If you feel that you have both feet planted on level ground, then the university has failed you.

Goheen’s remark frames higher education as an experience meant to unsettle complacency rather than confirm what students already think they know. “Both feet planted on level ground” suggests intellectual comfort: fixed certainties, unchallenged assumptions, and a stable sense of one’s worldview. By calling that outcome a “failure,” the quote argues that a university’s proper task is to introduce complexity, ambiguity, and self-questioning—through rigorous study, exposure to unfamiliar ideas, and encounters with difference. The ideal graduate is not someone who feels perfectly secure, but someone whose thinking has been productively destabilized and who has learned to live with doubt while continuing to inquire.