If nothing else, a Wesleyan education is said to provide valuable training in “critical thinking.” And yet, in considering the campus landscape, such meaningful reflection seems to be either absent or unassimilated. We have instead, as before, “critical thinking” as a productive career skill for the up-and-coming specialist, another resume badge for already overqualified young workers. Given the University’s success at generating well-rounded citizens and motivated employees/employers, when has Adorno and Horkheimer’s warning that “intellect’s true concern is the negation of reification…It must perish when it is solidified into a cultural asset and handed out for consumption purposes” ever been more relevant? Here the notion of “diversity university” has long been a running joke, as the lengthy trail of tenure denials for faculty of color becomes ever longer, and institutional support for ethnic studies programs is all the more contingent. Custodians continue to be laid off, the workloads for the rest unconscionably increased as the president collects his $535,000 and sets about to somehow get the endowment over 600 million. Next door, the progressive food service company is too busy printing sustainability pamphlets to notice the next shipment of factory-farmed meat coming off the truck. It’s true that Wesleyan’s natural sciences are great, unless you are a zebra finch in a biology lab, in which case your unmourned and merely tabulated death gives fresh significance to the cliché “knowledge is power.” Thoughtful students might take these as reasons to become “active,” were they not already being paid by the university to do—as an “intern”—a bureaucratized iteration of the trouble making they once did voluntarily and spontaneously. But at least many students find the time to become engaged in the non-Wesleyan Middletown community, driven both ways in the climate-controlled comfort of an Office of Community Service van. Wesleyan’s critical thinking takes the arrival of Attila as a demonstration of political diversity. Mario Savio’s concerns are actualized in the reformation of curiosity into a form digestible by society. While working for non-profits and the “common good” may not do much for our paltry endowment, they do seem to keep everything else running rather smoothly. Griping aside, as I am directly accountable for most of what is described above and implicated indirectly in the rest, I have no interest in the tired model of “youth in revolt.” This weekend, smile at that crimson cardinal in all of his masculinist virility and, with commencement but a few weeks off, recall the long-ago words of Victor Turner: “ritual is transformative, ceremony confirmatory.”