Articles Purpose, Form and the Representation of Higher Education www.flmint.nu | 147 Purpose, Form and the Representation of Higher Education in Jake Kasdan’s Orange County and Michael Duggan’s The F**k-It List By Tom Ue Keywords comedy, Michael Duggan, form, The F**k-It List, higher education, Jake Kasdan, Caroline Levine, Orange County, wholes www.flmint.nu | 147 The role of higher education has never been sub- jected to more considerable scholarly and public debate. Nor has it been more worthy of our attention. As the literary critic and intellectual historian Stefan Collini observes, in Speaking of Universities, In recent decades there has been an immense global surge in the numbers both of universities and of students, an expansion that, in purely numerical terms, quite dwarfs anything that has happened in the previous eight centuries or so during which versions of this curious institution have existed. (2017: 1) Collini’s focus may be on the English university, but his arguments can dextrously be applied to our thinking about institutions everywhere. Collini fnds that ‘the whole ecology of higher education in Britain has been transformed within the past generation’ (2017: 1), and he goes so far as to wonder whether we may not be approaching a point where our usage of terms such as ‘universities’ and ‘higher education’ may […] be best understood as the deployment of an inherited vocabulary without the underlying assumptions that for a long time made sense of it. (2017: 155) What he refers to here is how universities are increasingly pressured into becoming more utilitar- ian and how this development belabours some of our assumptions about them; for example, the idea that the university is a partly- protected space in which the search for deeper and wider understanding takes precedence over all more immediate goals; the belief that, in addition to preparing the young for future employment, the aim of developing analytical and creative human capacities is a worthwhile social purpose; the conviction that the existence of centres of disinterested enquiry and the transmission of a cultural and intellectual inheritance are self-evident public goods; and so on. (2017: 156) He reasons If ‘prosperity’ is the only overriding value which politicians in market democracies can assume commands general support,