The historian Samuel Catlin put it even more bluntly in an essay earlier this year: the campus he claimed, does not exist. Now less than ever.
Whatever it is, this imagined college—its students as much as its administrators—has run amok. We're told that it used to be something: a laboratory for ideas, a place of genuine debate—and it is now no longer that.
Perhaps then the problem isn't that America's colleges and the country's population have grown apart. Perhaps it's the opposite: Americans think they understand college too well.
This narrowly imagined campus provides fodder for a reactionary politics. It also diminishes the realities of diverse and evolving college experiences across the nation.
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