IT'S WRITTEN DOWN, MATT.

Matt "Dean Dad" Reed laments, "The unwritten rules are unevenly known."  That Divine Passive should be a warning.

I like the term “hidden curriculum” a lot. It typically refers to the unspoken expectations in a given field that new entrants are expected to know, even if they were never formally taught. Someone not knowing the “hidden curriculum” can result in having a much harder time than the folks who do know it.

The expectations are only "unspoken" if nobody speaks them. You'd think that we could have an institution to do that work. We could call it a "school."  People at Inside Higher Education might take an interest in that task.  Sadly, no.

Access to academia’s hidden curricula is uneven, though it tends broadly to correlate with race and parental backgrounds. Higher education isn’t the only industry with unwritten rules, though; part of the reason that so many professional athletes are the children of other professional athletes, I suspect, is that they’re raised knowing the unwritten rules. Others don’t. The recent concern about “nepo babies” in show business probably reflects their similar insider knowledge and, in that case, connections. When you grow up in an industry, you learn some of its rules by osmosis. That doesn’t guarantee success, but it helps.

Let's let slide his confessions to being clueless about home improvement. As a class, academicians generally can't carry water for a patternmaker. Higher education's failure to inculcate that knowledge, though, is self-inflicted.

As educators, you’d think we’d be uniquely attuned to hidden curricula. You’d think we’d go out of our way to fill in those knowledge gaps, since sharing knowledge is the point of our industry. And sometimes we do. But we can do much better, and if we’re serious about equity and social mobility, we have to do better.

But ... is anybody surprised, the column being posted in the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, that it neglects the most obvious design flaw.

This is where access-oriented colleges have a different task than the elites. The most exclusive places tend to skew heavily toward the children of the rich and powerful. The cultures in those places reflect that. The students from elite backgrounds know the unwritten rules of the class they expect to (re)join upon graduation; they don’t have to be told. (Scholarship students often run into an uncanny sense that things aren’t quite what they seem, but it isn’t obvious why.) That allows elite colleges not to spend too much time or energy on these issues. But access institutions bring in students who haven’t been exposed to the same unwritten rules. The rules they’ve learned are often quite complex in their own ways, but they’re built around a different reality. This is where academic advising, career advising and informal asides from professors can make a world of difference.

That most obvious design flaw?  Treating those "unwritten rules" as manifestations of "privilege," sometimes "unearned" privilege.

Look, this isn't rocket science.  This isn't even defending the America's Cup.

Yes, that's posted in a clubhouse in a posh resort area of Wisconsin.  The seven building blocks, though, are for anyone to use.