A university should help students love what is good and true and beautiful – and help them feel the freedom and responsibility for carrying that with them on their life’s journey, to give them a sense of themselves as beings who are profoundly connected with such things as truth and loveliness. To say this presupposes that students, like faculty, are more than thinkers or consumers, which the contemporary university all too often supposes them to be.

Three academics reflect on the purpose of university education.