EVERYTHING HAS AN OPPORTUNITY COST. University Diaries has located a number of useful posts on mission creep in the higher learning, this time focusing on the misnamed cultural competency. First up: Wendy McElroy.

'Cultural competence' "entails actively challenging the status quo…one table noted the need to incorporate institutionalized notions of power, privilege, and oppression into the definition….Thus, for many, cultural competence is transformative and political."

There is something of the Cretan Paradox in this definition. Suppose the status quo at a university is a 'cultural competence' mission. Is it thus culturally competent to actively challenge the mission? Suppose further that the university has a Director of Cultural Competence. Does that person embody an institutionalized notion of power, privilege, and oppression? But let us suppose that the Director is destooled and the mission statement rewritten? Is not there a new status quo to challenge, ad infinitum, ad nauseam?

Next up: Butterflies and Wheels.

So at the University of Oregon. There was this committee, see, and it came up with ever such a good idea to transform the university - the entire university, every bit of it, not just the studies departments, but all of it, math, physics, biology, all of it - from a pesky old educational and research institution into a wonderful caring hand-holding Make Everything Better device. Into a branch of mental health and/or social work. Super idea, no? Only...one wonders why not leave that to mental health and social work and similar organizations, in order to leave time and space for the university to go on doing what the university is (generally) supposed to do? On account of how it's all tooled up to do that, and knows how, and has the equipment in place, and has the rules written down, and the staff hired, and the beds fitted up with sheets. That's not to say it couldn't do it better, that there's no possible room for improvement, but it is to say that it seems a little wasteful to make it do a completely different job after it's already gone to all that trouble. Unless of course we think teaching and research are just completely valueless, in which case it does make sense to recycle all those books and microscopes and libraries and lecture rooms into something else as best as people can. But do we think that? Have we decided that? Have we quite, entirely made up our minds that teaching and research are just boring effete pointless elitist preoccupations that should now make way for therapy and massage and bedwetting? Have we? I on't think we have, quite. We may be stumbling and creeping in that direction, but I don't think we're quite there yet.

Go read the whole thing. Reflect on whether there might be comparative advantages in researchers being researchers, therapists being therapists, and higher education higher.

Finally, a lengthy and rather gloomy essay by Professor Norman Levitt. Too much stuff to highlight here. Let me offer this.

Therefore, if I tell you that a university is, above all, an institution for the preservation and extension of learning and for its dissemination to the emerging generation, for the winnowing of truth from falsehood and imposture, for the conservation of the highest values our civilisation can conceive, for the emulation, insofar as we are capable, of the finest and deepest minds our civilisation has produced, for the hoarding and protection of what must survive of our civilisation even after all the dross has fallen away; if I tell you all this without satiric intent, and with the purpose of describing an ideal that is at least approximable if not perfectly realisable, then I will have committed an enormous gaffe, by the standards that our culture inflicts on us all. I will have tried to sell you a bill of goods, swamp real-estate, pump-and-dump stock, the Brooklyn Bridge.

Read the rest, and ask, where is the Fortune 500 employer who will tell the job-fair sales representative "Enough?" Read it, and ask, where is the stressed parent who will tell the campus recruiter, "Enough?"