There is a striking consensus among the seers who have been describing the college and university of the near future. The institution of 2010, they say, will be a mixture of unprecedented demographic and technological transformation as today' s so-called minorities are becoming the new majority, and powerful digital capabilities are arriving daily with startling speed. These developments foreshadow great difficulties in managing the transition. It is no secret that a hot debate now rages across the United States about the role of remedial education, diversity, affirmative action, which students to recruit and educate, and the balance of public resources spent versus personal responsibility for education cost.
As the new century dawns, it brings with it twin versions of egalitarianism that deeply divide our attitudes toward recruitment, retention, and remediation. One version of egalitarianism, the Jeffersonians, believe in opportunity, gain, and growth on the basis of individual merit. They largely demand that the academy hold fast to its traditional roles, character, and mission. A second egalitarian theme in the American context is the Jacksonian levelers, who seek greater equality of result and condition. The Jacksonians are interested in closing the economic, social, and education gap between those at the top and those at the bottom, and they are willing to use the power of the state to accomplish these goals, using redistribution of income, whereas the Jeffersonians are suspicious of centralized power and state funding of social or remedial programs not based on clear individual merit. Society thus has a cluster of bipolar commitments tugging at both of these value dimensions as they affect recruitment, remediation, and retention (Balderston, 1995;Cohen, 1998). Some contemporary examples of this philosophical conflict are legal cases over preferential admissions (examples are Adams v.