Looking forward to reading it when I get a chance.
I had occasion to wander the halls of a college the other day. It was a nice day, so I wandered the quad and courtyards as well. Looked at the stack of books for sale, remainders from classes and saw a healthy batch of books square within the classical, western tradition. I gazed at bulletin boards, read the books for sale board, listened to people waiting to pay tuition bill or find out from the VA what award they were getting.
Meanwhile, as I scooped up this notice and that about this talk, the workshop, the open house I realized that the guy who wrote French Theory, forgot his name, was very right about his description of the typical u.s. university/college, isolated from the rest of the city in the suburbs or on hills [1], that the one thing I really miss about the school - aside from the opportunity to learn - was the way it functioned as a community or town center. I don't know of any alternative to university-as-town-center - these days. Is this just my hazy memory? Me idealizing my misspent youth wandering about campus libraries?
[1] historicallly colleges built in the 1800s were built on hills, as were cemetaries. This is because it was land that usually wasn't settled: farmers, builders, merchants didn't want to use it.
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)