Debating the Purpose of the Modern University

Maya: Did either of you see the university’s new campaign? The slogan is, "Knowledge that pays off." It makes our degrees sound like financial products. Leo: I did, and I’m torn. On one hand, students worry about debt, so the promise of employability is reassuring. On the other, rarely have I seen education reduced so blatantly to a transaction. Professor Chen: It is precisely that tension the university is struggling with. Public funding is shrinking, so institutions are pushed to prove their "value" in economic terms. Maya: But is it really value if we ignore what can’t be quantified? In my sociology seminar, we discussed how universities ought to cultivate critical citizens, not just efficient workers. What worries me is that social justice becomes a marketing slogan rather than a genuine commitment. Leo: That’s happening in the arts too. We curate exhibitions about inequality, climate anxiety, and migration. Yet sometimes it feels as though suffering is being aestheticized for comfortable audiences. Not until I started teaching did I realize how easily resistance can be commodified. Professor Chen: You’re both right to be skeptical. Still, it was students’ activism that pushed the administration to establish the new Center for Social Inquiry. Without that pressure from below, very little would have changed. Maya: True, but the center risks being tokenistic if it’s not allowed to challenge the institution itself. Only when uncomfortable questions are encouraged can a university claim to be serious about transformation. Leo: There’s also the question of whose knowledge counts. It is voices from marginalized communities that are so often invited to give a guest lecture, photographed for the brochure, and then quietly sidelined when policy decisions are made. Professor Chen: I can’t deny that dynamic. Yet what gives me cautious hope is the insistence of your generation that universities remain spaces of debate. It isn’t higher rankings that will save our public mission; it is the conversations you insist on having, even when they complicate our carefully crafted narratives. Maya: So the real question is not whether knowledge "pays off," but for whom, and at what cost. Leo: And perhaps, whose stories are allowed to define that cost.