first, facts as tools, methods as responses to the demands of the question.

When students encounter the big problems early, the architecture of education changes. Knowledge becomes a means rather than an end. Understanding becomes an instrument rather than an inventory.

And the university becomes what it was meant to be: a place where people gather to push against the limits of what civilization knows.

3.9 Get Rid of The Advisor

Universities insist that students must meet an advisor before they can choose classes, declare interests, or adjust their path. This ritual is meant to guarantee guidance, but in practice it collapses into a formality of conformity: a bureaucratic checkpoint disguised as wisdom.

The premise is backward.

Advice only works when it is sought.

Unsolicited guidance is rarely guidance at all. It is a placeholder for trust that hasn’t been earned.

Choosing a class is not a crisis requiring institutional intervention. It is a small expression of responsibility. If a university cannot trust students to decide their next course, how can it trust them to decide anything larger about their intellectual life?

Learning begins when students figure out their own questions, not when someone prescribes answers on their behalf. Education is the slow act of discovering what you want to know and who you want to become. Only the student can do that work.

A better model is simple: Let students choose their own advisors and allow faculty to choose whom they advise. Make mentorship a two-way street, not an assignment. This alone restores what advice actually is: a relationship grounded in interest, trust, and mutual recognition.

When students select mentors freely, they learn to follow their curiosity. When professors advise students they genuinely want to support, the relationship becomes fuller, deeper, and more intellectually alive. And when neither side is forced into the arrangement, the university becomes a place where mentorship is real rather than ritual.

Advisors can matter deeply, but only when the relationship is chosen. The university should create the space for these relationships, not mandate them.

In the end, no advisor determines a student’s life. The student does. The university’s role is not to decide for them, but to give them the responsibility, and the freedom, to decide for themselves.

3.10 Eliminate Extrinsic Departments

A university that wants to expand the human mind must ask whether its systems help people discover new ideas, or whether they exist mainly to soothe contemporary anxieties.

There are departments that exist not to open new intellectual worlds but to certify virtue, competence, or ideological posture. Their purpose is reassurance, not exploration.

These programs hand out credentials that promise personal transformation without giving students the hard experiences that actually lead to it. They teach “entrepreneurship” before a student has ever struggled with a tough problem; “leadership” before they’ve been responsible for anything; “innovation” as a look or a slogan rather than a consequence of necessity. What you get is performance instead of creation.

Other departments, born from historical wounds or social tensions, end up protecting categories instead of searching for truth. They try to turn reflection into an institution, even though reflection is something every field should do, not something walled off in its own corner. When a university pushes difficult histories or contested identities into separate administrative territories, it replaces genuine engagement with a managed simulation of it. The past becomes something managed by offices instead of something we use to think and imagine more clearly.

None of this diminishes the seriousness of the questions these fields touch. Power, suffering, identity, belonging, justice, and the full range of social questions these departments claim to address. These shape every scientific discovery, every artistic movement, and every philosophical debate. But we need to face these questions inside the work itself: in literature, in anthropology, in physics, in design, in the studio, in the lab. Real reflection comes from pursuit. It cannot be packaged as a separate curriculum meant to keep our morals in order.

A university should be a place oriented toward the future, not trapped inside the past. We must study history, and we must take human suffering seriously, but the university is also meant to open our imagination and make us feel excited about the future. Five thousand years from now, no one will know our national borders or many of the identity categories that dominate public life today. Entire countries may be gone. The United States itself may be a historical footnote. By then we may think of ourselves simply as the people of Earth. But our descendants will still encounter our mathematics, our stories, our architecture, and our theories of mind and matter. These are the things that endure. These are the lasting signatures of a civilization trying to reach beyond its own moment.

Departments that revolve around today’s signals, whether they come from companies, politics, or trends, shrink the university’s view to whatever is happening in the news. They turn education into a kind of cultural accounting. A university that wants to face the future cannot be a museum of present-day anxieties. It has to be a workshop for the worlds still to come.

I am not asking anyone to forget the past or ignore human suffering. I am asking for integration. Every real discipline already carries its own history, its own conflicts, and its own moral weight. When the entire university takes reflection seriously, there is no need for extra units that try to do this work from the outside.

The departments that matter are the ones with living frontiers of understanding, where knowledge is alive, questioned, stretched, and changed. Everything else is ornament. And when ornament begins to believe it is the cathedral, removing it becomes an act of clarity, not hostility.

By dissolving departments built on external signals or symbolic credentials, the university returns to its elemental purpose: to widen the student’s world and prepare them to shape the worlds that do not yet exist.

3.11 A Storytelling Curriculum

Human beings live inside stories long before they live inside arguments. Every ideology is a narrative with planetary ambitions, a story that wants to shape how everyone sees the world.

Ideas spread because they offer a way of seeing the world that feels more real, workable, or meaningful than the alternatives. Capitalism, communism, secularism, nationalism work less as arguments and more as stories that shape how people live. They work when they give people a world they want to live in.

You don’t win by out-arguing. You win by out-narrating.

Persuasion is no longer won by stronger arguments but by stronger narratives. People do not change their minds because they lose debates. They change their worlds by entering new ones. A position fades not through refutation but through the arrival of a stronger story. Narratives compete the way ecosystems do, through richness, coherence, and the promise of a future someone might want to walk toward.

Yet universities still act as if argument rules everything. Students are trained to make claims, cite sources, and build theses. These are useful skills, but they are not enough. In a world where narrative shapes reality, a bare argument has no pull. It cannot gather a community, shift a culture, create a movement, and open or close the horizon of what a society can imagine.

A university oriented toward the future must treat storytelling as part of its core structure. To teach storytelling is to teach world-building: how to guide attention, how to find meaning inside complexity, and how to create a reality that others can choose to enter. It is a practice that brings together philosophy, psychology, aesthetics, science, and ethics. The purpose is not manipulation. The purpose is to open spaces where new possibilities can grow.

George Lucas, who reshaped popular storytelling through Star Wars and showed generations how entire worlds can be built from imagination, explained this principle:“You can’t change the world. It’s not possible. All you can do is try to make your own world and then invite other people to be a part of it.”Transformation happens when someone constructs a world persuasive enough that others choose to inhabit it. Before any world can be shared, you have to be able to articulate it with enough clarity that it makes sense outside your own head. You have to turn a half-formed intuition into language that another person can actually understand.

Every serious undertaking begins this way. Every company begins as a story someone has to believe before anyone else will. Every movement begins with a small group trying to describe a future they have not yet reached. Entire scientific revolutions have started this way too: a lone researcher explaining an idea that sounds impossible until others begin to see its outline. Artistic circles, political reformers, explorers and inventors have done the same throughout history. First comes the story, then the slow work of making it visible to others. The story is what moves first.

The task of education is therefore not only to produce strong arguments. It is to cultivate world-makers who can imagine forms of life that are beautiful, durable, and worth inheriting.

A storytelling curriculum would not train students to entertain. It would train them to act with cultural agency, teaching them the ability to shape the stories and assumptions that guide how people see the world. They would learn to read stories as systems of power, persuasion, and possibility. They would learn to take apart the narratives that restrict them, and to design the ones that could carry us into futures we can only begin to see. They would study myth as technology, rhetoric as design, fiction as experiment, and media as a way of distributing worlds.

Most importantly, they would practice. Not by observing stories from afar, but by creating their own. They would make counter-stories, imagine futures, create traditions and bits of lore that future classes keep alive, win local elections, write philosophical fictions, launch clubs, newsletters, and micro-institutions with identities people want to join, make memes that spread, and build reconstructions of reality that reveal what the present can no longer express. The goal is not to win ideological battles. The goal is to widen the futures culture can imagine and make those futures feel possible.

A university that teaches storytelling understands that every discipline already tells a story: biology about life, physics about the universe, philosophy about meaning, engineering about human capability. Ask yourself, what draws people to an idea first? The data, or the story that makes the data matter? A storytelling curriculum does not replace these fields. It strengthens them by making their narrative foundations visible and usable. It trains students to use narrative as a central tool for thinking and making.

If the university wants to remain an engine of civilization rather than a museum of old debates, it must reclaim storytelling as a central intellectual skill. To build a world worth inviting others into is not a soft or secondary ability. It is the heart of leadership, invention, and cultural transformation. It is how entire eras begin.

A university focused on the future must become a workshop of narratives, both disciplined and imaginative, where students learn not only to interpret the world but to create worlds that expand the human horizon.

In the end, the task is simple: help students make worlds worth inviting others into.

3.12 Professors as Performers, Magicians, and Inspirers

The professor’s job isn’t to “deliver content.”

The world already contains more content than any human can ever absorb, and almost all of it is accessible in seconds.

The classroom’s value is not the transmission of information but the creation of a specific kind of atmosphere: a room alive with curiosity, friction, and the feeling that thinking matters. A great professor is less an orator of facts and more a maker of conditions. They create a space where people focus, notice what they hadn’t before, and think together.

This is why the best professors often feel like performers or magicians. Not because they chase applause or turn lectures into theater, but because they understand that learning begins when the room becomes alive. They know how to speak with clarity, how to reveal ideas at the edge of comprehension, and how to introduce the unexpected at the moment when the familiar has gone stale. They don’t entertain for entertainment’s sake; they use performance as a tool for opening the world.

A professor must learn to speak well. Not in a decorative or showy way, but with precision, structure, and rhythm. Speech is one of the oldest technologies of thought. When done well, it organizes attention, helps people get the concept, and shows connections they might have missed. A professor should also understand the basic tools that give speech its force. Cadence, volume, the right pause, stories from experience or from history. These elements help shape how an idea is felt, not just understood, and they keep the room connected. A professor should also learn to surprise, to invite the whole person into the room, and to make learning feel less like a transaction and more like an encounter.

