The basic problem I see is that the crazies now outnumber the scholars among university faculty. And the students seem, for the most part, to be on the side of the crazies.
So it is really not enough for scholars to stand up for scholarship. Even if multiple scholars stand together, they can still be picked off one by one by cabals of students who are determined to see them punished for not joining the crazies.
Perhaps, in some departments, where scholars still hold the majority and sit in positions of power on hiring and tenure committees, it might be possible to make some headway: not hiring crazies and denying tenure to any who have been hired but don't yet have tenure. But in departments where crazies are the ones in power, the faculty will only get crazier with each new hire.
It seems to me that the only way to save universities is to create new ones or restructure old ones, dedicated from the top down to scholarship instead of craziness. How many university administrators have the will to stand up to the crazies?
I'm a college professor. Unfortunately Universities no longer hire for 'critical thinking' but instead emphasize DEI. Okay so now we have faculty who are identity radicals. This can't be fixed.
You are wrong. Students can vote with their feet. In general, males already are. Both by not matriculating and by choosing majors in STEM, Economics and Business. I think women will too eventually as they react against the trans. movement encroaching on them and end up Baristas, etc. Fortunately, many women are now choosing science and medicine where they will become productive citizens. DEI is already losing influence outside of academia. The trades (mostly males) are becoming more attractive with their generally good compensation and technical orientation. The pendulum is swinging back.............It will take a while. But eventually even academia will have to change its hiring practices to be more even handed.
We could start by reforming our student loan system, so that loans could be bankrupted without government guarantees for lenders. We would see lenders refuse to fund degrees in social justice and DEI, and redirect funding towards degrees that actually improve people's economic opportunities, and ability to pay back their loan promptly. This would fairly quickly dry the supply of students and funding to the academics departments most inclined to be grooming youngsters in this useless self indulgent anti American propaganda.
It's not about numbers, but about leverage. If the crazies are in the student affairs office, or an office of diversity that answers directly to the president of the institution, that exerts more pressure than if they are adjunct faculty in a grievance studies program.
A big part of the problem we have now is that the crazies are on social media, and can do serious damage to the reputation of an institution in a matter of hours. This makes cowards of many upper-level administrators, who must prevent any reputational damage so that alumni keep contributing to the endowment and to the latest capital campaign.
The online crazies can also incite hatred against individual members of the faculty, who would really rather just be, you know, pursuing the truth than dealing with mobs and death threats and the like.
Agree. The donors and alumni who disagree with all this need to stop donating and funding institutions that don't protect free thought. And parents need to stop sending their 18yo to places where indoctrination rather than education take place. Money talks more than anything else. If the funding drops, the institutions will slowly change, but it takes time. They are like the Titanic, hard to turn quickly, but sure to sink if they stay on the current course.
I mentioned this in another post, but I can only imagine the shock and dismay of administrators at elite schools when wealthy donors rebelled in the wake of 10/7. And here they were thinking they just had to continue pandering the far left to keep their endowment secure!
The crazies are “educating” students in useless propaganda which has no long term social value and untethered from the real world beyond their tribe. This is the Achilles heal of crazy propaganda leading to a certain dead end
This is the only way forward I see. Just by luck there will be departments or Faculties here and there that remain committed to scholarship. If those departments can resist student and administration pressure to go woke, it is possible that they might carve out a self-reinforcing reputation. In effect, we might see a stable two-tier market, with most students going to activists schools, but a few picking scholarly institutions. But I am not optimistic. It is not clear to me that there is a student demand for scholarship as opposed to feel good activism. I don't see any demand at all in the humanities, though there are likely more students who want to actually learn in applied schools, like law or engineering. But even there, the reputation feedback loop just isn't very strong. As elite institutions go downhill, it becomes very likely that there will be a few 2nd or 3rd tier institutions that resist wokeness and consequently offer a better legal education. But how long will it take for employers to realize that, and then for students to realize that employers realize? Too long, I think. So, I think a two-tier equilibrium is the best case outcome, but even that is optimistic.
There are a number of employers that have vowed not to hire "crazy" graduates from these elite institutions for multiple self-preservation reasons. I think employment pressure is even more potent than a donor strike. Overly entitled activists do not make good employees, and paying customers do not tolerate crazy behavior from their providers. Veting these people is very easy, so we may see some changes sooner than we expect as long as government institutions will not try to protect them like they do with student loan forgiveness and other manipulations.
They actually don't. The scholars are just being scaredy scholars waiting for yet another wave to pass over above and hoping they will not have been washed out to sea when this storm passes. Sort of perennial narcissistic wimps most scholars I am afraid.
Firstly let's found The University Of Whiteness. Yes, whiteness. Dedicated to the preservation, protection, promotion and praise of White civilization. For well over a century whitey has tried to pretend that he himself had almost nothing to do with his own civilization. Western Civilization just sorta happened and it might just as well have happened in New Guinea. (Wakanda was far more advanced of course, but then whitey destroyed it like he destroys everything.)
Whitey tried to make himself invisible in his own home because he wanted to invite and include the whole world to join him in this project called civilization. All were welcome and whitey would rather be invisible than upset a newcomer in any way. So whitey was no where to be found when the Long March began. At every advance, whitey thought that surrender was best, since otherwise some might not feel Valued.
Time to reverse that. Whitey is back! He knows that it was he who built civilization and he should no longer be afraid to say so. Let's have White Supremacy. Mind, this is, at it always has been, open to one and all, but they have to become White (irrespective of race).
