A Student’s Lament

I came to university expecting an education. What I found was a carefully managed performance in which everyone pretends not to notice the obvious.

Students are admitted who are plainly not prepared for the work, and we all know the reason. Race is treated as a qualification. The results are predictable. Those students cannot keep up, so the standards are quietly lowered. Grading becomes a farce. Everyone receives high marks because anything less would expose the gap. The pretence is maintained that excellence still matters, while the reality is that the currency of achievement has been devalued for everyone.

The days are filled with rituals designed to keep the fiction alive. Land acknowledgements recited before lectures. Questionnaires about allyship. Workshops and consultants paid handsomely to search for systemic racism that most of us can see no longer defines the institution in the way claimed. We sit through it. We fill out the forms. We nod. None of us can say what we see, because the penalty for noticing is to be shouted down as racist. The fear is real and effective. Silence becomes the price of survival.

What was supposed to be the purpose of this place, free inquiry, hard argument, the testing of ideas against better ones, has been replaced by a bureaucratised routine. The university no longer steeled minds. It manages them. Debate is curated. Certain conclusions are pre-approved. Difficulty is treated as a form of harm. The result is not education but credentialing: four years of supervised activity and extracurricular signalling that may, if one is lucky, open the door to a job or the next set of professional schools where the same process begins again.

This is what "diversity" has delivered in practice. Not a richer intellectual environment, but a system that cannot admit its own trade-offs. Unqualified students are admitted, standards are adjusted downward so they can remain, and the rest of us are required to participate in the ceremonies that justify the arrangement. The cost is borne by the students who arrived ready to work and by the idea of the university itself.

I understand the moral impulse that began this. I also understand the reality that has followed. A place that once claimed to value truth above comfort now treats comfort as the higher good and truth as a threat. We are not fools. We see what is happening. We simply are not allowed to say it out loud. So, like everyone I just shut up.