Seated In Action

In the first half of this episode, your hosts talk about their recent appearance on Steve Zelt's podcast, "A Small Good Thing" (for more information about the podcast, visit https://www.asmallgoodthing.org/). The conversation lasted about two hours, but the content will be redacted to a trim thirty minutes. Within this conversation, your bois and Zelt grappled with the notion of what universities ought to do, though they did not do so thoroughly. So, we decided to devote an entire episode to talking about what we think the purpose of a university ought to be; in doing so, we articulate six principles upon which universities ought to based.First, we argue that colleges ought to challenge students. We do not merely imply that university coursework ought to be difficult; rather, we argue that professors ought to present controversial ideas that challenge students' fundamental suppositions about what they think they know. Secondly, we argue that in order to achieve the first goal, colleges need to place students