"We could look at a map of the world and give credit to the nations/peoples that contributed to building civilization"
Absolutely. Nevertheless 90% of it has come from Whitey. It's not that we stop giving others credit, it's that we stop pretending that we had nothing to do with it. For a couple of hundred years we've just taken civilization for granted, that's got to stop.
Lookit, the U of W, is a sort of joke, isn't it? It's political satire. It's a counter punch to the idiots who say that being punctual, doing your assignments, studying for tests, and getting good grades by doing good work is 'whiteness'. It's mockery: "So you think that everything that makes civilization possible is White, do ya? Well then I'm a White Supremacist." Get it? It's fighting 'serious' Bullshit with joking bullshit. But ... it's time to stop mumbling. Civilization must be defended and that means that those who built it must come to it's aid. And that's Whitey.
It's in the spirit of Lenny Bruce's famous: "Are there any niggers in the room?" act. One most effectively ridicules something by either by confronting it head-on ... or by pretending to conform and letting the absurdity speak for itself. If civilization is White, then let's pretend to conform to wokeness and agree: "Ok then, civilization is White ... if YOU say so."
But as you say, the real goal is a return to MLK's goal: "... not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." Dangerous game tho, there are folks who would take the U of W literally. Mind ... we'd want to know who they are, so the U of W could also be taken as a sort of 'bait'.
Administrators now outnumber actual scholars by a huge amount. There is the basis of the problem. The problem has never been actual academics, but in the administrators who oversee the hiring and the decisions on what to teach in every department. The only counter balance was government grants which until recently tended to favor actual science. In most sciences the funding is mostly for actual science, but in medicine the funding has been bending toward DEI issues instead or whatever the NIH/NAIAD/FDA narratives are. But this too has shown signs of relenting in the post COVID world.
Everything you say is true except admins don't outnumber faculty at Universities. They do in public primary/secondary schools in many cities, however. But they do occupy the admin roles that decide who is hired/fired/tenured/rewarded/punished. And that is leading us into a place from which salvation may not be possible for 30 years if we even tried. But who are the 'greater Angels' who would lead us there? And do have time to waste.
Our only lever is money. And we need to pull it away from the institutions that clearly hate us, our constitution, our values and our people. That will clarify minds like nothing else.
The number of administration staff is high - but not the issue per se. It's that we've created havens for radicals, and empowered unaccountable administrations with massive amounts of money with no strings but to bow to political leaders and trends.
Central to the challenge is that many of the 'crazies' are on the faculty now. And that makes them almost impossible to dislodge - so we're stuck 'til they're dead or the institution goes belly up. Tenure was supposed to protect independent thinking - but now it protects the mono-thinking of radicals with permanent posts and sinecures.
Evidence is all around us in that 90% of US faculties are from one party - a party that embraces an alphabet soup of ever-evolving radical notions, in the 3.4 DEI officers per faculty member at US universities being able to destroy lives with a whisper, in the 'division' departments whose alums now dominate administrations (aka, womens/ethnic/peace/diversity/similar departments), in the political appointments to college and university president roles whose sole job is to raise money today - and not lead students and faculty, or preserve actual academic freedom.
It also shows up in the >50% of 'peer reviewed' studies with findings that cannot be replicated. It shows up in 'educated' people in positions of influence on campus claiming that math is racist and a reflection of 'white privilege'. It materializes when students are allowed to interfere with legitimate speakers on campus without consequence, join riots and destroy property while masked, threaten faculty who have strayed from the true faith of they day, and intimidate / threaten Jewish kids on campus. It's especially gauling when Jewish kids try to dodge blood libel by saying something pathetic like 'but I'm not from Israel'... like attacking Israeli kids is ok. It shows up in polls showing most college kids think speech is violence and that the 1st Amendment is dangerous. It materializes when foreign students are given charter to hate America and riot - and worse when through 'intersectional' and 'deconstruction' thinking is leading American kids to despise America and western ideas, too. It shows when Chinese dicatators (and mass murderers) get standing ovations on campuses and at public events, but anyone defending the Bill of Rights is an racist and oppressor.
If you know any retired faculty from these 'elite' schools, or even recent grads - ask them what they see. If they bought into the garbage, they will descend ito loud babble if questioned. If they didn't, they generally don't want to talk about it - or only in hushed tones.
It really stinks. Sadly, I just dropped $150k+ in tuition for my kids - and they caught the mind flu they teach there. I think I got the tougher education, to be honest. At least they will grow out of it because they have to work in the real world now. But too many kids won't as long as we're funding this treadmill into decay and demise.
Beautifully written but lacking in substance. In essence this essay is college itself. If you can avoid being star struck by the eloquent language you’ll notice the lack of content.
One simple fact sets the whole thing on fire. The poison cannot be the cure.
To put this in context, there has been a debate in the (online) pages of some academic publications, but most especially the blog at Heterodox Academy, about the purpose (the 'telos', to use an academic-friendly Greek term!) of the university: is it the pursuit of truth, the pursuit of justice, or something else?
That's the level at which this is pitched, and I can tell you that many of us in academia are still devoted to the pursuit of truth, which requires engaging in free and fearless inquiry and following it wherever it leads . . . even if it leads someplace uncomfortable.
This commitment to free inquiry runs counter to the demands of the Cult of True Victimhood that a university should be a "safe space" that never exposes them to anything that makes them uncomfortable.
As to the "one simple fact" test, I would beg to differ. The claim that "academia is lost" - or, worse, that "academia is poison" - is extraordinary, and any good skeptic will tell you that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. If you take "one simple fact" as proof of a claim, that suggests you are already deeply, personally attached to belief in that claim, and no accumulation of facts will shake you from your conviction.
