An interesting piece on a new book that has to hack through a lot of cliches to get there.  Good lines: “the best of what the university has to offer lies less in its specific power to advance knowledge or solve problems in any of its many fields than in its more general, more crucial ability to be a model and a support for generous thinking as a way of being in and with the world.” 

I do like the idea of "generous thinking," and I do think the book will reward attention.

A couple responses: (1) this is weirdly non-ironic for being in The Baffler.  (2) This is not really about "The need for higher education to reclaim its role in the public sphere".  It is about the need for higher education to reclaim one of its most central purposes--the recognition and elucidation of what is valuable in the world.  Yes that is for a "public," indeed multiple publics, but it's not really about speaking beyond our central scholarly idioms in some other terms.  If this isn't at home in our everyday work, we're failing as scholars, not just as scholars "reaching out" to some public.  Scholarship should be about love.  (3) How did this guy get picked to write for The Baffler, and who let him get away with sentences like this?  "We must inculcate our students in a new paradigm that demonstrates the symbiotic relationship between students’ individual success and the community’s health."  I thought The Baffler was at least trying to be lucidly written.  Hmm.