I am back from two weeks in France and the Netherlands, where I spent part of the time bicycling into the wind — a 20-mile-per-hour headwind whose constancy loomed ever larger in my imagination. My survival solution was to spend as much energy as I could afford working through what I have come to see as a wondrous puzzle: Why should an enterprise devoted to rationality, clear thinking, and precise exposition spend so much of its time arguing about a set of words that have literally lost their meanings?
The words I have in mind belong to a set I have come to call the four horsemen of higher-education reform: access, accountability, affordability, and quality. In her charge to her Commission on the Future of Higher Education, Margaret Spellings asked us to provide guidance on how to ensure that our American higher-education system celebrated those four qualities. I now realize that I never really understood what she was asking of us — and have become increasingly convinced she didn’t know either.
So, heading into the wind, I tried to imagine what each of my four horsemen might mean and just how seriously we ought to take — or not take — calls to make them the cornerstones of federal higher-education policy. I hope those of you who follow this blog will spend a little time thinking about what those terms mean to you. On Friday I will begin posting my cycling-induced notions as to what they might mean — and not mean.
