I do think that every student must invent the university for him/herself. This is a very disorienting and sometimes disheartening process. I think a lot of romantic ideals about what the university experience is going to be or ought to be are mangled by it. A skeptical, jaded, but acclimated and prepared for success student is what emerges. In hindsight, I think inventing the university for myself has been more of a positive thing than a negative thing. Aside from the above mentioned, there is a sense of initiation connected to learning how the academy operates, and once the rules are understood well enough that the student can begin to leave some of them behind with a measure of confidence, I think the experience even becomes a liberating one. Surely a convincing argument can be made that the process is unfair to the student. But all students have undergone it. It's no less fair to me than it was to my professors. What would really be unfair is if it changed and new students no longer had to go through the process that older students did. On the surface, I think learning the "discourse" is silly and petty and geared primarily towards appeasing laziness. Beyond this, though, I think it is important. It prepares the writer for the expectations of peers (i.e. other academics) who will judge their work critically. To engage in a conversation, it is best to be familiar with the conversation up to the present moment, and to understand the methods by which said conversation is being approached. This doesn't mean a newcomer must conform to existing attitudes. But he/she must understand those attitudes in order to make an informed argument against them. All of this is taught through the pretense of engaging in a discourse of which the writer is eggregiously unqualified to comment on. It's all part of the learning process. The most important part of it, I think, is the attitude of the teacher. If the teacher understands his/her role as the person charged with acclimating new writers to the discipline, offering advice and encouragement until the new writer can be weened off a mentor, then the process works well. If the teacher has the attitude that he/she is privileged and the student is unprivileged, the teacher will most likely have a counterproductive influence on the new writer, since in subtle ways the teacher's goal will be to sabotage the new writer's advancement in order to preserve the privileged/unprivileged status.