Two thoughtful pieces, one recently published in the New York Times and one in Forbes, ask us to step back from our current obsession with “innovation” and “disruption,” business principles and technology in education, and think—just for a moment–about the purpose of education. It may be called “corny” these days to talk about the importance of human relationships, “values,” or “the human experience” in education; but our failure to do so, both authors suggest, helps explain some of the floundering and some of the failure in our thinking about higher education that are hard to deny.

What the authors suggest may not “scale” and may not slash costs, but both articles are worth reading for those willing to “reboot” our program for the future of higher education.