So the question is, why are you so attached to that belief? What comfort do you derive from believing that one of the core institutions of modern society is beyond saving?
I agree on seeking the truth (the mission) and that the Cult of True Victimhood runs counter to the mission. So why does this happen ? Why do University Administrators coddle those who seek safe spaces (other than pointing to the obvious, social media) ? Their parents obviously messed up in raising these kids. And I agree it is not the Universities job to raise these kids. Universities should assume a certain level of maturity and ability to deal with challenging situations. Sadly, not exposing these kids to reality just makes it worse for when they graduate. They are worthless in the marketplace in my opinion because they have no conflict resolution skills.
The village raised these kids. They all got trophies. Grades were negotiated. We were told by teachers and counselors and other parents that this was to engender positivity and feelings of self-worth in every child. It appears to have failed.
It eliminated self-doubt. While self-doubt can be painful., It also motivates and more importantly, engenders humility. These kids have no humility; and no doubt that they are absolutely right.
I think that is very true for some, maybe most. But they are not happy. We may be faced with an entire generation of lost males. In the past that only occurred in conjunction with war. But now the suicide rate is pretty high and they are abandoning the idea of work. I spent my professional life telling young people to find something, anything, they are good at and do it. Because it builds confidence and pla ting that seed is the hardest step.
I hear you and yet: The First Point was the Reported Joy of Basking in the Sunshine of a motivated teacher. I value far more highly the tossing of the baby (classics and why they're classical) out with the bathwater.
Bob - You're comment is spot on. But, you are rolling a stone up the hill. You introduce nuance to the conversation and most of the FP commenters won't know what to do with it because their worldwide is static, impenetrable to new (or nuanced) observation.
I've been mixing it up in the comments section for a while, now, and know the lay of the land. While there are certainly some commenters who are, let's say, resistant to nuance, there are many who are perfectly happy to consider other perspectives on the issue at hand.
If defending what is good in academia is a Sisyphean task, well, my doctor says I need more resistance training . . .
How do you defund a private institution? While your comment might look good on the comment page of TFP, it it useless for working towards a real, possible solution.
Agree. This essay is very ivory tower idealistic. Like some call to rise to supposed sane professors and academics. The rhetorics are useless when:
(1) university administrators realized somewhere along the line that they can grift guaranteed federal student loans and raise tuitions to the stratosphere. Consequently students are no longer scholars, but customers. When academics became a business, the customers are always right and they now have to bow to the idiotic young morons demanding "justice".
(2) The field of academics is highly political--and that's not even getting into politics political, I'm talking just about office politics. Awards of tenureship are often not based on merits, but how much the elite clique in your department thinks you're one of them and lets you in. This process has turned truly political and conservative thinkers have been weeded out entirely. So how does she expect the "sane" academics to rise under this system?
Maybe there are some ways to salvage these institutions. But it'll have to be something much more practical and not this idealistic call to arms she espoused in this essay.
As a tenured, full professor I have been speaking up. I am tired of others “thanking me for my boldness” as they say nothing. We need to address the creep of illiberal, intolerant and anti-intellectual ideas from the administration, curriculum, research conferences and journals focused on social justice’s justice across disciplines, disproportionate to actual discipline-specific research and teaching.
The suggested solution is not workable. Asking professors to “police” themselves, to be brave, etc… given what has transpired over the past two decades is a fools errand. I say burn down just enough of these schools in order to eliminate the excess degrees that cannot be absorbed by the marketplace. I appreciate that academia needs bench strength to experiment and explore. And that’s fine. But this investment needs to be more tightly managed and not hoisted and the backs of graduates whose earnings potential cannot absorb “experimentation.”
Universities are founded on a principle of faculty self-governance, in much the same way other professions (e.g., engineering) police themselves through professional societies. The idea is that it takes people with expertise in a field to assess the merits of the work of someone in that field and, for the most part, the system can work pretty well.
I would note that an increasingly managerial mindset toward academia is part of the problem, as it makes the work of faculty more and more subject to pressure from administrators and, in the case of public universities, to outside authorities.
If administrative offices are captured by the Cult of True Victimhood, then faculty had best watch what they say, and make sure their erstwhile free inquiry does not ruffle the feathers of the True Victims.
If it's a public university in a more conservative state, legislators and trustees might over-react and start to put pressure on faculty in the other direction, making it extremely dangerous even to raise certain questions, even in the interest of free inquiry concerning important issues of practice and policy . . . or even scientific fact.
Remember when there was intense conservative pressure against teaching evolution? I do, and it often felt exceedingly daring even to mention Darwin in class!
Free inquiry withers in the face of those kinds of administrative pressure.
Having difficulty separating this response from that to which it is a response -- other than having far more words, and throwing in (free of charge!) an anti-"conservative" shibboleth.
So, suppose you work at a public university in a certain state in the Southeast, and the state government has made it clear that you are not to teach "critical race theory." Suppose you are teaching a course that necessarily touches on matters of race. What do you do? Should you avoid talking about race at all?
If I lived and worked in that state, should I avoid teaching the work of Kant in my philosophy courses? After all, he described what he was doing as "critical philosophy", and more than one dumbass conservative commentator has on that basis accused Kant of being the founder of "critical theory" - which is as ignorant and ahistorical a claim as I can imagine. But will state officials care about any of that nuance? Or will they just can my ass for corrupting the young?
The post to which I was responding called for "tight management" of academia; my response is that "tight management" is antithetical to free inquiry.
Your bias is loud and clear, professor (if I may make an admittedly bold assumption); how do you propose to address the anti-Semitic (or DIE or CRT, et al) wave? Or is that a Legitimate Matter of "Academic Freedom?"
