to develop a basic understanding of the functions of and aspirations for higher education throughout its long history, and to appreciate the institution’s various genealogies;
to identify the academy’s contemporary challenges and opportunities, and to imagine its possible future trajectories;
to develop a basic understanding of how universities operate and why they work the way they do;
to attune ourselves to the aesthetic, ethical, epistemological, and political implications of academic conventions, to consider how those conventions have been naturalized and what ideologies and ontologies they embody, and to imagine how they might be otherwise;
to develop a capacious understanding of what constitutes scholarship, teaching, learning, and service, and to appreciate the values – and potential risks – of such generous thinking;
to appreciate why we should care about these things;
to consider how one can make principled choices within the academy, and to appreciate how the capacity to make such choices is inequitably distributed;
to recognize the power students possess to reimagine and reshape – or raze and rebuild – the academy, to appreciate how potential interventions are strengthened with critical insight and historical knowledge about how the academy functions, and to acknowledge the potential of modest interventions to effect meaningful change;
to appreciate for the opportunities and responsibilities – practical, epistemological, ontological, and political – that come with interdisciplinary research and practice;
to cultivate supportive contexts for conceptual and methodological experimentation and inclusive collaboration; and
to apply concepts and methods central to our class in the critical assessment and refinement of our own learning environments: the social, institutional, spatial, and technological apparatae designed to foster our interaction and education