DON'T GET A PH.D., GET A SPECIAL EDUCATION CERTIFICATE.

It's been at least fifteen years that I have been describing contemporary higher education's biggest scam as that of admitting unprepared students and calling it access.

Alas, in one of the house organs for business as usual, it's just the same business as usual.

Even as we remain committed to principles of inclusiveness, accessibility, equity and justice, we must ensure that we are challenging our students -- and ourselves -- with difficult and controversial subjects, with opposing and inconsistent viewpoints, and with perspectives and even principles that differ from our own. Critical study, higher learning and ultimately deeper understanding come from debate and discourse. We must be made to feel uncomfortable, uneasy and uncertain at times. But we must also ensure that our students feel their classrooms and campuses are safe environments in which to examine difficult topics, debate polarizing issues or even hear from polarizing figures and criticize established as well as emergent theories. Tall orders, I would agree, but we are up to the challenge. Universities are remarkable institutions.

That's Vermont serial administrator David V. Rosowsky enjoying a good wallow in his Good Intentions whilst provoking a sometimes contentious bull session, including a trenchant "There's a certain, delusional aspect to the flavor of this column" at the opening.

Not that it matters, because tempering the principles with the practicality ... intellectual work being difficult and requiring preparation ... loses out to the vulgar form of inclusiveness.  "California State University System weighs adding a quantitative reasoning requirement that advocates for underrepresented students worry could worsen gaps in access."

Read on, though, and you discover, dear reader, that the common schools are failing to provide the proper preparation.

Across the Committee on Educational Policy, trustees also echoed concerns about the proposal putting underresourced schools (and, in turn, their students) at a disadvantage. Above all else, stakeholders wondered why admission and goals for student retention are being put above K-12 education standards, when Cal State's own data have identified these inequities in high schools already.

“I know we’re trying to address that by educating more math quantitative teachers, but I continue to feel that we're perhaps putting the cart before the horse, and we should be focusing on making sure quantitative reasoning is available, not just the traditional math courses,” said trustee Lillian Kimbell during the session.

If only we had some way to ensure that the high schools did their jobs.

Perhaps, though, Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page gets the deep word.  "Don’t make diversity the enemy of excellence."  He continues,

Unfortunately, free speech is more than some young people can tolerate. Some of them were in the black student union that interrupted a program for 45 minutes in which I participated a few years ago at the University of North Carolina. I was more upset by their promptly leaving after reading off their demands. They didn’t hear me quote Marshall McLuhan’s observation: “Propaganda ends where dialogue begins.”

Too bad. I, too, thought as a student that I knew all the answers. After graduation, I learned about the questions.

Yet I’ve spent too much time with students in recent years to be grumpy about their impatience. Some are great at telling me what they believe. But, as [Yale Law dean Anthony] Kronman and [Chicago philosopher Allan] Bloom point out, students also need to be challenged to tell me why they believe it.

These days, unfortunately, "dialogue" is often Student Affairs wordnoise meaning "propaganda."  Furthermore, it is precisely the marginalized and underserved populations, to use the rhetoric higher ed likes to use, who are most poorly served by having their "safety" protected at the expense of discovering what the questions are.