the “basic grammar” of higher education — the familiar ways in which faculty teach, students learn, departments function, administrators govern, and so on — has proven to be extremely durable, evolving little over the past century. It could be that reformers go easy on the vaguest of slogans precisely because they know how difficult it is to achieve the concrete goals toward which they work so hard, such as to get students to drink less and study more, to create tenure systems that reward excellent teaching, to graduate much larger numbers of low-income students, to devise a truly coherent undergraduate curriculum, and so on. Maybe academic reformers talk so often about transformation precisely because they see so little of it and they need the occasional dose of hopefulness.

can know that the space is “safe.”