Enlightenment, in other words, can neither be modeled nor achieved by instructors whose pedagogy is driven by the exigencies of goal-bound evaluation. Ultimately, students taught under the SACS initiative will become habituated, by example as well as assignment, to avoid creative, original solutions to problems, to minimize expectation, and to regard their work as valuable only to the degree that it fits an assessment matrix. These, Kant reminds us, are intellectual habits a free people can ill afford to perpetuate. The sort of academic freedom which fosters liberal education is not the freedom to revise goals, but to have none. This is the freedom to reason from cause to effect rather than from goal to technique or goal to assessment.
Academic degrees are signs of academic ability.
The letters after a graduate's cognomen signify that the person named has acquired some range of intellectual abilities. One primary function of an educational institution is to confer degrees. Learned abilities are acquired by habituation. . The criteria for earning an academic degree are applied to one's achievements, but what is being measured is the character of one's abilities. Insofar as intellectual abilities are innate, educational institutions are superfluous.