Easy question? No.
I have come to think of university as a place where we choose the unpredictable. The best research is where we don’t know beforehand what our discovery will be. The best learning is where we don’t know where our thoughts will go. We don’t know what understanding might follow.
We choose the unpredictable because it can change meanings, if we are willing.
The personal side to this is that we are also working with parts of ourselves that we don’t know. When I do research, I don’t know whether I will be able to make it happen. When I learn, I don’t know whether I will be able to do the reading and thinking. In both, will I reach that new understanding? Doubts.
I believe that we all have abilities that we haven’t yet explored, and so we don’t know what our limit is. This is fundamentally what universities are for: pursuing the unpredictable and keeping alive that sense of the unknown and the possibility of reaching new understandings, despite our doubts.
I really do think that university should be a magical place where things happen unpredictably.