Heinz von Foerster understood this. His famous Heuristics seminar was chaotic, generative, and very alive. It ran with almost no institutional structure. No grades. No tidy modules. No sanitized rubrics. Just one project: make a book. Students weren’t protected by the usual pattern of small deadlines and partial credit. They had to deal with ambiguity, coordinate a full production process, and bring a project to completion without any guardrails. Effort didn’t matter. The work did. Excuses didn’t help. The seminar pushed you into contact with the world.

The experience left a strong impression on those who took it. One student described it like this:

What stayed with me from the course came on different levels.

Level 1 was skills. Project management, mainly. Heinz didn’t worry that we didn’t know how to make a book. He expected us to figure it out. Ever since, I’ve basically been doing project management. For Heinz, effort didn’t matter. Output did. It didn’t matter whether something took two seconds or two days, and he wasn’t interested in excuses.

Level 2 was cognitive skills. I learned that sometimes it’s good to read something you can’t understand at first. Maturana was tough. We read him closely and had to think our way through. Learning out of sequence can be valuable.

Level 3 was openness to new ideas. Heinz never shut anything down just because it was new. He was remarkably tolerant. He once told Jim and me, ‘You need to learn to cherish what’s implicit in a thing.’

— Bob Rebitzer, interviewed in Jamie Hutchinson’s Cybernetics of Cybernetics Interview Notes, 20 September 2004 (edited for clarity)

Another student recalled the atmosphere:

The course was chaotic but stimulating. In seminar, Heinz would ask a question and the room would open up. Very open conversations. So many classes are narrow; you don’t bring your whole self. In this course, you brought your whole self.

— Barbara Ford, interviewed in Jamie Hutchinson’s Cybernetics of Cybernetics Interview Notes, 3 August 2004 (edited for clarity)

Heinz’s influence moved far past the classroom walls. Students visited him at his home, sat in his kitchen, met his wife, and talked long after the seminar was over. Many stayed in touch for years. Friendships formed because he introduced people who never would have met otherwise. He paid attention to their lives. He wanted to know what they were thinking, where they were headed, who they hoped to become. It wasn’t the usual distant professorly interest. He remembered your struggles, asked about your choices, and nudged you toward courage. There was a warmth in the way he listened, a sense that he saw possibilities in people long before they saw them in themselves. His gift was bringing people together and opening their minds in a way that was both intellectual and deeply personal, not through authority but through attention and care.

More courses should work like this. Not by copying Heinz’s seminar, but by realizing the principles behind it: meaningful projects, meaningful problems, unfiltered conversation, conceptual risk, and intellectual aliveness. And fewer courses should feel like “CS 123: Death by PowerPoint,” where the professor is exhausted by slide production and the students sit in passive absorption.

And none of this requires professors to become entertainers. Geoffrey Challen makes the point clearly:

I think we’d all be much better teachers if we looked more critically at the idea of a professor as a performer.

You’re not a magician or a stand-up comedian. Your effectiveness isn’t measured by how many students attend your show. It’s measured by how many students learn the material. Most of that learning happens outside the classroom, and there are many ways to support it.

— Geoffrey Challen, The Idea of a Professor as a Performer

But for the classroom to feel alive, the professor must be alive. They need genuine fascination, a conviction you can trust, and curiosity that invites others in. They must be willing to engage with students as co-thinkers, not as recipients of a syllabus. They must understand that inspiration is not an add-on; it is the scarce resource out of which learning grows.

A professor, then, is not merely a teacher. They are a constructor of worlds, an architect of attention, a catalyst of creation. Their work has a touch of performance, but the kind that comes from honesty rather than showmanship. They create moments when learning feels larger than the room, and when a person sees a little farther than they did before.

3.13 Create Classes Inspired by Heinz von Foerster’s Heuristics

3.14 Be Good at Selling

Universities often behave as if the world is waiting for their discoveries. It isn’t. The world is loud, crowded, and busy worrying about itself. If we do not tell our story, no one will. And if we believe the work is worth doing, then sharing it is not vanity. It is a responsibility.

Academia has long treated_showing your work_ as a kind of impurity, as if presenting an idea with force and imagination were a kind of intellectual contamination. But staying quiet is not humility. It is a quieter and nastier form of arrogance: the belief that a paper, a prototype, or a breakthrough will magically find its audience without effort. Expecting the world to come to us is far more self-important than stepping forward and saying, “Here. This matters.”

The consequences of this posture are visible everywhere: buried discoveries, forgotten pioneers, and discoveries that never left the building. Everyone knows Douglas Engelbart’s 1968 Mother of All Demos. But almost no one knows about PLATO, despite anticipating online forums, multiplayer games, touchscreens, instant messaging, and online learning years before most of the world imagined them. The difference was not brilliance. It was culture. Engelbart believed in showing; PLATO assumed the work would spread on merit alone. It didn’t. Brilliant work disappears into the file cabinets of history when no one bothers to tell its story.

Some institutions understand this. The MIT Media Lab, for example, built an entire ecosystem around visibility. According to a professor who worked, at one point more than 150 researchers were supported by over 80 people whose only job was to help them tell the story of what they were inventing. The University of Illinois, by comparison, relied on a handful of exhausted communicators representing hundreds of faculty across campus. The result is predictable: one institution becomes a cultural myth; the other remains respected locally but invisible globally.

Silence is not a virtue. Hiding your work is not modesty. Sharing what we build is part of the work itself.

If we create something—a theory, a device, a system, a discovery—we owe it to the world to carry it beyond the lab. Not out of pride, but out of obligation. Students should lead much of this effort: inventing new formats, new mediums, new ways of telling the story of what they are building. Professors should make room for this, willing to share not only polished results but also the process, the struggle, and the curiosity that shaped them.

A university should be a lighthouse, not a vault.

Research that never leaves the room might as well never have existed. To share one’s work is not to boast; it is to contribute. Knowledge hidden away sinks into irrelevance. Knowledge carried outward becomes part of the world.

A university that refuses to hide its light—one that teaches students to craft stories equal to their ideas—becomes not only a generator of breakthroughs but a shaper of culture. Creation and communication belong together. A discovery becomes real only when it is carried into the open.

If a breakthrough falls in the forest and nobody hears it, it did not happen.

3.15 Don’t Wait

A university should not be a staircase. It should not teach you to wait your turn, collect credentials, and postpone the thing you actually want to do. You are never “qualified” for something you haven’t done before, and when you’re young, that means you’re unqualified for almost everything. That is not a flaw; it is the raw material of ambition.

Only the naive try things the experienced have already given up on.

The institution’s role is to widen your sense of possibility, not narrow it. If you want to write a novel, start writing. If you want to make a film, pick up a camera. If you want to create a company, build the thing you can’t stop thinking about. Learning happens in motion. Feedback from a professor or mentor can help, but no sequence of courses will confer readiness. Readiness is produced by the doing itself.

At the same time, beginnings aren’t always linear.

Sometimes you arrive at what you want by an indirect path. A stray class, a strange book, an unexpected question from a professor can tilt your trajectory in ways no plan could have predicted. The point isn’t to pursue everything directly, but to keep moving, to remain open, and to let curiosity shape the structure of your life.

The spirit, though, stays simple: don’t wait. Move towards what pulls you. Let the work teach you what you lack. Let the university amplify your imagination rather than certify your competence. The future belongs to those who act before they feel ready, because nobody ever is.

3.16 Allow Students to Attend Whatever Classes They Want

Curiosity should never need permission.

Students should be free to walk into any class, stay for a day or a week, leave halfway through, return later, or never come back.

Exploration is not a contract. It is an encounter.

Students should roam widely across fields, take courses far outside their focus, drift into unfamiliar disciplines, and follow threads that make no immediate sense. American higher education was originally built for this kind of wandering: serendipity as method, and the movement between fields treated as something natural and necessary. Somewhere along the way we replaced that openness with anxiety about credentials, certifications, double majors, triple majors, as if stacking labels were proof of intelligence.

Let the wandering return. The university should make it effortless, because wandering is often how learning begins.

3.17 More Collaboration, Less Fragmentation

The whole university, students, professors, everyone, should collide more often. Fewer silos, more shared rooms. Build spaces, incentives, and projects that pull people across departments and disciplines. Make cross-pollination the normal state of things, not the rare accident.

3.18 Introductory Courses Should Be Taught by the Best Professors

Introductory courses shape the entire arc of a student’s intellectual life. This is the moment the world first opens, or quietly collapses. It’s absurd that universities often assign these courses to the newest, least prepared, or least interested faculty. Nothing reveals a system’s priorities more clearly than who it puts at the front door.

Intro courses should be taught by the people who understand what is at stake: the spark, the beginning, the first expansion of a student’s world. The professors who are alive, thoughtful, curious, the ones capable of making knowledge feel necessary. Being asked to teach an intro course should be one of the highest honors in the institution, not a chore to avoid.

This is where you reach the most minds, where the questions are still unformed and everything is possible. The beginning is not a low-stakes space. It is the most delicate part of the entire system. Get the beginning right and the whole experience opens up. Get it wrong and everything that follows feels smaller, flatter, and drained of air.

Being assigned an introductory course is a mark of honor, not punishment.

PART IV — STUDENT LIFE & CULTURE (THE HOW IT FEELS)

4. Culture is the Real Curriculum

A university teaches through what it normalizes:

• how people spend their nights and weekends
• what they talk about when no one is grading them
• what they do with boredom, anxiety, and free time
• who they gather with, and why

The real curriculum is not hidden in the catalog.

It’s written in the habits, jokes, rituals, and default choices of student life.

Change that, and you change everything.

4.1 End the “NPC student” default

By “NPC student,” I mean a student who moves through campus life on autopilot, following routines without much thought.

Many students fall into patterns that make them feel less in control of their own lives.

