A few days ago, while I was giving the new Keeton House ping pong table a workout, I observed a small band of students conspiring at the bottom of the stairs. I watched as they made their move on the dining room, banging pots and pans and yelling for attention. I quickly fell in behind these young idealists to find out how their political theater would challenge the establishment at its moment of national and global vulnerability.

Bringing the racket to a close, they announced their platform to lead the Student Assembly. What could it be? The bottom has fallen out of the global economy, the world is in ecological peril, Cornell will be eliminating positions, tuition is climbing through the stratosphere, and we are packing our graduates off to a very uncertain future. And the demand of these lads? Cornell must supply the bathrooms with two-ply toilet paper rather than that stingy single-ply stuff!

Only a couple of days earlier The New York Times reported on the environmental destruction involved in pampering soft American buttocks. The cushy stuff costs real trees (sometimes even old growth) rather than recycled pulp, and turning trees into paper also requires much more water than does recycling paper into fiber. Many favorite brands also use polluting chlorine-based bleach to turn the product nice and white before we get the chance to turn it various shades of brown in our privies.

I really don’t want to pick on these guys as they merely give us a metaphor for a larger problem. What I want to argue is that it’s time to look beyond the coddling of our own bums — and the costs that go with it — and toward something more like building an environment of sustained intellectual inquiry. If the last decade has done anything, it forces us to revisit the age old tension between decadence (and the systems created to maximize it) and a life with meaning. We must begin to imagine ways in which elite education is more than the moral equivalent of Charmin to accessorize the McMansion.

Students and faculty alike are missing how the economic crisis is a time to rethink the unchallenged assumptions of higher education. Elite schooling should demand more of us than the acquisition of a series of technocratic skills that will, in turn, provide us with the means to obtain more ways to pamper ourselves. Too often, we who run this place have allowed higher education, one of the most valuable resources in the world, to be reduced to vocational training. Reflective of the mentality that led to the broader economic crisis, we have also elected to compete with other elite institutions based on the seductive dazzle of our facilities rather than the fundamental quality of our teaching and learning.

The current crisis is a good time to rekindle some of the great questions that have burdened the humanities since the dawn of ancient letters: What is the good life? Why are we here? What do I owe others in my society? What is a citizenry capable of achieving? How should a polity be organized? What will make me truly happy? For too long we have all shied away from articulating what it is we’re actually trying to do together at this beautiful, wondrous place. Now is the time to begin the dialogue.

It’s also time for students to challenge professors who are complicit in either perpetuating the winner-take-all view that has dragged down the entire economic ship (including the winners) or, more often, those who feed the numbing technocracy that passes for education and allows us all to feign political innocence when it all goes down the tubes. So, dear student, if your courses are filled with jargon and not ideas, formulas and not ethics, facts and not meaning, then revisit the course catalogue and find yourself something better. The financial markets may be in a meltdown, but the marketplace of ideas is alive and well. To paraphrase George W. Bush after 9/11, it is in the national interest for you to start shopping.

Current circumstances give life’s eternal questions renewed salience, and you’re in the right place to explore them. How best to do so? Start by thinking about something other than your own rear end. Call your fellow students to engagement. Take the courses. Ask the questions. Read the book. Challenge your professor. Complicate your worldview. Do the work. Share a thought. Stretch your mind. Be curious. Apply your intellect. Push your imagination.

The rewards of a life well lived are far more enduring than the anything Wall Street ever generated, and you’re not going to get that dream job anytime soon anyway. So you might as well start enriching yourself in ways that the financial markets can’t take away from you.