For Gramsci, being an intellectual has nothing to do with your profession. It has nothing to do with “eloquence,” with elitism, or with standing in front of a lecture hall. Being an intellectual means “active participation in practical life.” Intellectuals, who for Gramsci are always present in any profession and in any economic class, are distinguished by their “social function”: They direct, organize, construct, persuade. To be an intellectual means to be invested in a certain “conception of the world” and the will either to sustain it or to change it, “to bring into being new modes of thought.”

Gramsci’s worry was that, already in the 1920s and ’30s, universities had become too specialized, too enamored of skills and job-training. His worry doesn’t sound far-fetched in an age when universities are not so much beholden to their publics as to private corporations and donors. It certainly rings true, for a different reason, on my own campus, Clemson University, which was founded for the democratic goal of educating agrarian workers. (Clemson’s democratic mission relied, as democratic missions often have, on erasing the convict labor of black workers.)

Gramsci, who was from a rural background in Sardinia and who spent much of his life as a teacher in rural settings, would perhaps have been at home with such a mandate for a university. But he would not have been satisfied with it as the goal of an education. In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci writes, “democracy, by definition, cannot mean merely that an unskilled worker can become skilled. It must mean that every ‘citizen’ can ‘govern’ and that society places him, even if only abstractly, in a general condition to achieve this.”

The goal of education, in other words, is not only to teach skills. Education prepares students to be intellectuals in the Gramscian sense—that is, to be in the condition to govern, and thus to reorganize, at the very least, the university they attend. So threatening, so revolutionary, was Gramsci’s vision that, at his trial, the public prosecutor famously stated, “for 20 years we must stop this brain from functioning.”

This week, the Afrikan/Black Student Alliance at the University of California at Santa Cruz reclaimed Kerr Hall with a list of demands. The demands were reasonable, by nearly any measure: They would like to live together in guaranteed housing; they would like to have a designated social space inside that housing; they would like to choose colors of black liberation and diaspora for the exterior of the housing; and they would like “mandatory in-person diversity competency training.” It appears that the university has committed to all of the demands.

What is most striking about these demands is that they are a robust “conception of the world.” They ask for the protection of students who are continually endangered by existing conditions on campus. They ask, in the form of a demand, for the modest redistribution of campus resources as well as for the equally modest recognition of campus power structures. Those reading this who might condescend to the third demand might recall the campus fashion of naming student housing after white supremacists. Those who would balk at the fourth demand are welcome to spend a day on a college campus.