• living in a loop of schedules, assignments, and deadlines
• treating each semester like a checklist rather than a chapter of a life
• disappearing into apartments where doors stay closed and screens glow late into the night
• managing stress with alcohol, caffeine, and endless scrolling instead of figuring out what they actually care about

A university that takes culture seriously would interrupt these patterns and pull students back into aliveness:

• Talking to people outside one’s usual circle becomes normal.
• Making things becomes as expected as consuming them.
  • Bands, zines, research groups, contrarian reading circles, basement theaters.
  • On a Friday night, the question becomes: what are we making? not what are we numbing with?
• Parties exist without defaulting to blackout drinking.
  • Gatherings where people remember what happened and want to return.
  • Music, performances, and deliberate ways of being together without erasing ourselves.
• Boredom as a signal to create
  • When someone says, “I’m bored,” the cultural response is: “Good. What do you want to create?”
  • No one should feel strange for starting something; only for never trying.
• Groups form around shared ideas and obsessions.

“NPC students” emerge when a campus offers only hollow routines: classes that expect compliance instead of thought, social scenes that reward blending in, and days filled with tasks that never connect to anything personal.

Change this environment, and students change with it.

Give students teachers who speak with conviction, classmates who take ideas seriously, and settings where interesting work happens, and they stop moving through life like background figures.

They begin to act with intention: choosing their studies, their friends, and their futures because those choices actually matter. They start using their own judgment and begin living with direction.

4.2 Abolish Frat + Bar Supremacy

Frats and bars dominate because the university has ceded nightlife to the only institutions willing to organize it. When the campus offers nothing alive, the Greek system becomes the default social engine, regardless of its distortions.

A living university builds a nightlife ecosystem rooted in creativity, not intoxication; belonging, not hierarchy; and discovery, not repetition.

The solution isn’t prohibition.

The solution is to design a social world big enough that Greek life is no longer the cultural capital of the campus. You have to build forms of social life that are more magnetic, meaningful, and architecturally integrated into the university’s purpose.

1. Build Cultural Infrastructure, Not Enforcement

Frats succeed because they offer architecture: houses, rooms, rituals, and continuity.

The university offers… flyers and one-off events.

A university can create nightlife that has continuity, density, and reasons to return.

• House Network: Student-run homes organized around live interests: music, film, philosophy, startups, science, games, dance, research. Doors open on specific nights for dinners, salons, screenings, jam sessions, and debates. Houses are porous and overlapping; people move between them instead of disappearing into one box.
• Night Studios: Maker spaces, design labs, rehearsal rooms, computer labs, and writing studios open 24/7. People come because of work and play mix: bands practicing next to someone cutting a short film, someone debugging code next to a group planning a small journal.
• The Late Commons: A large, bright nighttime space you go to on purpose: project demos, open mics, arguments, board games, live sets, reading groups. A place where house nights and studio work spill together, so you can talk, flirt, hatch plans, and find the next thing to join.

Replace the frat house as the default with a network of houses, studios, and commons where campus culture actually lives.

2. Create Rituals That Outcompete Greek Life

Greek life thrives on ritual, repetition, and shared expectation.

Universities can do the same, using different content.

Build better rituals, rooted in curiosity, creation, and myth-making.

A few examples:

• Midnight Lecture Series_:_Talks at 11 p.m. on lawns and rooftops: professors, students, musicians, founders, anyone with something to say. People sit on blankets. Ideas land differently when the campus is awake in an unfamiliar way.
• **The Great Game:**A semester-long puzzle that leaves clues in libraries, tunnels, forests, and labs. Teams form across majors and dorms. Alliances shift. The campus becomes a playable world.
• **Annual Night of Madness:**One night each year when everyone makes something: 24-hour build sprints, campus-wide hide-and-seek, pop-up theaters, impromptu concerts, and experiments that break routine.

Ritual is the living structure through which a campus builds itself.

3. Build a Nightlife Worth Staying Awake For

In most American universities, “going out” means going to bars or frats.

The music is too loud to talk, the rooms are too dark to see anyone, and the whole night runs on a single activity: drinking.

People go because there is nothing better. Maybe you meet someone. Maybe you forget yourself for a while. But it is thin, repetitive, and predictable.

A living university builds nights that expand people rather than dull them:

• Parties as Worlds: Parties can be more than a packed room with one playlist. They can be small worlds: 1920s Paris with big-band swing, Vienna salons with waltzes and long conversations, science-fiction nights set in the year 2800, Martian banquets, masked gatherings where people move through rooms without the armor of their everyday identity similar to _Sleep No More._Different music. Different moods. Different ways of meeting people. A party becomes memorable when it gives people something to enter, not just something to endure.
• **The Midnight Stage:**A rotating, warm room for music, monologues, experiments, failed ideas, half-finished songs, improvised scenes. The point is to try, not impress.
• **Gatherings that Invite Imagination:**Nights where people mingle because the environment pulls them in: ambient music, a strange theme, a question on the wall that gets you talking, maybe someone painting in the corner or a silent disco with an actual idea behind it. Nights you remember because of who you met, what you felt, and the thought that followed you home.

Bars are thin experiences because they aim only to distract.

A living university should aim higher: to build places where people feel awake, connected, and capable of more than they thought.

Offer students worlds worth entering, and the old defaults lose their grip.

A New Principle

Frats and bars win because they offer a world. The university must offer many worlds, each porous and alive.

Frats and bars are boring because they ask nothing of you. A living university can offer nights that draw people upward: more open, more alive, more connected, and more capable of joy.

When campus architecture, nighttime culture, and student initiative pull in the same direction, Greek life becomes one option among many instead of the campus center of gravity.

Redirect fun toward aliveness, imagination, and collective meaning.

When students experience nights that feel active and consequential, the appeal of narrower scenes fades on its own.

4.3 Free Food

The true measure of a college campus isn’t rankings, endowment size, or whatever universities brag about.

It’s how much free food there is.

A university runs on activity: talks, meetings, workshops, clubs, guest speakers, conferences, etc. With that much activity, there should be endless free food circulating through campus at all times. Not as a luxury, but as a basic sign of a functional, intellectually alive university.

But free food shall never be wasted. I’m normally suspicious of regulations, but this is one place where I’d enforce a rule.

If you run an event and you have leftover food, you are required to post it in a public, universally known channel like UIUCFreeFood, or whatever standardized campus system, so students can come claim it. Not “should,” not “could,” not “if we remember.” Required.

Better yet: post before the event, so people show up because of the free food (and yes, maybe also for your event’s content, if they feel generous). The moment you do that, the usual academic boundaries start to blur, and students wander into spaces they’d never normally think to enter. And there’s something magical about that shift.

Free food creates this tiny gravitational field that pulls people out of their majors, out of their routines, out of whatever narrow hallway they live in. For a few minutes, the whole structure of campus pulls apart just enough to let light through, and all the walls between fields and majors blur in that brightness. Conversations that never happen start happening. People who never meet end up sitting next to each other, staring at the same slide.

It’s the one thing that can pull an art student into a biology talk, or send a business major into a philosophy lecture they’d never normally consider. And my little secret hope is this: some completely random student shows up for the free food, hears something unexpected, and falls in love with a problem they never knew existed. And who knows, maybe years later they’ll even mention it in their Nobel Prize acceptance speech, admitting it all started with a talk they only went to for the pizza.

And of course, there’s the other side: some students are just hungry. Not “hungry for knowledge.” Literally hungry. Maybe they don’t have money to buy food, or work too many hours, or are too overwhelmed to cook, or simply didn’t have time to grab dinner. Free food fills stomachs, steadies people, and gives them the small bit of ease or energy they need to get through the next thing. That matters just as much as the cross-disciplinary serendipity we want to instill.

This applies everywhere on campus, not just events. Dining halls too. If you have leftover food, give it to students. Do not toss it. Zero food waste.

“The food might go bad,” “We might get sued,” and “Policy says we can’t” are excuses people repeat when they do not want to do the obvious thing. Figure it out.

Free food already does so much work on campus: pulling people into rooms they never planned to enter, handing out tiny pockets of joy in the middle of hectic weeks, keeping someone going on a day when they had nothing else. It does not need to be dressed up as anything bigger than that. It just needs to be there, available, circulating, doing its quiet job in the background, moving around the campus in whatever serendipitous path it takes. That is enough, and it reaches the small, overlooked pockets of campus where initiatives, task forces, and official emails never think to look.

4.5 A Place for Students to Publish Their Work

A university should leave a trail of its students’ minds, not just their GPAs.

Right now, almost everything students make disappears: papers get graded and forgotten, projects get archived, and ideas vanish the moment the class ends.

We need a public space where students can put their work into the world while they are still becoming themselves. Something simple, open, and alive: essays, prototypes, diagrams, obsessions, fragments of code, reflections after midnight, videos of experiments gone wrong, attempts that didn’t land but changed the person who made them.

This would be a living record of curiosity: what students tried, what they built, what they failed at, what surprised them, what pulled them forward. Most campuses lack any shared memory.

A shared publishing space changes how students encounter a campus. It creates continuity. When a new student arrives, they don’t enter an empty campus. They walk into a landscape shaped by the work left behind—paths, questions, half-built structures, strange inventions, ideas that never fully resolved but still matter. This record shows what has been attempted before, without prescribing what should come next. It shows them what is possible without telling them what to be.

It also makes student work more honest. The MIT Admissions Blog hints at the right spirit: students speaking in their own voice about things they care about, rather than in an institutional voice. But a true publishing commons would go further. It would allow student work to appear in its unfinished, exploratory state, including missteps, revisions, and open questions.

This is my favorite MIT Admissions Blog post.

Although of course you end up becoming yourselfbyChris Peterson

The result would be a culture where students contribute to a shared body of work. They take themselves seriously as creators because the institution takes them seriously enough to give them a place to publish.

