David Brooks, "The Practical University": A Place to "Fornicate Meaningfully"?

"What is a university for?" asks David Brooks in his latest New York Times op-ed entitled "The Practical University" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/opinion/Brooks-The-Practical-University.html?_r=0). He further inquires, "Are universities mostly boot camps for adulthood, where young people learn how to drink moderately, fornicate meaningfully and hand things in on time?"

Me? University, i.e. college and law school, were long ago, and they have become distant unpleasant memories. Drink moderately? True, I never passed out. Fornicate meaningfully? I was too shy, and it never happened. Hand things in on time? Yes, but by and large, my university papers were drivel.

Nothing I ever learned at university ever taught me how, afterwards, to draw a proper balance between force and moral rectitude in life and death situations, or, still later, to lead and motivate in the business world when, in 2008, all seemed lost.

Brooks, however, believes that universities are places that can effectively teach "practical knowledge," whose skills include:

• "the ability to be assertive in a meeting;"
• "to disagree pleasantly;"
• "to know when to interrupt and when not to;"
• "to understand the flow of discussion and how to change people’s minds;"
• "to attract mentors;"
• "to understand situations;"
• "to discern what can change and what can’t."

Brooks continues:

"Anybody who works in a modern office knows that they are surprisingly rare. But students can learn these skills at a university, through student activities, through the living examples of their professors and also in seminars."
 

Rare in a "modern office"? These skills are rare anywhere.

Learn these skills from professors, whose lives have been sheltered from the ugly realities of the inner city, the evolution of self-destructive capitalism, the mind-bending terror of today's battlefields, and the maniacal mental machinations of Iran's Supreme Leader Khamenei and the deranged belligerence of North Korea's Kim Jong Un? I don't think so.

Ultimately, will universities go the way of the dodo bird? Possibly. Given the cost of tuition today, young people are being forced to engage in a mature cost/benefit analysis, and for their part, universities will need to evolve if they are to survive in our wintry brave new world.