As economies tumble, as the Earth burns, and as governments implode all around us, it's become easier and easier to dismiss higher education as elitist, irrelevant, and out of touch with reality, that place where ordinary people have to face everyday uncertainty without the privileges or comforts of the classroom. In this episode, my colleagues Elisabeth Anker, Kristina Huang and I bring the university back down to earth as a place where students discover a wide variety of equipment for living—this is an expansive toolkit of intellectual and emotional capacities for navigating the chaotic realities of our time with greater confidence, hope, and imagination. At some point, you’ll hear me describe the university as a kind of social, cultural, and political Swiss Army Knife, an institution who’s value lies in the fact that it can accomplish so many different kinds of common good for generations of youth and the society they will inherit. Across the arc of our conversation, we carefully unfold all the different tools in the university’s back pocket: colleges provide millions of faculty, staff, and students with long-term employment opportunities while offering a permanent space for community gathering; they educate people both intellectually—by expanding their knowledge—but also institutionally—by teaching students how to navigate complex systems and more gracefully communicate and negotiate with authority-figures like professors and members of the administration; college campuses also offer literal geographical spaces to practice democratic freedoms like the public expression of free speech, non-violent civil disobedience, and the collective sharing of knowledge; and perhaps most importantly, universities offer a check and balance on the dominant ideas of the society they serve. They are fundamentally good for providing a space for innovation, dissent, and deliberate sustained thought about what kind of life each individual wants to live, and how we will live it together.