Posts and reflections

**‘What Universities are for‘: reflection on the topic and approaches for improving the design of my courses**

Post July 2025, author – Dmitry Lapin

The original post was published on LinkedIn

The end of the academic year is a moment to reflect on the changes in course design and my approach to teaching for the following year. I have come to realize something important that I have not yet fully consciously and consistently implemented in my teaching. It became clear to me that answering the question ‘what universities are for’ is central and foundational to the design of my courses and teaching activities, which I want to consider in my own teaching activities in the following year.

This thinking was serendipitously sparked by reading the book ‘Deep Work’ by Cal Newport, which led me to the question of what the role of universities is. Therefore, I have read the book by Stefan Collini, ‘What Universities Are For’. At the same time, we worked on a white paper for the Department of Biology at Utrecht University on AI and education, which further shaped the thinking process, the result of which is in the post below.

So, what are the universities for? Interestingly, the book with the same name does not provide the answer itself, but instead offers pointers and relevant perspectives. If I were to choose one single objective of university education, it would be to train the skill of working ‘deeply’ and in a focused manner. All other skills depend on it.

Universities train students able to grasp the state-of-the-art in a particular field independently, prepare them to work in a specific area of the economy. Universities prepare well-educated, culturally equipped, good citizens of society (Newman’s model, if I follow Collini’s terminology). Universities provide skills for conducting scientific research (Humboldt’s model). However, all these different roles have one thing in common: mastering these skills depends on the student’s ability to work deeply and focused. Deep work creates a state of intellectual flow, so addictive in itself (see Newport’s take on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) that it discourages distraction, including the inappropriate use of AI by students. Thus, I concluded that the overarching goal of my courses and teaching activities should be to encourage students to engage in deep, individual, and focused work.

What does this mean in practice? Below are four approaches I have found for myself.

First, it is counterproductive for teaching and learning to stuff in more and more new (certainly fascinating!) topics and developments into a course despite the fast pace of knowledge generation. Instead, teachers should identify what kind of foundational knowledge students should have at the end of the course. If the course is primarily intended to provide students with an overview of the latest developments, it may be time to reconsider the course design. Admittedly, it was not a conscious effort for me in my course design so far to focus on the foundational skills, but fortunately, it happened ‘by itself’ thanks to the existing guidelines and advice from other teachers. For my next year’s courses, I will make sure to focus on the foundational skills, which I, as a teacher, researcher, and coordinator, can identify.

Second, it is no use for teachers or students if the students do not have time to digest the information, reflect on it, and if they are pushed to ‘sweat’ and study on the weekends and evenings just to be able to grasp the main content of the course. I have experimented with this already in several courses by giving more time for self-study during the course-allocated time slots, by more realistically estimating how much time students need to digest materials, by introducing more hands-on work-together sessions, by offering dedicated office hours for the students to ask questions, and by giving more options for asynchronous learning (e.g., prerecorded lectures). I was pleased to hear the positive feedback from students regarding this approach. I was also less exhausted by the teaching load (my own feeling and records on my health tracker apps). This ‘rust en ruimte’ (Dutch for ‘piece and quiet’) approach provided the desired headspace and added more fun for both teachers and students.

Third, to stimulate deep work, one needs to identify the intellectual interests of students and teachers, so that they can forget distractions and focus on the course. What is this magic shared interest? Obviously, there is no one topic that would be interesting for all. However, there is something intrinsic to people pursuing an academic university education or those who give it. This realisation came to me when I read about the specialty of humanities education and research in Collini’s book. The sheer existence of this area of human intellectual activity is sometimes difficult to explain in terms of economic value or impact. Still, we, humans, pursue it simply because we are intrinsically curious about our place in nature and society, about their structure and functioning. That, in my opinion, is the reason most teachers at universities attended universities in the first place and why most students are at universities, whether they realize this or not. Thus, following Humboldt’s university model, research should also be a part of teaching. I started to implement this in my courses last year by offering students projects and assignments based on materials from published or my own ongoing research. Again, I was delighted to see the positive effect of this intervention on engagement from my and the students’ side. This is something I want to expand on in the next year’s courses.

Fourth, the constructive alignment in the course should be directed at enforcing the objective – ‘learning how to work deeply’. Since this skill is not quantifiable, it is challenging to create a graded assignment that aligns with this goal. All assignments, however, indirectly assess this skill and stimulate its development in my courses, at least to some extent. I got additional inspiration from reading about the nature of teaching and student assessment in the humanities and social sciences in Collini’s book. Both the content (quality of arguments) and form (ability to convince through writing and personal take) of the student’s work are essential for grading in these disciplines, which is somewhat different from STEM education. So, what can we learn from this in STEM education to enforce the deep work approach/skill? I believe it should be a student’s diary or journal, with personal reflections on the course topics. This obviously takes time for both students and teachers to write or grade. However, I am very curious to try this out, and I would like to introduce such a journal in one way or another to my courses.

What I Learned from Reading “Flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Post August, 2025, author – Dmitry Lapin

The original post was published on my personal webpage on the site of Utrecht University.

