I wasn't driving when this happened, which is a good thing because big trucks make me nervous, and when we're approaching an eight-mile-long steep uphill grade featuring blinking signs warning "High wind alert--Truck blow-over danger," I'm much more comfortable with a colleague at the wheel--especially if it's the colleague whose legendary calm would make her the ideal driver for a trip to the ends of the earth through an apocalyptic nightmare.
So I'm sitting pretty in the passenger seat while my colleague struggles to keep us in our lane through wind gusts roaring down the mountain and pushing us toward the guardrail. Suddenly we see flashing lights. We join a line of cars and trucks crawling carefully past the wreck of a semi that has blown over on its side next to a cliff edge. Emergency vehicles have attached heavy cables to the truck, but with every new gust of wind the cables quiver and the truck scoots a little closer to the edge. In the battle between cables and wind, who wins? We're not staying around to find out.
Is this a metaphor for the current state of higher education? If so, are we the truck being blown off the cliff, the cables trying to hold the truck steady, or the drivers gawking as they try to move on and survive the storm? Who or what is producing the wind? Is it the FAFSA breakdown, the bleak enrollment forecast, the budget crisis, or the larger cultural disdain for higher education?
Judging by my conversations with colleagues from other campuses last week, we'd prefer to be among the line of cars crawling past the disaster than in the truck going over the cliff--but even then, I'm really glad I'm not the one driving the car.
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