The Scholarly University is a poetic riddle, originating in The Cylindrical Entity. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is a single couplet. The Scholarly University is always written from the perspective of an animal. Forms of parallelism are common throughout the poem, in that certain lines have similar grammatical structures and they sometimes have reversed word orders. Each line has six syllables. The first line is intended to describe the past. It must make use of assonance. The second line is intended to move away from previous ideas concerning the future.