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The writer is assistant professor of east Asian languages and cultures at Stanford University
At a time when elite universities are facing unprecedented public scepticism — accused variously of ideological capture, cultural irrelevance and institutional arrogance — reform proposals often fixate on governance and admissions. These are urgent issues. But they are not sufficient. If higher education wants to restore its credibility, it must also rethink what happens inside the classroom.
Universities cannot take their place in society for granted. Some now argue in favour of skipping them altogether — and not just to avoid skyrocketing tuition costs. For over a decade, Peter Thiel has offered $100,000 (a figure that will double this academic year) for students who drop out and found a start-up. The pressure is only intensifying with the rapid adoption of generative AI and the perception that it will degrade the value of written work. Last year, a survey found that nearly 90 per cent of Harvard undergraduates used AI in their coursework; nearly a quarter substituted it for assigned readings.
In this context, the pedagogical temptation is to choose between fighting and accommodating new technology. The resurgence of handwritten, in-person exams and oral vivas is part of this trend. But there is another possible response: teach students to make things.
In recent years I’ve worked as a professor of Japanese literature and culture at institutions across the Americas. In my courses, students not only handle historical texts and objects — they create them. They turn wooden soup bowls, then lacquer them; they build ceramic tea bowls, then use them to brew tea. They compose seasonal poems and construct scale gardens.
These experiences do not replace traditional modes of analysis but deepen them. The student who shapes a tea bowl is better equipped to interpret a historical source about ritual aesthetics because they’ve felt the constraints of balancing form and function. The act of making becomes a heuristic: a way of asking sharper questions, developing closer attention and forging connections between theory and experience.
The value of such work reaffirms that universities are not only places of abstraction and argument, but sites where knowledge meets skill.
This is not a new proposal. For much of the 20th century, to be an educated person did not mean being purely cerebral. As the historian Dorothy Hartley documented in her indispensable Made in England, knowledge of craft, repair and fabrication was not the opposite of intellectual life — it was part of it.
Universities once reflected this ethos. Land-grant institutions in the US were founded to connect the life of the mind with the work of the hands. British polytechnics offered rigorous technical and cultural education side by side. Today, this synthesis has frayed. When universities are seen as disconnected from the practical and the physical, it should not surprise us that trust declines.
Bringing making back into universities, including in the humanities, is an invitation to rethink what literacy means in an era of digital automation.
This is not about turning literature departments into fabrication labs but considering an interdisciplinary way of teaching.
Of course, these pedagogies come with challenges. They can be difficult to scale, assess and fund. But change is already under way. At institutions like Stanford, where I currently teach, students learn how to grow indigo and dye fabric to think critically about global supply chains, for example.
We do not need to choose between critique and creativity, elite knowledge and public trust. But we do need to reimagine how these values meet in the classroom. Let students read deeply, argue boldly and build something with their hands.
