'range of skills' as a threat

The project that's this week's priority: a paper I'm working on about how faculty on my campus perceive writing proficiency. I did a pretty extensive survey last term asking faculty across-the-curriculum how much and what kinds of writing they assigned and also what they thought of student writing ability. I was wondering if there would be any interesting trends when I looked at their answers in conjunction with rank, department affiliation, and years employed at the university. A few such trends have emerged (I'll post about those later this week, as I crunch the data)...but what mainly interests me is the *language* that faculty used on the open-ended questions. Certainly a lot of panic in their assessments of student literacy (of lack thereof), but particularly when describing the RANGE of writing "skills." Range certainly represents a teaching *challenge*, but I'm interested in the implications of, well, freaking out about this kind of diversity. I wonder how I might try to understand this imperative in light of broader imperatives toward cultural homogenization. I'd like to look more at the literature on "universal design." More on this later (as I write the paper and think this through)...I'm giving a talk based on the research as part of our 'Faculty Seminar' series on the last of Friday of April--so I better get writing!