Over time, this turns a university into more than a sequence of courses. It becomes a continuous act of collective imagination, carried forward by the people who dare to make something and leave it behind.

4.6 Conflict Resolution

Before you file a complaint, start paperwork, or try to use the system against someone, talk to them. Actually talk. Face-to-face. Conflict should begin with conversation, not escalation. If the other person refuses to talk, won’t show up, or shuts down any attempt at dialogue, then escalation is appropriate.

The first step in any conflict should be two people talking and trying to understand each other.

4.7 Cultural Revitalization

A university doesn’t revive itself by issuing mandates or policing student life. It revives itself by making aliveness unavoidable.

Most campuses today suffer a silent cultural collapse. Social life shrinks into a few predictable routines: the frat circuit, the bar crawl, the weekly cycle of binge, forget, repeat. It is a world defined by thin experiences, because the institution has abandoned the work of building thick ones. When the university stops generating culture, monoculture takes its place.

Revitalization starts with events and the spaces around them that pull people out of their rooms and into each other’s lives. Not entertained, not distracted, but actually present

Each event should be built to do at least one clear thing:

• show a kind of beauty that changes what people notice,
• provoke curiosity that does not let go, or
• ask questions people didn’t know were theirs.

This is cultural life as a habit: expanding what people pay attention to, and giving them reasons to show up.

1. Rebuild the Union as a Living Cultural Engine

Most student unions have become logistics hubs: rooms, reservations, posters, bureaucracy. But the Union should be a central place where student life and campus ideas actually meet, where art, argument, and curiosity are easy to stumble into.

Reinvigorate Union programming with relevance and presence:

• Bring modern cultural figures, scientists, musicians, writers, and designers not as celebrities to admire but as humans to encounter.
• Host daily live music and performance, so that art becomes a background condition of campus life rather than a rare occasion.
• Turn the Union into a warm, continuous field of activity: conversations happening in corners, an unexpected cello rehearsal drifting through the atrium, a visiting mathematician arguing with students over coffee.

The goal is simple: make the Union a place people pass through even when they don’t “have an event,” because something is usually happening.

2. Create Habits of Aliveness

Culture doesn’t flourish through one-off events. It grows through habits.

People need daily rituals that pull them out of their rooms and into the shared intellectual life of the campus. That can be simple:

• Daily concerts on the quad, simple and spontaneous.
• Evening conversations where people bring the ideas they’re working through.
• Story nights with scientists, artists, and creatives speaking plainly, without turning it into a lecture.
• Walk-in workshops where students learn how to build something, fix something, or try a tool or topic they don’t already know.

This isn’t about “programming” for its own sake. It’s about making it normal to stumble into a rehearsal, a demo, a debate, a reading group, or a shared meal and end up staying.

3. Replace Status Games With Better Options

Most toxic social patterns, exclusivity, clout-chasing, the frat-bar monoculture, survive because the university has failed to offer better worlds.

When the coolest thing you can do on campus is “go out,” everything collapses into that narrow form. But the moment the campus offers living alternatives, status begins to reorganize around curiosity, creativity, and presence.

Build enough alternatives that people can pick a different kind of night without feeling like they’re opting out of campus life:

• Science nights that feel like shared inquiry, not lectures.
• Makers’ fairs that spill into the night, full of prototypes, experiments, and visible failures.
• Film clubs that treat movies as portals rather than assignments.
• Labs as galleries, where research becomes something you can walk through, listen to, or touch.
• Music everywhere, not as performance but as community: jam sessions, open rehearsals, students playing on lawns, ambient sets at sunset.

When there are dozens of ways to participate in the intellectual and artistic life of the campus, the old status economy dissolves.

The goal is not to moralize against bars. The goal is to build a world where they are no longer the cultural apex.

A New Cultural Principle

A university is responsible for the imaginative climate of its campus.]

If it provides nothing, the culture collapses into frat basements and bar lines.

If it provides a living ecosystem of art, ideas, music, conversation, and wonder, students will choose it, not because they should, but because it feels like life.

Cultural revitalization is how you pull people out of numbness and into meaning, guiding them toward knowledge and showing them how to be alive.

4.8 Panem Et Circenses

The Roman poet Juvenal warned that a population numbed by_panem et circenses,_bread and circuses, loses its capacity to think, act, or demand anything higher of itself. Give people constant stimulation and they will forget they ever wanted more.

Universities have recreated this pattern with astonishing precision.

Not through grand amphitheaters or imperial games, but through a thousand small distractions that saturate the day: endless notifications, shallow events, entertainment packaged as “engagement,” social rituals optimized for forgetting rather than remembering. The result is a student body that moves constantly and rarely reflects, busy, entertained, and rarely alone with a thought.

It is the campus version of Brave New World’s soma: a culture designed to keep people busy, satisfied, and quiet. Students don’t always choose this; they inherit it. When the institution surrounds them with distraction, they adapt to distraction. When everything is loud, immediate, and easy, they stop asking what they actually want. They accept the rhythms handed to them: the predictable nights, the prepackaged amusements, the rituals of performance that replace actual attention. Desire itself becomes faint because nothing in the environment encourages them to listen for it.

The deeper cost is the erosion of interior life. Thinking requires a kind of stillness, not literal silence, but an inner spaciousness where questions can form and bother you. When a culture is built around constant diversion, that space disappears. People lose the patience to wrestle with uncertainty, the courage to be confused, the ability to sit with a problem long enough for it to reveal its shape. A distracted campus is incapable of the very thing a university exists to cultivate: consciousness capable of reflection.

The problem is not that students like fun. The problem is that the university has stopped offering anything more compelling than distraction. Campus entertainment becomes the default because nothing stronger competes with it. There are too few environments that demand presence, too few rituals that build depth, and too few gatherings that reward attention instead of breaking it into pieces. In this vacuum, triviality becomes inevitable.

The antidote to panem et circenses is not austerity or prohibition. It is the revival of desire, the slow reawakening of a person’s capacity to want something beyond distraction. A living university cultivates this not by policing pleasure but by creating environments where curiosity becomes stronger than entertainment, where beauty interrupts routine, where thinking is not an academic chore but a form of aliveness.

A campus full of circuses keeps students comfortable.

A campus full of interesting worlds makes them fully alive.

The choice between those two is the choice that determines everything that follows.

4.9 Student Clubs

Student clubs should be the laboratories where a university’s imagination goes to test itself. A place to discover what might be possible. Too many clubs, especially technical ones, have drifted into the same project, the same competition, and the same design with slightly improved tolerances. It becomes imitation rather than inquiry. A car club that builds the same car every year isn’t engineering; it’s a tradition. And while tradition has its place, it cannot be the center of an institution devoted to discovery.

Imagine instead a culture where student teams try things we do not yet know how to build: flying vehicles, deep-ocean robotics, bioluminescent architecture, hyperloop prototypes, exosuits that blur the line between art and engineering. These are projects bold enough that failure becomes interesting rather than embarrassing. The point is not to create the next Iron Man suit; the point is to re-open the frontier of curiosity and remind students that the world is larger than the menu of officially sanctioned competitions.

And for those who think, “I don’t have enough experience,” that is precisely the signal to begin. The frontier is defined by the absence of experience. If you already know how to do it, it isn’t new. Universities should be the safest place in the world to attempt what no one has tried. That is the whole reason universities exist.

This applies equally to nontechnical clubs. A “social club” should not mean attending the same mixers and running the same events every semester. It should mean experimenting with formats of gathering and bringing people together. Clubs should create experiences that stretch people, not routines that stabilize them.

To make this possible, the institution must stop treating clubs as liabilities and start treating them as engines of discovery. That means shifting the administrative posture from restriction to enablement. Student teams don’t need micromanagement; they need support structures that let them explore safely and ambitiously. Give them the infrastructure to test real prototypes without risking injury or personal property. Build the facilities quickly, not in geological time, and treat safety as something that supports experimentation rather than halts it. Develop clear, minimal procedures that help students work responsibly instead of drowning them in bureaucratic friction.

Most importantly, stop acting like innovation is a threat. The university should not be the primary obstacle that clubs must overcome on their way to building something extraordinary. It should be the force that clears space, lowers barriers, and encourages teams to take on projects that feel a little impossible. A club culture that aims only for what is safe, familiar, and annually repeatable will never produce anything surprising. A club culture that reaches beyond its own experience might just change what students think they can do.

Student clubs are not extracurriculars. They are humanity's R&D division, run by people who still believe that the world can be different. Give them room, and they will build things no one was ready for.

4.10 No Career Fairs

Universities love to pretend that career fairs are the climax of education: the great marketplace where four years of life are distilled into a résumé, a handshake, and the hope that someone in a branded booth will find you employable. It is a ritual built on the quiet assumption that the purpose of college is job-placement, and that the highest aspiration of a university is to serve as a talent pipeline for corporate HR departments.

Career fairs flatten people long before corporations do. They teach students to present themselves as products rather than thinkers. They elevate conformity over curiosity, polish over substance, performance over possibility. They produce graduates who know how to look employable but have no idea what actually matters to them. A campus built around job fairs is a campus that has forgotten how to ask: “What are you here to do?”

Worse, it has forgotten how to help students find the answer.

Career fairs are a distraction. They reduce the vastness of education to an afternoon of fluorescent booths and branded stickers. They treat students as future employees, not emerging minds. They pull people away from the deeper search for meaning and into the shallow choreography of “professionalism.”

A living university replaces this with something better: a culture where paths are discovered, not assigned; where exploration precedes employment; where people learn to pursue what matters because they have learned who they are.

The purpose of the university is to help students become the kind of people for whom work becomes an expression of their curiosity rather than a surrender of it.

