I think it finally dawned on me a few years ago, during an IAP session about "academic dishonesty" that the estimable Travis Merritt talked me into being part of. The message was clear -- everyone in the room, faculty, post-docs, undergraduates, you name it -- were convinced that there was an Eleventh Commandment (or was it just the Prime Algorithm?) on those stone tablets Moses lugged down the mountain:

No matter the subject, no matter the group of students, no matter whether they were self-selecting or coerced by one or another of the General Institute Requirements, given 13 weeks and all the equipment imaginable, plus TAs and Athena besides, still we could not bring the whole lot of them up to some definable minimally-acceptable level.

"Well," I've been told, by sager heads, "there are always a few who just don't make the effort." Sad, but true -- in my decade and a half here at MIT, I've run into those derelicts, who can't manage to get themselves to class, always manage not to turn in assigned work, and so on. One wonders why on earth they came in the first place -- to spend so much money to do nothing useful. It's comparable to the dolts who pay the price of a ticket to Fenway and of the beer they sell there, as a way to drink themselves stuporous.

But still, can there be that many of such folk wandering the Infinite Corridor? I find it hard, no impossible, to believe. Which takes me back to the initial puzzle yet once more. And the puzzle grows, as Lewis Carroll so deftly put it, "curioser and curioser" given that we like to pretend that we are dealing with the brightest people of their age in the known universe. SAT scores, high school grades -- no matter what the measure, our students are off the charts. And still they fail.

Or is it that we fail? That our pedagogy is so inept, and our curriculum so ill-formed, that they just won't do the job? A few weeks ago, at a day-long "retreat" organized by the CUP to ponder the nature of MIT's program, I expressed my bafflement to one of my colleagues. She rejected my premises (note the pronoun). "They're not the brightest in the world. Not any more." (Someone had just remarked that the failure rate in one or another of the mobbed freshman requirement courses hadn't changed appreciably as long as records stretch back.) The reasons. Affirmative action of course, both on matters of ethnicity and gender.

Now that strikes me as a really dangerous notion. "Blame the women" -- how convenient, how tidy! My own teaching experience stretches back to a public junior high school, where each year we had a sturdy quotient of those students we called LBD -- "lovable, but dumb." My favorite -- I will protect his privacy by suppressing his name -- was one I dubbed "the Mad Cabbage" in honor of the way he played linebacker on a football team I coached. All of which is a roundabout way of saying I have met and worked with truly limited intelligences, and I don't find them in my classes here at the Institute.

It seems to me sometimes we suffer from a radical confusion about our enterprise. Are we teachers or winnowers? That is, do we undertake to communicate learning to a body of young people, with rigor and high expectations of course but with pedagogical effect, as well; or do we undertake to sort out, from an otherwise hard-to-differentiate group of young people whom the rest of the world sees as more or less equivalent, those who are truly excellent from those who are merely extremely accomplished?

In the one case, we should take pride in the relatively high rate of accomplishment of our students. I know that my alma mater, that Liberal Arts college just up the Red Line, makes a great deal of noise about its graduation rate, and likes to brag it's hard to get into Harvard, but (once you're in) it's hard to get out again without a BA. MIT seems less prone to that particular variety of self-congratulation, but we make a point of parading in all their vast numbers those who have stayed the course, each Commencement Day. But if our real work is to sort out, should we not find that parade a point of shame -- a sign we haven't been tough enough, demanding enough, strict enough? A chilling thought, I grant you; maybe just a passing nightmare, in the long dark nights of late winter.

Still, I remain, stubbornly, puzzled by the persistence of failure among our students. And I remain convinced that it is not so much that they are failing as that we are failing them. I only wish I had the key to some reformist solution. I've tried to come up with one, but alas, I've failed.