Given a tradition of student independent behavior and town-gown conflict that goes back to the middle ages, and given the American emphasis on the education of late adolescents, universities have been enclaves protecting experimental modes of behavior. The current increasing average age of college and university students may change universities more than we expect. If experimentation in behavior becomes less common in universities, will that slow down the invention of daring new intellectual methods, or the revaluation of values?
The truth is that during their history, universities have been less successful in fostering new modes of thinking. In my field, for example, among canonical modern philosophers who have suggested revolutionary new approaches, here are some who were NOT members of universities: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Rousseau, most of the French philosophes, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard. Around the time of Kant, universities began to monopolize the media of intellectual communication. In our time France probably has maintained more non-university intellectual media, and it has more public intellectuals and non-academic philosophers and theorists.
The wired world and its digital media may open up intellectual discussion by making an end run around the universities and the few large corporations that publish the most prestigious scholarly journals. Then what's a university to be? An archive? A research center?