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.
Degrees of Anxiety
Why is college, which is supposed to be empowering and a gateway to an open future, experienced by so many as a source of shame…
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?
General education programs, more than anything one can find in a school’s promotional literature, tell the actual story of what an institution thinks a college…
Where Is the University?
We mastered the physical layout, the power structure and the logistical workings of the university, which had increasingly become an exploiter of our labor. Expected…
The Universe and the University
Santos’s popularity at Yale tells us something about the contemporary university, an institution not only structured so as to produce Santos’s class, but also to…
Elite Education
The sociological function of elite colleges in non-ideal America will always be to produce an unfairly privileged elite. The only question is what it means…
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.