4.11 Curiosity Open Houses

Most campuses have some version of an engineering open house: a day when student teams set up tables, professors dust off old demos, and visitors walk through a maze of posters and half-functioning prototypes. At UIUC, EOH (Engineering Open House) is the closest thing to a small-scale world’s fair: science experiments, robots dancing, kids staring wide-eyed at machines they didn’t know existed.

At its best, an open house ignites awe.

It gives children and teenagers the sense that the future is open, that the world is full of problems worth pursuing, that science and engineering are not abstract subjects but living forces you can touch. It shows them that students, people barely older than they are, can make things that seem impossible. A single afternoon like that can change the trajectory of someone’s life.

But the potential of these open houses is larger than what most of them currently achieve. They should feel like stepping into the future, not into a well-intentioned but mediocre science fair. And to achieve that, we have to change the incentives.

Make Building the Impossible Normal

Most projects are thrown together at the last minute. Clubs repeat the same designs every year. Professors bring out the same demo they’ve shown for a decade. The whole thing becomes predictable. Safe. Boring.

A Curiosity Open House should feel nothing like that. It should feel like stepping into the future, more like Disneyland and the World’s Fair.

To get there, we need to fix incentives. Students won’t attempt ambitious things if the system rewards mediocrity. Put real support behind bold projects: money, materials, fabrication help, and sponsorships. Reward teams that actually try something new. Reward risk, including failures that come from hard problems.

Christopher Xu is a perfect example of how culture should look. He spent an entire year building a robotic squirrel from scratch, working nights, weekends, and even taking a gap semester to pull it off. That kind of genuine obsession is what makes a project worth showing. Little kids, in their simplicity and honesty, can tell when something is real. This squirrel became the entire highlight of the entire open house that year. (See his project: “#16 Showing off”and learn about Chris in Appendix B).

Bring in People Who Expand Imagination

Also: who you invite matters. Don’t bring corporate robots who give the same HR-approved talk everywhere they go.

Curiosity Open Houses are also about stories, about the humans behind the breakthroughs, the real stories of people who’ve built things, broken things, tried things, and lived interesting lives.

Those whose stories make you think, “I want to do something like that.”

And we’ve seen what happens when you do that.

In 1995, UIUC brought Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak to speak at the Engineering Open House. That same year, three students, Luke Nosek, Max Levchin, and Scott Banister, teamed up to design a T-shirt for the event. Just a small project. But it pulled them together for the first time and set off the chain of collaborations that would eventually lead to PayPal.

Jimmy Soni writes:

Their first joint venture was a T-shirt for the 1995 Engineering Open House, a student-organized annual conference whose keynote speaker that year was Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak.

The trio bonded over producing something small, and it gave them confidence that they might one day make something big.

— Jimmy Soni, The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley

When you bring in people who expand imagination, the campus expands with them.

Expand It Beyond Engineering

Make it campus-wide.

Engineering students show their work, engineering students attend, engineering students care. Everyone else remains outside the circle.

But curiosity is not a discipline. Curiosity is human.

Imagine an open house where every department participates:

• Philosophers staging live debates as performance art.
• Chemists running glowing, synesthetic experiments.
• Historians building immersive micro-museums.
• Musicians wiring instruments to sensors and transforming sound.
• Designers crafting speculative artifacts from futures that don’t yet exist.
• Linguists creating live language games.
• Mathematicians turning proofs into installations you can walk through.

A campus-wide Curiosity Open House becomes something larger than a technical exhibition. It becomes the university’s annual self-portrait, a map of what its students are capable of imagining, what students made, what they asked, and what they were willing to try.

Build a Culture That Expects More Each Year

Finally, it has to avoid becoming a tradition machine.

The rule should be simple:Each year must outdo the last.

If these open houses are to matter, they must avoid the trap of repetition. The event should be an engine, not a tradition, a place where each year pushes the limits of the previous one. Students should enter knowing the expectation is not "match last year," but surpass it. Not by being bigger, but by being bolder.

Do this, and Curiosity Open Houses become something close to the early world’s fairs: temporary windows into possible futures.

A university needs at least one day each year that reminds everyone why they are here: to imagine, to build, to test limits, and to show the next generation that the world is larger than they knew.

4.12 Incentives of Excellence

Universities punish failure, but they rarely reward greatness. The message is basically: “Don’t screw up,” not “Aim high.” So people play it safe. No risk, no ambition, nothing bold.

We need incentives that push students to try harder and go further.

Create challenges, competitions, and recognition that make excellence visible:

• best grades
• perfect-grade challenges
• lowest grades (surviving the hardest classes)
• most credit hours in a semester
• fastest graduation
• solving a real, important problem
• Inventions that don’t fit anywhere
• and a Hall of Makers for anyone who creates something impressive

And then: give real rewards.

Not meaningless certificates, actual benefits.

• A free semester
• Free food for a year
• Guaranteed funding for your next project
• Your name in the building
• Priority access to labs, studios, equipment
• Dinner with any alumni you pick
• Swipe access to almost every locked space on campus
• Fully funded trip anywhere you want to go
• You get to put anything you want into a 100-year time capsule under the school.
• A small parade across campus in your honor with a band, banners, and your project rolled through the streets
• Name a room after you for a year
• Unlimited printing
• Rename the WiFi for a day

Build a culture where effort, courage, and mastery are recognized. Students should see that pushing themselves leads to visible consequences. Incentives are not about competition for its own sake; they are about setting expectations. This is a place where ambition is normal.

Reward excellence and people will aim for it. Ignore it and they eventually stop trying.

4.13 Excited About the Future

Education is supposed to expand people.

Instead, a lot of students come out of college more cynical, more anxious, and somehow convinced the world is doomed and they’re powerless. They learn to diagnose what’s wrong with everything, but they lose the ability to imagine anything better.

People get “educated” and end up sad, stuck, or mediocre.

Really? That’s the outcome?

If you sleep with the dog, you get its fleas.

When you surround individuals with tired norms, they get normalized. If the culture is pessimistic, they absorb pessimism. If the environment teaches caution, they shrink. If the expectation is mediocrity, they settle.

A university should do the opposite.

It should make students excited about the future, not in a naïve, delusional way, but in a real, active way. Excited to build things, fix things, imagine new systems, and try impossible ideas because they can actually see themselves shaping the world instead of diagnosing its failures from the sidelines.

Education shouldn’t end with a long list of reasons everything sucks. It should end with a sense of possibility.

A living university gives students something to look forward to. It makes them feel like the future is theirs to approach, not something to fear.

4.14 Graduation

Graduations should be about demonstration through creation, argument, or intervention that their world is irreversibly larger.

The ceremony is the public release of whatever they have made: a proof, a company, a policy, a poem, a machine.

Achievement, not compliance.

PART V — PHYSICAL CAMPUS & INFRASTRUCTURE

5. Infrastructure for Human Flourishing

5.1 Housing

Use the university’s biggest advantage: land.

• Build high-quality, affordable dorms and co-living spaces
• Undercut slumlord apartments
• Put downward pressure on local rents.
• Make on-campus living the cheapest, easiest, and most social option.
• Students should want to stay because it’s better, not because it’s required.

If private landlords complain, too bad.

The university does not exist to support local real estate or even the local economy. It exists to support students.

When housing is abundant and affordable, students stop worrying about leases, fees, and isolation. They spend more time around each other, which naturally supports the next essential piece of campus life: food.

5.2 Dining Halls

Dining halls are where everyday life happens. Good housing keeps students close; good dining brings them together.

• Provide consistently good, low-cost food; keep dining halls open and active.
• Make meal plans optional but so affordable and convenient that most students choose them.
• Turn dining halls into reliable social spaces: places to meet friends, run into people, or simply avoid eating alone.
• Make leftover food visible and easy to claim, to reduce waste.

Affordable housing and accessible dining let students live well, connect easily, and focus on learning instead of survival logistics

5.3 Free Bikes Everywhere

Imagine a campus where bikes are as common as benches, not rented, or checked out, simply there. Dozens on every block. You walk outside, grab one, ride to class, leave it at the next rack, and someone else takes it fifteen minutes later. Movement becomes effortless.

To make this real:

• Flood the campus with free, sturdy, low-maintenance bikes
• Use simple, standardized designs that are hard to steal and cheap to repair
• Build clear, safe bike lanes so riding feels natural
• Treat bikes as shared infrastructure, not personal property

When bikes are everywhere, the campus shrinks in the best way: students move quickly, run into each other more often, and stay connected to what’s happening around them. The university becomes a small, walkable, bikeable city that feels alive, social, and easy to navigate.

5.4 Libraries & Archives as Living Organs

Libraries and archives are the university's memory. They shouldn’t sit quietly in special collections; they should show up in campus life.

• Invest in rare books, university archives, digitized newspapers, and long-term preservation.
• Make the material accessible: searchable, open, easy to browse.
• Don’t rely on exhibitions alone. Most students never see them.
• Produce media that meets students where they are: short films, mini-documentaries, podcasts, well-edited digital stories.
• Tell the histories of people, discoveries, conflicts, and turning points in formats students will actually watch and share.

Students should feel they live inside a long, unfolding narrative, not inside a mall. A strong library system makes the university’s identity tangible, something you can walk through, learn from, and contribute to.

5.5 Beauty

Beauty matters.

Beauty shapes mood, focus, and the way people carry themselves.

All university campuses must be beautiful: trees that are worth noticing, buildings that invite you in, and spaces that make you slow down for a moment.

Beauty creates places that make you feel more alive.

5.6 Build a Geodesic Dome

5.7 Unit One

Unit One was one of UIUC’s most ambitious attempts to build a living environment where learning did not stop at the classroom door, where students could experiment, create, try new skills, debate, and be part of a community that treated curiosity as a daily habit.

It began in 1971 as a response to CRUEL (the Committee on the Reform of Undergraduate Education), which argued that living and learning had become disconnected at Illinois. Unit One tried to fuse them.

