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Six decades ago in Queens, when I was a lousy and irresponsible junior high school student and then a lousy and irresponsible high school student, I fantasized about someday being not just a studious college student, but a classy one. As if matriculating in a make-believe, midcentury movie starring Peter Lawford, clothed in tweed and leather elbow patches.

Since that time, my higher education jets have cooled with age, but not nearly to the point of cold, as a large part of me remains a romantic about American colleges and universities. This, despite widespread and increasing anger and doubts about them in many places — sour views held by millions, often the very people who owe much of their worldly and other successes to the “academy.”

Back in the 1960s, when I only occasionally did my homework, I figured I had one last chance to have the kind of career and life I envisioned for myself, but only if I finally learned how to work conscientiously, consistently. Which, I did, at a special one-year program at a community college intended especially for young people having a hard time getting accepted elsewhere. Fear, I learned, can be a great motivator. From the ivy-free City University College Center at New York City Community College, I went on to earn undergraduate and graduate degrees from two excellent universities, winding up in terrific jobs at both. My boss each time, as great fortune would have it, was C. Peter Magrath, who you may recall from his 10 years as president of the University of Minnesota, from 1974 to ’84. Peter’s love for American colleges and universities, particularly big and messy land-grants, was ardent. I learned a lot from him.

But as enthusiastic as Peter’s allegiance was, it was grounded in practicality and hard reality, as governing boards generally don’t elect innocents. Yet he never lost an electric spark of wonder about higher education, and nor have I, causing me to have small patience these days with critics whose strictures about colleges and universities are overly severe, myopic regarding what remarkable and invaluable institutions they are. Their shortcomings and excesses notwithstanding, they deserve better.

I’m reluctant to be seen here as embracing an infelicitous devotion. Though if that’s the perception, so be it, as colleges and universities, despite inadequacies and sins, deserve more reverence than they have been receiving.

What kinds of inevitable sins and inadequacies exactly?