Actually, I agree that actual academia is inherently un-"manageable," or it ceases to be academic in any meaningful way. Unfortunately, here is far too much evidence that in too many instances, publicly displayed, it's being de facto, if not de jure, managed (or merely driven) in highly pernicious ways. Any internal resistance, beyond abandonment by those who would resist (ie, the OP) being nowhere in evidence, places external "management" quite firmly on the table. IMHO.
I am a professor, yes. The problem with the ideological influence of CRT and DEI and other grievance-driven ideologies has much to do with leverage, driven in large measure by social media, which puts faculty and administrators who are devoted to free inquiry on the back foot.
In my own state, there is an interesting dynamic between the ideological leverage from the left and the political leverage from the right, wielded through the state: it actually gives the upper-level administrators and faculty in leadership roles at my own institution some space to shore up the traditions of academic freedom and free expression on campus.
Even the diversity office here has been more prone to emphasize equality of opportunity and due diligence rather than equality of outcomes and favoritism.
I don't know how stable that balance is, but I have the sense that much depends on having a president and a provost (essentially the Chief Academic Officer) with some backbone and a clear-eyed commitment to the true mission of a university, and perhaps an alumni base not much given to ideological fads.
But I still sometimes feel like I'm walking a tightrope . . .
I've previously sensed -- perhaps erroneously -- a whiff of woke. In the present instance: A rather uncompromising "go away and leave us alone" stance, including an equally unflattering characterization of the ambient commentariat. Trotting out the Snopesian strictures on teaching evolution -- as far as I know, that's been pretty far out in the fringes for a long, long time. And selecting CRT as the vehicle for illustrating that which must be defended. However... I've already been somewhat reoriented by one of your later responses (that I wished I seen sooner)... bias is a human condition, one of which I'm certainly guilty. I'm surprised already. Pleasantly so.
The person that wants to teach CRT at a University that does not want that subject taught should leave and find an accommodating University. The employer has the upper hand here, not the employee.
I disagree that tight management is antithetical to free inquiry. I worked at a company for 35 years that was tightly managed but allowed free inquiry. If investments needed to be made in new ideas, that was allowed, provided there were guard rails and accountability.
There's also a nuance in what it means to "teach" something. I may teach students about CRT, which is not the same thing as indoctrinating them into CRT as an ideological commitment.
CRT is a theoretical framework that exists and has some influence. Students should probably be aware of it and be able to deliberate about its merits relative to other accounts of race and of civil rights, just to be informed citizens and, in some cases, responsible professionals.
But if I teach about CRT, in this sense, will state officials assume I'm indoctrinating my students and can my ass for corrupting the young? Who can say? Legislators and public officials are not always the brightest lights.
True story: Years ago, I met an alum of my institution, a member of the class of 1955. He intoned that, when he was a student, "certain faculty" were teaching "communistic ideas" . . . and he raised his eyebrow in an eloquent expression that said, "you're not doing that, now, are you?"
I informed him that just that week my students and I had read and discussed the Communist Manifesto in a course on political philosophy. He looked shocked, and I explained that my goal was not to convert my students to Marxism, but to give them an insight into the history of Western thought. You don't have to agree with Marx to notice that his ideas helped to shape the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so it's best to understand him, at least.
The alumnus seemed . . . unconvinced, and I was just glad he didn't have the power to drive me out of my (at the time not-yet-tenured) position.
Interesting story. Thank you. I am with you on the difference between teaching and indoctrination. Students do need to learn a lot of uneasy history. So where is indoctrination happening ? On social media ?
My favorite part of my job was teaching younger staff. It’s the part I miss the most in retirement. But my teaching was on the job, not in the class room.
I was dismayed and disgusted by the intellectual and moral rot universities displayed in mandating the Covid vaccines for students. These novel shots did not stop transmission—kind of an important point!—had zero liability, despite Pfizer having previously paid an over two-billion dollar fine for malfeasance, and of course there was no long term safety data. Students were known to be at an extremely low risk of death from Covid. Yet the professors were silent and complicit. No shot, no education—no problem! In many colleges, students studying remotely had to be vaccinated (Another sign of the great brains running our universities.) Even now some colleges maintain the Covid vaccine mandate while in many European countries the shot is not even offered for this age group, much less coerced. Professors and university administrators who tacitly supported this egregious violation of medical rights are not to be intellectually admired on any level. Uh, what’s the Latin word for coward?
Professors that did sound out about vaccinations were silenced by the government, the administrators, etc. There were a brave few who signed on the the Great Barrington manuscript and a few others who were end of career academics beyond reproach. This was the scariest part of the whole pandemic for me.
The impression I get is that the universities basically sold their whole student populations off as a market in exchange for some secret payment/enticement from pharma or government entities. There was no to little attempt to justify it medically beyond TV catch phrases. Indeed some universities had no mandate for professors and staff—older and statistically at much greater risk—but an ironclad mandate for students. I see no possible scientific justification for this.
Not so secret. Most universities have made themselves, at least partially, dependent on government grants. Fauci made it clear what he would fund and wouldn't and he has a history of denying funding to people/institutions that defy his narrative. This is well known within those who jobs depend on getting government grants. Same with pharma.......
