‘Socrates at the tech’: On higher education in the age of the mass university

Abstract

While conservative pundits routinely decry the collapse of ‘real’ universities, the task of defending the modern mass university and renovating its pedagogical culture receives too little attention. The author draws on the Socratic and Stoic traditions to defend the idea that higher education should be open to all citizens. That defence talks in terms both of the role of a university in sustaining a robust public culture and about providing the conditions in which all citizens can flourish. By drawing on the same traditions it is possible to point to some crucial principles that might inform the kind of pedagogy such a university system deserves, but which are all too conspicuously lacking in our universities at the present time.