The present inquiry examines the University Question raised by James Joyce`s "The Dead." Although the flitting reference in the text (the phrase "the University Question" appears only once, that too with its underlying context specifically alluding to the then ongoing Irish debate over university education) may seem to suggest that this is a topic tangential at best, one, moreover, hopelessly enmeshed in the circumscribed historical context of the prior turn of the century, this essay argues that the University Question in fact provides a central pole for critically revaluating the final story of Dubliners, in particular its ending. For one thing, so far as the central character Gabriel Conroy`s pedantic and patronizing attitude throughout that fateful evening is inextricably linked to his privileged status as a university teacher in what is, after all, an underdeveloped part of the world, his ruminations over his own precarious identity later that night cannot but throw a radically shifted light on the problematic figure of intellectual, in which case his following invocation of "passion" ("Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion," 224) may constitute, however obliquely, a critique of higher education centered on Reason. Yet, if that critique necessarily remains as abstract as the hero`s attendant appeal to "journey westward," there exists another, more crucial level in which the University Question, this time precisely due to its irreducible specificity, calls for our attention. That is, assuming it is the very ill-grounded nature of Gabriel`s brand of cosmopolitanism which his ultimate self-questioning is designed to undermine-and cosmopolitanism, according to Kant, is nothing if not yet another vision of universalism, a regenerative hope for humanity`s co-belonging based on the universal outline of natural law-what could the strangely obtrusive word ``universe`` possibly signify in the concluding paragraph? What kind of bearings, if any, could the university question have for that grand vision with which Dubliners concludes? Even with Joycean penchant for wordplay in mind, conjoining and correlating such two apparently incommensurable words as universe and university may seem like a pointless exercise in semantic homology. Once we trace, however, some of the thematic elements in the text (especially the shoe/foot related motif) that simultaneously foreground and problematize that visualization of an affect on the one hand ("snow … falling through the universe" 255) and the institutionalization of an ideal on the other (university qua community of scholars), "The Dead" may offer us a chance to not only reassess the pivotal position the story occupies in Joyce`s oeuvre but reevaluate the very condition of literary academia in which we approach his works in this late age of globalization.