I absolutely think this essay is great. He is cogent, sticks to his theme, and uses language beautifully. Not only that, but he's not speaking from some ivory tower of academia; he was thrown off that a few years ago... He genuinely seems to be practicing what he's preaching and knows the value of passion and wisdom, not academia pigeon-holed into so-called activism. He very briefly touches on something that bothered me in this sphere, and it's the necessity of publish, publish, publish... even when there's nothing to say. It floods fields of study with useless or repeated, often wrong or useless information. Not every academic endeavor needs to be or should be shared with the public; this is an artifact of the commercialization of academia. When profs have to rely so heavily on outside funding to secure their job, their academic freedom or academic integrity is usually at stake to some degree. Either they are swayed to produce results that align with the funders' wishes, or they feel pressure to publish drivel that adds to the noise of many published papers that say nothing or that say something wrong. The dramatic increase in admin staff, the ever-increasing need to provide students with unnecessary luxuries in order to lure them to their institution, and the subsequent inflation of college tuition to support this business model are not cohesive with academic freedom and learning about Homer and the Hittites.
I think we need to quit approaching college as a consumer and start approaching it as a student or apprentice again. I also think this logically means that not everybody should attend university; it should be reserved for the passionate, curious, and independent. It's not a rite of passage into adulthood, where you learn how to curb your alcohol intake; that's a very expensive way to learn how to make mistakes (guilty). It should be a bastion of academic learning (learning for learning's sake). I'm not sure how to reclaim this idea, but I think if we follow the money, that's a good start.
Anyone that has taught in the university understands we have matriculated too many marginal students/intellects. They generally end up in the education/social science/communication/business departments. Not that these disciplines aren't needed, they most certainly are, but giving people degrees that can't do math and can't construct paragraphs/read complex tracts is madness. I watched my own discipline, sociology/social psychology move from a quantitative orientation and hard core intellectual basis to a qualitative/social activist basis. This was done bit by bit by hiring practices and recruitment of students into the major (required by deans/administrators for department funding). I became the go to guy to teach statistics to social science and education majors in a mid tier public university because they were hiring women/qualitative researchers who had no interest or aptitude in statistics which were once the basis of sociological research. I was on a temporary line of employment while tenure tract was reserved for the others.
Thanks for sharing your experience, Dave, that's very interesting. (That word falls very flat, but I need some time to process exactly what I mean with that word. Perhaps, "telling" is more appropriate?)
This matriculation issue is present even in the hard sciences, where "retention" has become an idol, especially for DEI purposes in some schools. (Which is rather insulting and prejudiced, that DEI is the "solution" for "retention" issues.) I understand, appreciate, and empathize with some of these DEI initiatives in theory (and in practice sometimes), but like anything, they can run rampant over the purpose of college, which is subject mastery and rigorous education to prepare one for a career. (I also want to say that I don't think highlighting minority representation has "watered down" the curricula that I've experienced. It's not as direct as that... It's more of an entitlement/consumerist issue I think. I know it can happen, but it's more the "retention" issue for me, particularly when a STEM student graduates and can't perform in industry.)
I speak from an engineering background, where retention is indeed low and there are some very practical reasons for the need for diversity in the field. For me, it's when these groupings/representations become ultimate, academia suffers. It's sad to me that education is lumped into the group of students that are "marginal" intellectually. I feel like we need to correct this, but the solution should be mutli-faceted (education reform, better pay, more rigorous education, less centralized curricula industry, etc)
My experience comes from receiving my PhD from an elite institution known at that time (30 years ago) as the most radical sociology department in the country. Yet, there was a total open environment to study what you want, letting your intellectual curiosity lead you. Few classes, yet lots of units of study where you could study under a variety of professors from the Boston Collective (the top 7 universities in the Boston area). I took classes/audited classes from Professors at MIT/Harvard/Tufts along with my institution. I taught around the Boston area and then ended up in Florida finishing my dissertation and eventually on a non-tenure line at a middling university. Yet, I used The Communist Manifesto in my social theory class (along with Durkheim, Weber and even Marcuse). Found that few of my students could grapple with the original texts (except the Communist Manifesto) and ended up using other books demonstrating the same theories in easier to understand ways. I used books from the sociology of consciousness (along with others) in my introduction to sociology classes. No one said boo to me about what I was teaching even though it was some pretty radical stuff (not necessarily leftist radical). In my interdisciplinary social science classes I taught subjects like War and Peace and sociology/social psychology of work along with the aforementioned statistics. Frankly, genreally the students gave me great reviews and were much more engaged than in other professors classes. My classes were always oversubscribed. But, in all, I had to water down the discussion/reading from what I was use to in by Boston area classes. I still remember when my students wanted to discuss AIDS, I had them read a tract that talked about AIDS/HIV from a failure of government/science/homosexual practice perspective and one of the students wrote on the evaluations that he wanted to study AIDS but didn't expect or want to look at it from that (sociological) perspective. He gave me a bad evaluation, LOL. Point being, that they refused to give me an open tenure tract position, even though they saw how much work with the students I was doing in favor of a women using post-modern theory for her feminist research. The department head (a women) told me a couple years later after I had left for a private firm that her dean told her not to pick me for a finalist and to hire a woman working in feminist studies, which they did. I left and they made her teach the statistics class which she hated and had little background in. So that is my experience..............certainly wasn't alone with that critique of the academy back then either.
The problem with higher education is too many people. There’s too many students and too many teachers. There’s a bunch of mediocre intellects teaching classes and many more mediocre minds taking those classes. When you have functionally illiterate people graduating university, there’s a wee bit of a problem.
I would be more precise about "studies" majors, as the term can be used for interdisciplinary programs of serious merit, both in terms of academic rigor and in fostering professional development. I'm thinking of things like international studies, policy studies, and even environmental studies - if well structured with a hefty dose of the natural sciences and rigorous history.