What Unit One Actually Was

• An academic program inside Allen Hall, co-sponsored by Academic Affairs and Student Affairs.
• A full set of credit-bearing courses (about 50 per semester), taught by department-appointed instructors.
• Small classes—usually 5–35 students—in seminar rooms inside the dorm.
• A structure that protected faculty experimentation: instructors could try new courses, methods, and topics without departmental bureaucracy
• A Guests-in-Residence program: 6–8 writers, artists, activists, musicians, journalists, or public thinkers lived in the hall for a week and ran workshops, discussions, and informal sessions every day.
• Heavy noncredit programming: discussions, film series, tutoring, study-skills workshops, field trips, student-run groups.
• Studios and labs inside the dorm: ceramics, photography darkrooms, music practice rooms, electronic music studio, multipurpose rooms, library, etc.

Unit One was a fully operational academic micro-college inside a dorm.

How It Worked Day to Day

• Students lived together, took classes downstairs, ate with their instructors, and saw guest artists wandering the halls.
• Instructors held office hours in the building and were given free meal passes so they could sit with students.
• Workshops, concerts, and talks happened constantly, not big events, but frequent, small, high-contact ones.
• Students started clubs, ran programming, and shaped the atmosphere.
• Anyone on campus could join the classes or events if space allowed, but Allen residents got priority.
• The program’s culture came from students being self-selected, curious, and active.

Why It Mattered Then

Unit One showed something universities usually pretend is impossible: lower-division undergraduates can thrive in a small, intense, intellectually alive environment inside a giant campus.

Evaluations repeatedly found:

• students were more engaged,
• had stronger discussions,
• built deeper relationships with faculty,
• collaborated more,
• and experienced a much easier academic/social transition.

COPE (the university’s official Program Evaluation Council) eventually endorsed Unit One for radically improving quality and rigor after reorganization in the 1980s.

And the clearest sign of value:students saved it from termination four separate timesby mounting large campaigns.

You don’t fight for a dorm unless it’s doing something irreplaceable.

Why It Matters Today

UIUC today has:

• more isolated students,
• a large lecture culture,
• weak campus community,
• and very little intimate intellectual life

Unit One solved that problem once. It did it in practice, not in theory.

It created:

• daily intellectual life in the place students actually live,
• direct access to interesting adults doing real work,
• small classes for freshmen without bureaucracy,
• a cultural identity that wasn’t frat-driven or anonymous,
• and a sense of belonging tied to learning, not branding.

What a Modern Reinvention Should Do

• Bring back daily creative/intellectual activity in Allen: concerts, workshops, discussions, maker sessions, film nights.
• Rebuild the Guests-in-Residence model and expand it. Mitch Altman and others are already willing to come!
• Reintroduce small seminars that actually matter (e.g., Designing Society–style courses).
• Protect the “weird + curious + open” culture without drifting into checkbox programming or ideological rigidity.
• Restore the physical studios and labs. Make Allen a place where things are built, made, debated, and performed.
• Give students real control over programming, as before.
• Make Allen the experimental campus: the place where new courses, formats, and ideas get prototyped.

Make Life More Interesting

Unit One worked because it treated the dorm not as housing but as a miniature college, a place where young people lived closely with ideas, with each other, and with visiting adults who were doing meaningful and interesting things in the world.

Learn more about Unit One:

• • Unit One History
• • The Zen of Unit One: Residential Learning Communities as a Way to Foster Liberal Learning at Large Universities by Howard K. Schein
• • Designing Society by Marianne Brün (1984)
• • See the impact of Unit One.

5.8 Parking

Parking should be straightforward and humane. Meters shouldn’t be priced to punish people, and enforcement shouldn’t rely on someone constantly cruising for violations. It's inefficient, demoralizing work, and it pits staff against students. Set clear, reasonable rates and use technology so the system runs cleanly without turning anyone into a parking predator.

5.9 Fix the Body, Fix the Student

A university should not produce pale, anxious, sedentary people who know how to optimize a résumé but do not know how to carry themselves through the world. Students should leave more alive than when they arrived: stronger, healthier, more energetic, more disciplined, more capable of action.

Benjamin Franklin understood this. In his 1747 proposal for education,Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania, he argued that students should live “plainly, temperately, and frugally,” and that they should be frequently exercised in running, leaping, wrestling, and swimming so as to keep them healthy and make their bodies active and strong. He did not treat physical vigor as extracurricular decoration. He treated it as part of education itself.

He was right.

A living university should quietly train students in habits of physical competence and self-command. Not through some fake wellness branding campaign, and not through bureaucratic “student success initiatives,” but through an environment that actually makes health normal and degeneracy inconvenient.

That means specific changes:

1. Establish a baseline student fitness standard.

A basic standard could include:

• 20 consecutive pushups
• 5 strict pullups
• Run 1 mile continuously at a steady pace without stopping
• Swim at least 100 meters/yards continuously and tread water for 2 minutes
• Carry 40–50 lbs (groceries, luggage, equipment) for at least 100–200 meters without stopping
• Hold a 60-second plank

2. Put fitness infrastructure in public view.

Every dorm area and major student zone should have some version of:

• Pullup bars
• Dip bars
• Open turf/grass
• Multi-use court

Standard: visible, free, well-lit, and always accessible.

3. Rebuild the social life around activity.

A living campus should have more:

• pickup soccer
• lifting groups
• long walks
• dance
• hiking clubs
• swim hours
• run clubs
• martial arts
• outdoor games

And less of a social culture built around passive, alcohol-centered gatherings in enclosed spaces.

A university that ignores the body will eventually weaken the mind too.

Physical weakness bleeds into intellectual weakness. If you are always tired, inflamed, distracted, hunched over, badly fed, and unable to endure discomfort, your thinking suffers too. Education is not just what enters the mind. It is also about the condition of the person doing the learning.

Living plainly matters too. A university does not need to train students in luxury. It should train them in independence. A student who learns to live well without excess, who can eat simply, sleep properly, move their body, and govern their impulses, is already freer than the student who needs constant consumption and comfort to remain functional.

The goal is not bodybuilding for its own sake, nor some compulsory athletic culture. The goal is a university that treats physical vitality as part of human flourishing. Students should graduate not just knowing more, but being more capable: able to hike, swim, lift, run, build, endure, recover, and act.

A civilization that cannot produce vigorous young people is in worse shape than it thinks.

PART VI — TECHNOLOGY & ACCESS

6. Technology as Public Infrastructure

6.1 End the LMS Trap

Everyone knows the current learning platforms are slow, closed, and ugly. They hide course materials behind logins, break every few weeks, and lock the university into expensive vendor contracts.

Fix it:

• Make all course materials public by default.
• Adopt or build open-source tools.
• Let anyone browse lectures, notes, assignments, and discussions.
• Allow students to freely audit any course online.
• Every student should be able to export their work, notes, syllabi, and project artifacts in durable formats. A class should not vanish because a semester ended.

If the teaching is good, it should be visible. If it isn’t good enough to show the world, you should improve it. Treat knowledge as something to share, not something gated.

Everyone knows Canvas is horseshit. Why do we use it? Create an alternative.

6.2 Open Everything

Transparency should be the university’s default, not its exception.

Make every layer of the institution visible:

• Syllabi and materials: Publish class plans, reading lists, assignments, slides, datasets, and project archives. Let curriculum improve in the open instead of being rebuilt in isolation.
• Budgets and governance: Show how money moves, who decides what, and how priorities are set. All visible. Students and faculty should understand the systems they live inside.
• FOIAs and documents: Publish what would otherwise require extraction. Sunlight shouldn’t depend on paperwork. The FOIA log should be public.
• Faculty evaluations and course feedback: Publish aggregated, anonymized patterns (not names) so teaching can improve.
• Research processes: Share more than final papers, notes, prototypes, failures, and revision history when possible.
• **Admissions data and philosophy:**Publish priorities, rubrics, and aggregate patterns, not just acceptance rates, so people can see what the institution claims to value. Let people see how judgment is made.
• Hiring and promotion criteria:Make the standards public—what counts as good teaching, research, and service—without publishing private deliberations.
• **Archives and history:**Digitize and open yearbooks, documents, letters, policies, and debates so the institutional record is easy to browse.
• Space usage and room availability: Make studios, labs, and seminar rooms searchable, with clear rules for booking when available. Let individuals book rooms, not just student clubs.
• **Programming and event calendars:**Publish events in one place. Intellectual life shouldn’t depend on knowing the right people or the right links.
• Institutional memory: Make reports, committee work, and policy rationales easy to find so people can see how decisions were made.

Transparency makes it easier to trust decisions, spot waste, and improve what isn’t working.

PART VII — PROJECTS & ENTREPRENEURSHIP

7. Projects > Classes

7.1 Project-first culture

Learning in college comes from:

• the thing you built at 2am
• the documentary you made
• the rocket you tried to land
• the website that accidentally got 10,000 users

Universities should:

• Fund people and projects, not just RSOs and centers.
• Make it easy to:
  • get small grants
  • borrow equipment
  • use lab space
  • get faculty partners

A few thousand dollars may not create immediate traction, but it does something more important. It gives a student confidence, and it accelerates their progress and ambition at exactly the moment when momentum matters

What looks small in the short term often becomes the beginning of a path, a craft, or a life’s work.

7.2 Clubs Are Optional. Projects Are Essential

RSOs often become:

• resume factories
• bureaucracy training grounds

You don’t need a logo and a constitution to change the world.

You need a project and a small group of obsessed people.

7.3 Entrepreneurship Cannot Be Taught

Entrepreneurship centers:

• should stop teaching people to play startup theater.
• should not revolve around:
  • pitch competitions
  • jargon
  • networking for its own sake

Instead:

• they should not exist and vanish from the face of the earth, and
• put more money directly into student experiments. Grants. Fast decisions. Prototypes. Customers. Failures. Postmortems. Fund momentum, not choreography.

