Every issue has one section dedicated to a particular question. Collecting responses from a range of perspectives, these symposia prompt us to think about the values and ideas that shape our most urgent cultural and personal decisions.
“College, in our society, names not only an institution, an important local employer or an obligatory step on the status ladder; it also names an aspiration to intellectual community.”
The Real College Scandal
In 2019, fifty or so parents were found to have bribed administrators and coaches to have their children accepted to colleges around the country. This…
Degrees of Anxiety
Over the past seven years, I’ve helped create two curricular projects at the University of Virginia, one a new general education curriculum for undergraduates in…
The Second Curriculum
It was March of 1994, my freshman year in college. I was attending North Carolina Central University, a historically Black university in Durham, when I…
What Should Students Learn?
This fall, after a year’s hiatus, Columbia College will welcome a new entering class to campus. Within hours of their arrival, the new students, numbering…
Where Is the University?
Anna, the protagonist of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, plays a peculiar game to pass the time. She invented it as a child, but now,…
The Universe and the University
Listen to an audio version of this essay: Curio · The Point | The Universe and the University Laurie Santos, a cognitive scientist, is a…
Elite Education
One of the wonders of modern academia is that the ideal of workplace democracy should be so prevalent among people who regularly endure faculty meetings.…
College Life
No symposium about what college is for would be complete without the perspectives of those for whom the question is most immediate: college students. This…