Those are distinct from "grievance studies" programs like gender studies, which are often constituted along ideological lines.
It comes down to the debate which occasioned this article, concerning the 'telos' (the goal) of the university: is it the pursuit of truth, or the pursuit of justice? A program with "studies" in the name could go either way.
Given that the prefrontal cortex doesn't gel fully until the age of 25, there is some practical danger in allowing 18-22 year-olds to stew in perversity and self-destructive anti-Americanism for four years. And they're already primed for it by their teenage internet use, much of it supplied by foreign powers that wish us ill. Maybe Justice Scalia was wrong; perhaps the constitution really is a suicide pact. I admire the blue sky optimism of this piece, but I wonder if the rot is too deep for wishin' and hopin'.
When universities began in the late 1980s to openly attack rather than debate the concept that great men mold and shape history through the force of their character, the decline in civilization was instantaneous. Ideas and creativity are defiled by universities.
Anyone who has managed large groups in important enterprises knows the reality of leadership.
So obvious: Caesar, Christ, Einstein, Shakespeare. Benjamin Franklin & Thomas Edison & Graham Bell created the modern world with unprecedented inventions of business and form of government and electricity. Rockefeller and Carnegie's will power for industry transformed the planet. The vast majority of their critics are anklebiters, gnawing at some inconsequential cinder flung from the foundries of invention. Today, Musk is endlessly censured for displaying those same qualities and his critics too, are mere gnats.
When professor or university attacks or ridicules historical precepts that have been wildly successful for thousands of years, that culture is in jeopardy.
My 11 year old son is sitting next to me translating Greek texts for fun. He found my books and hasn’t been able to put them down.
He won’t be going to Yale, nor will he be governed by Yale or any of the rest of the inbred pipelines of power.
The time has come for a New Republic with new towers. This young man, and others like him, aren’t Tick Tok drones. They need a nation in which to thrive. The angry, thoughtless drones are a burden. Send the drones to the ivory towers. Let them learn the religion of the drones, seek their priorities, and pursue life through whimsical delusion. The rest of us want truth. We want peace. We want to thrive. We need a New Republic.
I’d love to know what you are considering for your son, for real. I have a daughter like him in 3rd grade, and can’t stomach the idea of sending her off to one of these school. So now what? Time is ticking…
I don’t know. I told him he doesn’t have to go to college. It’s possible to be a wise, knowledgeable, skilled human without sitting at the feet of self-important state employees.
His older brother is going to a small Christian college for two years to engage in the Liberal Arts in a place where questioning is encouraged and delusion enjoys its natural consequences. It’s the same school where I first learned to read old Greek. I’m engineering research faculty at Georgia Tech. Of my seven degrees (please discourage 7 degrees), including the PhD, the Liberal Arts Associates Degree from that school did more to shape my reasoning skills than any other, at a foundational time in my life. Those two years spent in engaging humanity, mostly in ancient contexts, with engaged professors and thinking, curious peers formed the foundation of every pursuit since. My only restriction for him, if he chose college at all, was to find a similar experience for his first two years. When we went looking for that experience for him, there weren’t very many options. He’s going to Florida College in Temple Terrace, FL. I don’t know what son #3, the little scholar, will do. He’ll have the same single constraint from me, if he chooses college.
That’s the longest, most pompous way to say “I have no idea.” Good luck. Your daughter is in good hands though. I’m sure whatever you do will be just right.
The points made are good, but the author himself left the university setting. It remains unclear how the universities can be rebuilt from within, if all the academics who value free thought and open inquiry have to leave to be able to safely speak out. Abandoning the ones that won't support open discourse sends a more impactful message, while simultaneously building new universities or strengthening those that aren't too far gone. Maybe that's the point he was trying to make. But ultimately he also abandoned academia, in the sense of leaving the university setting.
How can the universities be rebuilt from within if one cannot get hired into a position in faculty without convincing the hiring committee that you are "woke"?? One cannot qualify for such a position without publications, and if the journals are staffed by victims of the mind virus, one's submissions are rejected. I think a lot of academic talent ends up in other fields because people who do the hiring are looking for social justice activists, not scholars.
"Be brave" is not a solution to the structural problem of institutional capture. This argument here is that something good remains amidst the rot - and it is striking that this argument needs to be made - but Katz has no suggestion of how to cut out the rot while saving what is healthy. If this is the best argument for conserving universities, then I think the case is made that we do indeed need to burn down the ivory towers and start over.
Many thanks to the Free Press for publishing this! It’s bracing to read an account of what is still good in academia, and what can be done in its defense.
Back when only the brightest students were expected to go to college, it was almost guaranteed that they would easily find a good job upon graduation. But once going to college became the thing that *everyone* should do, the supply of the college-educated began to outpace the demand.
Now we have a system that completely ignores the issue of demand.
One thing that might have an impact on this problem is putting colleges on the hook for the tuition costs of any student whom they cannot place in a job upon graduation. If colleges had to worry about whether students were actually employable, they might start to recognize that admitting too many students into degree programs with minimal demand in the real world was a bad idea.
Correct. Meanwhile those of us who work in the trades earn. As an extended family we've kept the majority of our progeny out of so called higher education outside of specific courses taken for value and not for the purpose of obtaining a degree. The two that have become physicians are also rabid leftists. It is taking several holiday cycles to return them to reason. Hope springs eternal.
100% correct. Supply has greatly exceeded demand. But because our government provides loans to students, rather than the school, we have an entire generation saddled with debt and no skills. We do have very rich universities though. Always follow the money.
