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For anyone who has witnessed the success of many young men and women who were taught to fail, has watched them lay claim to their talents, meet their commitments and set out with a plan in their minds, the widespread pessimism about whether Open Admissions can work, as they put it, is baffling. Especially baffling is the fact that this pessimism was deep-rooted even before any of the new students had stepped on our campuses. By now, there is a literature of pessimism, a theology-more precisely, a social science-of despair that serves the purposes of those who have already rejected the social policy implicit in Open Admissions. Unfortunately, the debate about Open Admissions has been and is being carried on in the language of those who oppose it: in the alphabet of numbers, the syntax of print-outs, the transformations of graphs and tables, the language, in particular, of a prestigious group of social scientists who perceive through their language truths that even they seem, at times, unwilling to hear, much as scientists of another kind in another