Entrepreneurship is not a curriculum. It is a disposition toward uncertainty, an appetite for problems, a willingness to test an idea in the world and accept whatever the world answers back. This cannot be simulated through competitions or polished slides. It cannot be standardized, credentialed, or professionalized.

Oh, and if students want to become entrepreneurs, the path is simple: they begin. The university’s role is not to certify people’s ambition but to create an environment where starting anything feels natural and possible.

Stop the cap, and remember, entrepreneurship cannot be taught.

PART VIII — RESEARCH & GRADUATE EDUCATION

8. Research Without the Bullshit

8.1 The PhD problem

We should be honest:

• The PhD system is built to produce professors in 19th-century Germany, not curious humans in the 21st century.
• It works for a tiny minority.
• For many others it becomes:
  • a union card
  • a decade-long delay
  • a way to avoid making real decisions

We should:

• shorten, reshape, or in some cases replace PhDs with:
  • problem-driven fellowships
  • short, intense research apprenticeships
  • paths that don’t require 6–10 years of limbo

I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of union card that you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s being a professor or other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper which says they’re qualified, but it really doesn’t mean anything. The Ph.D. takes far too long and discourages women from becoming scientists, which I consider a great tragedy. So I have opposed it all my life without any success at all.

— Freeman Dyson

8.2 Graduate students as humans, not cheap labor

• Grad students should not be:
  • disguised teaching machines
  • visa-dependent labor
  • endlessly exploited

If we can’t pay grad students decently and give them freedom, we shouldn’t have the program.

8.3 Fix the IRB

IRBs exist to prevent abuses like Tuskegee. That is a real achievement. But the system we have now does something nobody intended: it blocks harmless research, slows down student projects, and makes even simple surveys feel like federal paperwork.

At a university, this has predictable effects:

• fewer experiments
• fewer student-led studies
• less intellectual exploration
• more box-checking
• and an entire culture trained to avoid trying things

The goal is to bring strict oversight where the risk is real, and fast, light-touch handling where it isn’t.

What IRB Was Meant To Do

• Protect people from coercion, deception, real medical risks, or exploitation.
• Review research that could genuinely harm subjects.
• Ensure informed consent is clear and honest.

What IRB Currently Does

• Treats a five-minute online survey like a clinical trial.
• Requires “exemption applications” for things that are already exempt.
• Forces students into months of delays for projects with zero risk.
• Applies medical-style oversight to basic behavioral, social, or educational research.
• Makes independent or exploratory research nearly impossible.

What the University Should Do

1. Create a two-track system.

• High-risk research: full review.
• Low-risk research: instant registration, no committee, no waiting.

Examples of low-risk: surveys, interviews, classroom studies, benign behavioral tasks, anything with no plausible physical or psychological harm.

2. Make exemptions actually exempt.

If a project fits the federal “benign behavioral” or “educational practice” categories, it should require no IRB submission at all.

3. Allow independent or student-led research outside large labs.

A student shouldn’t need the machinery of a medical trial to run a small experiment or a community study.

4. Publish simple decision trees.

Faculty and students should be able to answer:

Do I need IRB? If yes, how much? How long will it take?

Right now the answer is opaque and inconsistent.

5. Stop treating every data point as human-subjects research.

Observational studies, public-behavior studies, and routine analytics should not require full IRB cycles.

Let’s Move Forward

Oversight should scale with risk.

If something is harmless, it shouldn’t take months to approve. Let researchers ask basic questions, run small experiments, and learn something, without navigating a system built for drug trials.

8.4 Fund Discovery, Not Paperwork

Build a portfolio that backs people, buys time, and pays for being wrong.

The grant system fails because it funds performance: detailed predictions, tidy deliverables, and rhetoric that flatters committee instincts. Discovery is the opposite: uncertain, wandering, and often only legible after the fact.

This means we should fund science the way we fund exploration: as a portfolio.

• Exploration Grants (tiny, fast, frictionless) give researchers money to try unusual ideas without all the usual paperwork. A short application, quick decisions, and a learning note at the end, without staged milestones or scripted progress steps.
• Investigator Fellowships (5–7 years, renewable) fund people with demonstrated depth and genuinely interesting questions. There are no deliverables. Renewal is based on integrity, learning, and intellectual growth, not on promises made to a committee years earlier.
• Expeditions (large, long, collaborative) support shared tools, platforms, and moonshots where the real challenge is coordinating people, not predicting outcomes.

Freedom needs counterweights, so we set aside a considerable budget for truth-maintenance: replications, red-team critique, and solid studies when the evidence base has fallen apart. We require reflection. We do not require success.

A university that worships polished plans will get polished plans. A university that funds time, autonomy, and honest adversarial testing will get the future.

PART IX — ADMISSIONS, ALUMNI & EXTERNAL RELATIONS

9. Who We Admit, Who We Honor, Who We Become

9.1 Admissions Built for the Human Being, Not the Performance

Stop auditioning children.

The current system trains students to become applicants, not people.

By the end of high school, many know how to look impressive on paper but have no idea what they care about.

Essays are coached. Activities are optimized. “Leadership” is a costume.

A living university should reject this audition logic.

At seventeen or eighteen, there are only a few things you can see clearly:

• whether someone can handle demanding academic work
• whether their life has any real momentum, however small
• whether they are willing to be honest rather than perfectly packaged

Everything else is noise or performance.

So admissions should be built around one core principle:

Admit for capacity to grow and contribute, not for capacity to perform being impressive.

From that principle, everything else follows.

What You Can Fairly Judge at 18

At that age, no one is finished. They shouldn’t be.

What you can judge is:

• **Academic ability:**Can they handle hard material without collapsing?
• Trajectory: Are they moving somewhere, even if they don’t know exactly where?
• **Sincerity:**Does what they present feel lived, not manufactured?

At 17 or 18, no one is fully formed. Most students don’t have a polished narrative, a finished worldview, or a portfolio that proves everything. That’s ok. The university should help create that growth, not demand it in advance.

But you do need some evidence that the person is real and feels alive.

One System, Two Signals

You need a simple architecture that doesn’t reward faking.

The university can use a one admissions system with two primary signals:

• **Academic Threshold:**a clear floor of competence
• **Lived Story:**small, honest traces of how someone actually moves through the world

Every admitted student meets the academic floor.

Beyond that, some are selected mostly on academic strength, others mostly on story and trajectory.

But the underlying question is always the same:

“Will this person grow here and make the place more alive, not less?”

The Academic Floor (Without Worshipping Scores)

There should be a transparent academic threshold: if you consistently hit a certain level of scores and coursework, you’ve proven you can do the work.

For this group:

• No essays.
• No forced “tell us who you are.”
• No theater.

If the number of academically-qualified students is less than or equal to the seats reserved for this track, they all get in.

They have already paid their dues in work, not performance.

If there are more academically-qualified students than seats, you don’t start grading their souls. You:

• run a simple lottery within that pool, and
• reserve the right to exclude only in rare, clear cases of documented sustained dishonesty, cruelty, or abuse.

This changes a few things because:

• You honor academic excellence without turning it into a personality test.
• You avoid over-selecting for a narrow type of hyper-coached striver.
• You don’t pretend you can accurately rank 2,000 perfect-score kids into a “deserving” order.

Scores become what they should be: a strong, limited signal of one capacity, not a proxy for worth/

**A note on perfect scores:**High numbers don’t guarantee good citizens. But the solution isn’t to psychoanalyze teenagers or stage moral auditions. Set a hard floor against documented dishonesty or harm, run a simple lottery when demand exceeds seats, and let the rest stand. You’re not building a campus of polished high achievers; you’re building a community with room for difficult, brilliant people. Culture will shape them far more than admissions ever can.

The Story Signal (Without Performance)

Not everyone fits neatly into the academic-automatic pool:

• late bloomers
• students from under-resourced schools
• unconventional learners
• creators and thinkers who invested time in real work instead of perfect grades

For them, the university looks at what can’t easily be faked:

• things they made because they were curious
• things they wrote without being asked
• responsibilities they quietly carried
• difficulties they navigated without turning them into spectacle
• questions they keep coming back to

This is not a genius search. It is a search for genuineness and direction.

Again, the standard is not “greatness.” It’s: does this look like the real life of a real person trying to move forward?

No 20-page portfolio. No cinematic trauma essay. Just enough evidence to see: there is a human being here, not a product.

What This System Actually Produces

This architecture:

• strips away most incentives to fake a life
• gives strong academic students a clean path without extra performance
• protects late bloomers and unconventional students with momentum
• refuses to rank “perfect” applicants by microscopic, meaningless differences
• recognizes that character is formed at the university, not fully measured before

Admissions is not prophecy. It is a decision aboutwho gets a chance.

The university’s promise should be simple:

We will not make you lie about who you are to enter.

We will ask only: can you grow here, will you take the chance seriously, and are you willing to be fully alive?

9.2 Invite “failed” alumni

Stop inviting only:

• billionaires
• Nobel laureates
• celebrities

Also invite:

• those who tried something ambitious and it collapsed
• those who changed direction at 30 or 40
• those who the one who walked away from prestige to do something “weird” and meaningful
• those who live perfectly happy and “normal lives,” whatever that means
• those experienced real consequences—illness, loss, prison, failure—and found a way forward

Bringing these alumni back sends a simple message:a life is not a trajectory toward perfection, but a sequence of revisions.

9.3 Philanthropy That Doesn’t Suck

Philanthropy should expand what the university can attempt, not add another beige building with a name on it.

