According to the New York Times, a commission on higher education consisting of -- you guessed it -- businessmen appointed by Bush has started pushing standardized testing for colleges.

Businessmen are experts in education. That's why they run school local boards: they know better than teachers.

Now that the Federal government has, by the way it finances education, made it more and more difficult for families of modest means to send their children to college without burdening them with mountains of debt, it proposes to dictate through high-stakes testing what college students should know when they graduate. Considering the incredible diversity in curriculums and academic programs now existing, a single high-stakes test that all students would have to pass to graduate would radically change our universities into assembly-line factories of learning, with the shots all called by the feds.

We should have expected this development sooner or later. He who pays the piper calls the tunes. Really open and free inquiry frightens businessmen and especially Republican ones. This is a perfect opportunity to bring into line one of the last bastions of free thought.