The University Is an Asylum for Troublemakers. That’s a Good Thing.
Early in John Williams’s 1965 campus novel Stoner, one of the characters, a brilliant young student called Dave Masters, holds forth on “the true nature of the University.” Masters wishes to disabuse his fellow students of the idea of the university as hallowed ground, where intellectuals worship at the altar of “the True, the Good, the Beautiful.” No, says Masters: The university is not a shrine to rationality and morality; it is “an asylum or … rest home,” where troublemakers like himself can be “safely irresponsible” without causing too much trouble. “We do no harm, we say what we want, and we get paid for it,” he concludes, “and that’s a triumph of natural virtue, or pretty damn close to it.”
