When we were in DC last week, we took a stroll through the Georgetown campus. We wanted to give Jonah a taste of a fancy college. He’s seen some of the public colleges where I’ve taught. He’s even sat in a couple of my classes. But they were public schools with 70s architecture and cranky Dell computers at the front of the room. Kids sitting on radiators in the back of the room. We wanted to show him ivy covered buildings and eager, over-achieving students. We wanted to give him a picture of what is waiting for him at the end of high school.

We wandered through the campus. We took a couple of pictures and sent them to my sister, who graduated from Georgetown many years ago. We walked into the buildings and into the classrooms, which surprisingly had no security guards. The classrooms were a combination of tradition and technology — old school blackboards and lecterns with built-in, touch screen computers. Steve and I groaned. At one time, we planned to be at a place like this.

We asked Jonah what he thought about the campus. He shrugged. His brain, which has been permanently altered from Minecraft, had already re-engineered the campus for maximum efficiency. He didn’t think much of the Hogwarts vibe or the ivy. He described his plan for a college campus with large modern buildings surrounding a circular green zone. I’m really glad that he’ll be starting his architecture program this fall.

The Atlantic has a long article this month about one for-profit, online college, Minerva College. It’s highly selective and not free, which sets it apart from MOOCs. The students live in dorms on a campus, but the faculty live wherever they like. Information is learned and conversation is facilitated through the computer.

The Minerva boast is that it will strip the university experience down to the aspects that are shown to contribute directly to student learning. Lectures, gone. Tenure, gone. Gothic architecture, football, ivy crawling up the walls—gone, gone, gone. What’s left will be leaner and cheaper. (Minerva has already attracted $25 million in capital from investors who think it can undercut the incumbents.) And Minerva officials claim that their methods will be tested against scientifically determined best practices, unlike the methods used at other universities and assumed to be sound just because the schools themselves are old and expensive. Yet because classes have only just begun, we have little clue as to whether the process of stripping down the university removes something essential to what has made America’s best colleges the greatest in the world.

I think it would be silly to form an opinion on such an enterprise before it is up and running. Let’s see what it can do. If Mineva can provide a cheaper college that teaches kids about the same amount of material, then it’s worth a shot.