While trying to impact societal and organizational change on a fundamental level, in theory, to hear “yes” to a request for advancements is generally a good thing. But can this theory be applied to higher education? Theories, in essence, are fragile and require that a very particular set of underlying assumptions fit a scenario before they can be applied. Furthermore, beyond the assumptions, they depend upon lemmas and corollaries, assistants in the mapping of arguments to proofs, to take the assumptions and prepositions and align them to support the proof. The higher education realm is dynamic and, at any given moment, the conditions that fit a particular assumption can shift. Certain givens, as they are stated in proofs, are static. For example, minoritized subjects are at a disadvantage with respect to college admissions. As Brim states, “As a general rule, in higher education, riches harm the poor…Poor students are hidden by elitist educational institutions, not from them.” General rules govern the proof of theorems. Better yet, they contain them so that the results of narrowly defined suppositions do not fall outside of predetermined bounds. Though ambitious in scope, later, I hope to use many of the givens established in our society, along with lemmas and corollaries justified in our readings and class discussions, to prove an overarching theory regarding the subject matter of this class.

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