In this paper I argue that recent developments in higher education presuppose a conceptual framework that fails plausibly to account for indispensable aspects of educational experience--in particular that a university education is fundamentally a project of personal transformation within a particular social order. It fails, I suggest, primarily because it consists of mutually supporting but erroneous conceptualisations of knowledge and the human subject. In pursuit of transparency and codification we have seemingly forgotten education's existential dimension: that education is closely tied to questions of personal identity and the formation of character and that this is an embodied project.