Humanities programs as such are not the problem and, if well structured and well staffed, may be part of the solution. In my own context - as a philosopher working in an interdisciplinary program - I am continually pushing for a return to an earlier way of conceiving of the liberal arts as, well, the arts of liberty: a rich education that can foster in students the capabilities of free people living in an open society.
If we're going to save democracy, we need citizens who can think their way out of a paper bag. And if you want doctors and engineers and scientists who are more than just efficient functionaries who can do math really well or who have memorized lists of technical terms for things, they need a wider perspective on what it means to be a professional and why it matters for professionals to be worthy of trust . . . which they may get, say, from a course in professional ethics or, I don't know, maybe even learning about Homer and the Hittites . . .
(You might be surprised how eager many engineering students are to read Aristotle, just to pick an example at random, or to have the opportunity to talk about what 'democracy' means.)
Administrative staff are a separate problem and, I think, much of the source of trouble in academia. Many who occupy offices in student affairs and diversity and the like come out of education programs which are not well known for their academic rigor. They are especially vulnerable to capture by the most trendy of ideologies.
If we could take back freshman orientation, we could do a lot of good!
I wouldn't generalize that way. Yes, there is a lot of nonsense, and much of it originated in the humanities. Currently fashionable gender theory was new on the scene when I was a graduate student in philosophy, for example, and I have watched it metastasize in the decades since.
But the spread of nonsense has not been uniform, and there is still lots of very good work being done at the core of the traditional disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. I tend to gravitate toward colleagues and programs in which the search for truth - rather than the nursing of grievances - is still the goal.
What I would like to see is a restoration of the liberal arts as a bulwark of an open society, and I'm not convinced we're all that far from such a restoration. It's a matter of countering the leverage now held by devotees of the Cult of True Victimhood, which gives them influence far greater than their actual strength.
The basic problem I see is that the crazies now outnumber the scholars among university faculty. And the students seem, for the most part, to be on the side of the crazies.
So it is really not enough for scholars to stand up for scholarship. Even if multiple scholars stand together, they can still be picked off one by one by cabals of students who are determined to see them punished for not joining the crazies.
Perhaps, in some departments, where scholars still hold the majority and sit in positions of power on hiring and tenure committees, it might be possible to make some headway: not hiring crazies and denying tenure to any who have been hired but don't yet have tenure. But in departments where crazies are the ones in power, the faculty will only get crazier with each new hire.
It seems to me that the only way to save universities is to create new ones or restructure old ones, dedicated from the top down to scholarship instead of craziness. How many university administrators have the will to stand up to the crazies?
I'm a college professor. Unfortunately Universities no longer hire for 'critical thinking' but instead emphasize DEI. Okay so now we have faculty who are identity radicals. This can't be fixed.
You are wrong. Students can vote with their feet. In general, males already are. Both by not matriculating and by choosing majors in STEM, Economics and Business. I think women will too eventually as they react against the trans. movement encroaching on them and end up Baristas, etc. Fortunately, many women are now choosing science and medicine where they will become productive citizens. DEI is already losing influence outside of academia. The trades (mostly males) are becoming more attractive with their generally good compensation and technical orientation. The pendulum is swinging back.............It will take a while. But eventually even academia will have to change its hiring practices to be more even handed.
I hope you are right!
We could start by reforming our student loan system, so that loans could be bankrupted without government guarantees for lenders. We would see lenders refuse to fund degrees in social justice and DEI, and redirect funding towards degrees that actually improve people's economic opportunities, and ability to pay back their loan promptly. This would fairly quickly dry the supply of students and funding to the academics departments most inclined to be grooming youngsters in this useless self indulgent anti American propaganda.
Agree!
It's not about numbers, but about leverage. If the crazies are in the student affairs office, or an office of diversity that answers directly to the president of the institution, that exerts more pressure than if they are adjunct faculty in a grievance studies program.
A big part of the problem we have now is that the crazies are on social media, and can do serious damage to the reputation of an institution in a matter of hours. This makes cowards of many upper-level administrators, who must prevent any reputational damage so that alumni keep contributing to the endowment and to the latest capital campaign.
The online crazies can also incite hatred against individual members of the faculty, who would really rather just be, you know, pursuing the truth than dealing with mobs and death threats and the like.
Agree. The donors and alumni who disagree with all this need to stop donating and funding institutions that don't protect free thought. And parents need to stop sending their 18yo to places where indoctrination rather than education take place. Money talks more than anything else. If the funding drops, the institutions will slowly change, but it takes time. They are like the Titanic, hard to turn quickly, but sure to sink if they stay on the current course.
I mentioned this in another post, but I can only imagine the shock and dismay of administrators at elite schools when wealthy donors rebelled in the wake of 10/7. And here they were thinking they just had to continue pandering the far left to keep their endowment secure!
The crazies are “educating” students in useless propaganda which has no long term social value and untethered from the real world beyond their tribe. This is the Achilles heal of crazy propaganda leading to a certain dead end
yes, its not sustainable but it can cause damage before it runs out.
This is the only way forward I see. Just by luck there will be departments or Faculties here and there that remain committed to scholarship. If those departments can resist student and administration pressure to go woke, it is possible that they might carve out a self-reinforcing reputation. In effect, we might see a stable two-tier market, with most students going to activists schools, but a few picking scholarly institutions. But I am not optimistic. It is not clear to me that there is a student demand for scholarship as opposed to feel good activism. I don't see any demand at all in the humanities, though there are likely more students who want to actually learn in applied schools, like law or engineering. But even there, the reputation feedback loop just isn't very strong. As elite institutions go downhill, it becomes very likely that there will be a few 2nd or 3rd tier institutions that resist wokeness and consequently offer a better legal education. But how long will it take for employers to realize that, and then for students to realize that employers realize? Too long, I think. So, I think a two-tier equilibrium is the best case outcome, but even that is optimistic.