If donors want to help, fund freedom:

• scholarships
• student project funds
• crazy experimental seminars
• art, sculptures, domes, space and things that inspire
• independent fellowships for brilliant, unconventional faculty
• no-strings grants that let students and researchers attempt work at the edge of what’s known

Give money to possibility, not vanity.

9.4 Alumni Email for Life

Give every graduate a permanent university email.

9.5 Storage as a Basic Right

Give every student terabytes of secure storage for life.

Access to secure digital storage will be a basic human right.

9.6 Stop Punishing the Unconventional

Every university carries a quiet history of pushing out the very people who later reshape the world. Not because they lacked talent, but because they didn’t fit the approved mold.

Stop repeating that mistake.

A student who thinks differently, works strangely, or pursues an idea that looks pointless today is often the one who creates value tomorrow.

Don’t punish unconventional minds now and chase them later for money.

Stop institutional thirst, gatekeeping, reflex to demand conformity before offering support. If someone is trying something interesting, let them work, and get out of their way. Trust that if you back people early, they pay it forward later.

PART X — DIVERSITY & INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM

10. Everything in Motion

10.1 Beyond Checkboxes

Diversity should mean:

• lots of different ideas
• lots of different backgrounds
• serious debate

Not:

• bureaucratic virtue signaling
• checkbox quotas
• speech codes that suffocate thought

A living university:

• invites people you disagree with
• protects controversial speech
• trains students to argue, not cancel

The problem is not diversity; the problem is reducing human beings to administrative categories and calling that moral imagination.

10.2 Tenure Reform

Every university claims to value originality, but most of its evaluative machinery favors whatever is already legible. Most breakthroughs begin as work that doesn’t yet look successful. Early ideas are slow, uncertain, and hard to measure.

Discovery rarely arrives in a form an institution can recognize in advance. The work that later reshapes a field often looks, at first, unproductive: slow, uncertain, resistant to fashionable metrics. It may generate more questions than results, more failures than publications. But this is exactly what early-stage insight looks like. Breakthroughs begin as anomalies long before they become achievements.

A reformed tenure system must learn to protect this early phase of intellectual labor. It must judge not only what has been completed, but what is being attempted: the ambition of the question, the coherence of the inquiry, and the clarity of the thinker’s trajectory.

If the institution waits for proof before offering support, it is no longer fostering discovery.

Tenure should be the place where uncertain ideas survive long enough to become real.

10.3 A Larger Identity

A university’s identity should not shrink to the politics of the moment. Its task is larger: to cultivate the capacities that move humanity forward, regardless of race, gender, or nationality. The point is not to deny difference but to refuse to let difference exhaust our imagination.

A serious institution frames its mission in universal terms. It draws people together around shared intellectual work: understanding the world, expanding it, and contributing to the progress of all. When identity becomes the center, the university loses its horizon. When the horizon is human possibility, identity naturally finds its place without becoming the purpose.

The university should anchor itself in that larger vision.

10.4 The Institution That Refused to Freeze

A university should never mistake longevity for wisdom.

What looks permanent is often just a moment pretending to be a monument.

Institutions become rigid when they forget that their rules began as experiments, created as provisional answers to problems that have since changed.

UIUC’s early history understood this. It began not as a shrine to inherited traditions but as a deliberate departure from them. It was believed that learning should be tied to labor, that theory and practice gain meaning only when they meet. They chose an English motto—Learning and Labor—not because Latin was unavailable, but because they refused to mimic the old world’s prestige architecture. When, in 1886, students attempted to replace the English motto with a Latin one, the effort collapsed for lack of quorum. The university simply did not care enough to imitate old conventions. That indifference was its strength.

Equally telling was UIUC’s skepticism toward degrees, grading systems, and rigid academic hierarchies. These were treated not as sacred structures but as tools, revisable whenever they failed to serve the educational mission. The early institution assumed that clarity of purpose mattered more than conformity to established models.

The past’s willingness to refuse its own inheritances is worth reclaiming. To think for oneself. To experiment without waiting for permission. To build a university that recognizes its own mutability.

Nothing in a university is final. What appears permanent is usually a temporary solution that stayed in place because no one questioned it. Institutions stiffen when people mistake habits for principles.

Structures endure only because we continue to affirm them. Once we withdraw that support, they lose their authority.

Change the assumptions, and the institution changes with them. Change the questions, and new forms of learning become possible. Stability, when it matters, should be earned through usefulness, not inherited through inertia.

A university faithful to its purpose remains self-skeptical. It tests its own conventions, refuses to confuse precedent with wisdom, and remains willing to rebuild when the work demands it. Its legacy is not preservation but the continual capacity to rethink itself.

PART XI — HOW TO ACTUALLY BUILD THIS

11. A Roadmap

11.1 Short-term (1–3 years)

• Publish all syllabi.
• Start 3–5 jailbroken programs:
  • No grades, no finals, and students must build, discover, or create something.
  • These spaces become “autonomous zones of curiosity.”
  • Get inspired by Heinz von Foerster’s seminar.
• Create a student project fund with simple applications and quick turnaround for funding decisions.
  • This is our internal version of Emergent Ventures.
• Shrink or eliminate everything that has become Kafkaesque: duplicative bureaucracy, unnecessary approvals, and admin layers that exist mainly to police students and faculty.
• Fund a few faculty to think for life with lifetime funding, no deliverables, and complete intellectual autonomy.
• Begin the demolition of majors
  • Replace majors with “pathways” of self-designed constellations of interests.
  • Let students choose problems and interests first, fields second.
  • Begin building the transcript as a biography, not a checklist.
• Cultural revitalization
  • Turn dining halls and the union into actual community engines.
• Phase out weed-out classes

11.2 Medium-term (3–7 years)

• Build high-quality, affordable student housing:
  • crush the slumlord economy
  • stabilize rents in the surrounding community
  • bring students back onto campus
  • make on-campus living cheaper and more social than off-campus living
• Dining halls become:
  • affordable
  • reliable
  • delicious
  • open late
  • filled with events, debates, live music, midnight psychology discussions, and interesting people wandering through
• Departments publish their unsolved frontier problems publicly
  • Big, visible wall in the entrance of every building
  • Meaningful rewards for anyone who solves them
• Rebuild the nightlife and outcompete frats and bars by building worlds worth entering:
  • A true culture of creation, not consumption
  • Get inspired by Coldplay Nights
• Fix IRB by creating two tracks: “high-risk full review” and “everything else is instant”
  • Rethink oversight as enablement, not obstruction
• Fix technology:
  • kill the LMS
  • open-source everything
  • make course materials public
  • open the curriculum
  • transparent budgets
  • open archives
  • searchable institutional memory
• Build the Curiosity Open House (Annual World’s Fair)
  • One day a year where the entire university shows:
    • ￭ what it is making
    • ￭ what it is imagining
    • ￭ what it is discovering
    • ￭ what questions it cannot yet answer
  • A demonstration of the university’s living frontier.
• The university becomes the R&D wing of the human spirit.

11.3 LONG-TERM—OR: THE HONEST SOLUTION (BUILD A NEW UNIVERSITY)

This might be easier to do by:

• raising about $200M
• buying an underused campus

And assembling:

• a group of fully alive people from science, arts, business, engineering, and every field.
• curious students of all ages
• engineers
• artists
• mathematicians
• scientists in every field
• writers
• economists
• philosophers
• designers
• makers

And starting from first principles:

• No grades
• No majors
• No career fairs
• No bureaucratic priesthood
• No artificial constraints
• No credential worship
• No fear

A place where:

• curiosity is sovereign
• older people hold cultural gravity
• young people are taken seriously and trusted with responsibility
• storytelling is a discipline
• science is a frontier, not a staircase
• towers of knowledge have no foundation
• the student is the protagonist
• the institution stays in the background
• the purpose of life is to do what you love and love what you do

A place where:

Every mind we expand is a permanent extension of the human species.

And of course—yes—this may not work.

But neither is the current university “working.”

Most institutions are frozen monuments to old compromises.

So build the next one.

Let’s transform the universe from something that happens to us into something we happen to.

The university was always meant to be the place where that increase is deliberate, systematic, and accelerating.

It is time to remember what we are.

You do not need permission. You need a vision, a group of brave people, some land, a little money, and a sense of the possible.

Everything else is clay.

11.4 THE TRUE LONG-TERM PROJECT

You may think the university is a place, but the university is a pattern that emerges whenever:

• students ask real questions
• faculty are alive
• curiosity outranks fear
• learning outweighs schooling
• conversation beats compliance
• the frontier is visible
• and the institution remembers who it serves

This vision for the university is not a plan for administrators. It is a plan for civilization.

If humanity is to survive the next century, it must evolve from:

• ranking → meaning
• credentials → competence
• lectures → inquiry
• bureaucracy → clarity
• monoculture → imagination
• performance → curiosity
• isolation → worlds
• stability → aliveness

We are defined by the number of fully alive minds.

And that begins with one decision: Follow your curiosity, and build a world where others can follow theirs.

PART XII — FOLLOW YOUR CURIOSITY

If this whole manifesto had to compress into one line:

Follow your curiosity

College should not be about:

• hiding from risk
• numbing yourself
• living someone else’s life

It should be:

• A place to ask the questions
• A place to build things with people you love
• A place to learn how to think, act, and live fully

The university is a self-organizing system derived from the people in it.

If you are here, it’s your system now.

Make your desires explicit in your actions. Refuse to be an NPC. Treat projects as your real education.

This is how we change the future.

Go to a university because you want to change the world, not because you think you need a credential.

Don’t go for the class, professors, or extrinsic outcomes like jobs. Go for the questions.

Every student should be on a self-transcendence mission.

Follow your curiosity.

Build the university you wantedRead the book. Then use the place.

The vision names what a university could be. The book gives students the practical moves for finding classes, people, projects, resources, and openings inside the one they actually have.

Buy the book See the map