Higher Education and September 11 th

ence simultaneously rich and hollow, meaningful and unspeakable-are multiple possible futures whose relative probability we cannot reliably assess. We will surely contemplate in detail the character of events that will never come to pass. And events we never imagined, like the events of September 11 th, will surely overtake us and displace our wisdom, our fears, and our best professional knowledge. I cannot remember another time when the future seemed so decisively unreadable, outside our control. As subjects supposed to know, academ-