In the past several weeks, I had the pleasure of reading the book Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. This interest was sparked after I encountered it in Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport, where it was cited as a key source of inspiration. Flow left a deep impression on me; reading it sparked new thoughts and inner discoveries that I want to share here. This post is not a summary of the book, but a reflection on how it resonated with me personally and professionally.

These three aspects caught my attention:

The definition of flow (optimal experience), and the difference between pleasure and joy/happiness, along with the conditions that enable flow.
How flow manifests in different life domains – work, family, relationships, art, and sport.
What it takes to sustain optimal experiences over the long term.

1. Pleasure vs. Enjoyment and How I Structure My Day for Optimal Experience

One of the first things the book helped me recognize was the difference between pleasure and joy/happiness. Joy and happiness, as described in the book, require conscious effort and focused attention, but the payoff is much greater and longer-lasting.

While reading, I realized that subconsciously or through analyses, I came to a lifestyle and a schedule that allows me to regularly achieve the ‘flow’ state and thus stay motivated and excited about different parts of my life. These are some approaches that work for me:

Finding what motivates me and increasing these factors in my life while decreasing the influence of factors that demotivate or drain me,
Having my ‘golden hours’ (for work or other activities that energize me),
Limiting work on the weekends and beyond the regular working hours,
Following a fitness routine with a schedule and reachable goals,
Maximally shifting focus when changing one activity to another.

2. Hiring with Flow principles in Mind

The book also gave me a clearer framework for thinking about hiring in my lab. Even though I already have a fantastic team, hiring is never easy—it’s partly intuitive, yet the decisions have long-term impact. What stood out to me was the concept of the autotelic personality—someone who is self-motivated and finds deep satisfaction in intellectually challenging tasks. This is exactly the type of person who thrives in research settings like mine. While we, as people who hire, often make these judgments subconsciously, Flow helped me articulate and validate these criteria.

Additionally, the Flow and other books and analyses provided me with concrete tools to cultivate and strengthen the flow culture in my laboratory. One of these is eliminating distractions.

3. Teaching as a Flow-Driven Experience

Another key insight: students should consciously enjoy the learning process for it to be truly effective. This may sound obvious, but Flow helped me crystallize why enjoyment – grounded in research, optimal challenge, course structure, and feedback – is essential to course design. I came to this idea before, but Flow gave me stronger language and rationale to act on it.

Links to my LinkedIn earlier post (in three parts) with thoughts on how to implement the Flow principles in the course design:

Link 1

Link 2

Link 3

4. New Points of Professional Growth as a Principal Investigator

Surprisingly, the book also changed how I view my role as a manager. It helped me see new growth directions in leadership, particularly in building and guiding a research consortium grounded in the principles of optimal experience. I am energized by this challenge and by the idea of designing a professional environment where people consistently experience flow in their work.

5. A mid-life phase

Toward the end of the book, I found myself thinking of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Like Dante’s character, I’m in a mid-life phase. I have had a strong start with my lab, internalized my teaching routine and stepped into management of a research lab. But by the spring of this year (2025), I felt tired, not depressed or burned out. Something was shifting, but I couldn’t name it. Reading Flow helped me put words to it. Now I realize that I started to feel lost back then, I needed a step up. Flow helped me see this and identify new points for my personal and professional growth.

Reflection on ‘Moral ambition’ by Rutger Bregman

During the winter break of 2025–2026, I read the book Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman.

On the one hand, the book offers a critique of how we often spend too much time on activities that make little or no positive impact on the lives of others. The term “noble losers,” for instance, is used to describe people who are aware of major global challenges and possess knowledge, talent, time, and often money, yet keep their sphere of impact rather narrow or do not pursue impactful paths at all. Examples include individuals who follow a vegan diet or avoid air travel and expect that these actions alone will make the world a better place. Following this logic, almost anyone could be placed in this category, which I find rather radical, disrespectful, and even demotivating.

On the other hand, the author argues that in order to make one’s life matter and positively affect the lives of many others, solving such problems should become an ambition. This requires having a vision for a solution, devising a plan, leaving one’s comfort zone, and taking action—even in the face of resistance and negative feedback, emotional, intellectual, and physical exhaustion. One must be an idealistic, altruistic realist with the energy to make things happen. I agree with most of this line of thought, except that I strongly believe people who consistently and positively impact the lives of others often draw energy from what they do. Any exhaustion may instead result from an increased workload or from dealing with “boring” but unavoidable tasks associated with impact-oriented activities, such as finances, team management, and team building. In my view, this could be mitigated by delegating such tasks to others who enjoy doing them. Thus, exhaustion and self-destruction are not necessarily inherent to being impactful.

This book confirmed my earlier belief that research-based higher education (the Humboldtian model), public–private partnerships, intellectual property protection, and science-based startups are powerful instruments available to academics to create positive impact in the lives of others. Perhaps this is even the moral obligation and calling of scholarly activity, given the position, resources, and respect academics hold in many countries. I find this realization genuinely motivating. No time to waste, let’s head for impact!