There are a number of employers that have vowed not to hire "crazy" graduates from these elite institutions for multiple self-preservation reasons. I think employment pressure is even more potent than a donor strike. Overly entitled activists do not make good employees, and paying customers do not tolerate crazy behavior from their providers. Veting these people is very easy, so we may see some changes sooner than we expect as long as government institutions will not try to protect them like they do with student loan forgiveness and other manipulations.
They actually don't. The scholars are just being scaredy scholars waiting for yet another wave to pass over above and hoping they will not have been washed out to sea when this storm passes. Sort of perennial narcissistic wimps most scholars I am afraid.
Crazies or cowards (and does it matter?)? And...
When the crazies ARE the Administrators, hired to be Crazy (DIE, et al)?
Firstly let's found The University Of Whiteness. Yes, whiteness. Dedicated to the preservation, protection, promotion and praise of White civilization. For well over a century whitey has tried to pretend that he himself had almost nothing to do with his own civilization. Western Civilization just sorta happened and it might just as well have happened in New Guinea. (Wakanda was far more advanced of course, but then whitey destroyed it like he destroys everything.)
Whitey tried to make himself invisible in his own home because he wanted to invite and include the whole world to join him in this project called civilization. All were welcome and whitey would rather be invisible than upset a newcomer in any way. So whitey was no where to be found when the Long March began. At every advance, whitey thought that surrender was best, since otherwise some might not feel Valued.
Time to reverse that. Whitey is back! He knows that it was he who built civilization and he should no longer be afraid to say so. Let's have White Supremacy. Mind, this is, at it always has been, open to one and all, but they have to become White (irrespective of race).
"We could look at a map of the world and give credit to the nations/peoples that contributed to building civilization"
Absolutely. Nevertheless 90% of it has come from Whitey. It's not that we stop giving others credit, it's that we stop pretending that we had nothing to do with it. For a couple of hundred years we've just taken civilization for granted, that's got to stop.
Lookit, the U of W, is a sort of joke, isn't it? It's political satire. It's a counter punch to the idiots who say that being punctual, doing your assignments, studying for tests, and getting good grades by doing good work is 'whiteness'. It's mockery: "So you think that everything that makes civilization possible is White, do ya? Well then I'm a White Supremacist." Get it? It's fighting 'serious' Bullshit with joking bullshit. But ... it's time to stop mumbling. Civilization must be defended and that means that those who built it must come to it's aid. And that's Whitey.
It's in the spirit of Lenny Bruce's famous: "Are there any niggers in the room?" act. One most effectively ridicules something by either by confronting it head-on ... or by pretending to conform and letting the absurdity speak for itself. If civilization is White, then let's pretend to conform to wokeness and agree: "Ok then, civilization is White ... if YOU say so."
But as you say, the real goal is a return to MLK's goal: "... not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." Dangerous game tho, there are folks who would take the U of W literally. Mind ... we'd want to know who they are, so the U of W could also be taken as a sort of 'bait'.
"The basic problem I see is that the crazies now outnumber the scholars among university faculty." - source?
Administrators now outnumber actual scholars by a huge amount. There is the basis of the problem. The problem has never been actual academics, but in the administrators who oversee the hiring and the decisions on what to teach in every department. The only counter balance was government grants which until recently tended to favor actual science. In most sciences the funding is mostly for actual science, but in medicine the funding has been bending toward DEI issues instead or whatever the NIH/NAIAD/FDA narratives are. But this too has shown signs of relenting in the post COVID world.
Everything you say is true except admins don't outnumber faculty at Universities. They do in public primary/secondary schools in many cities, however. But they do occupy the admin roles that decide who is hired/fired/tenured/rewarded/punished. And that is leading us into a place from which salvation may not be possible for 30 years if we even tried. But who are the 'greater Angels' who would lead us there? And do have time to waste.
Our only lever is money. And we need to pull it away from the institutions that clearly hate us, our constitution, our values and our people. That will clarify minds like nothing else.
Personal observation.
The number of administration staff is high - but not the issue per se. It's that we've created havens for radicals, and empowered unaccountable administrations with massive amounts of money with no strings but to bow to political leaders and trends.
Central to the challenge is that many of the 'crazies' are on the faculty now. And that makes them almost impossible to dislodge - so we're stuck 'til they're dead or the institution goes belly up. Tenure was supposed to protect independent thinking - but now it protects the mono-thinking of radicals with permanent posts and sinecures.
Evidence is all around us in that 90% of US faculties are from one party - a party that embraces an alphabet soup of ever-evolving radical notions, in the 3.4 DEI officers per faculty member at US universities being able to destroy lives with a whisper, in the 'division' departments whose alums now dominate administrations (aka, womens/ethnic/peace/diversity/similar departments), in the political appointments to college and university president roles whose sole job is to raise money today - and not lead students and faculty, or preserve actual academic freedom.
It also shows up in the >50% of 'peer reviewed' studies with findings that cannot be replicated. It shows up in 'educated' people in positions of influence on campus claiming that math is racist and a reflection of 'white privilege'. It materializes when students are allowed to interfere with legitimate speakers on campus without consequence, join riots and destroy property while masked, threaten faculty who have strayed from the true faith of they day, and intimidate / threaten Jewish kids on campus. It's especially gauling when Jewish kids try to dodge blood libel by saying something pathetic like 'but I'm not from Israel'... like attacking Israeli kids is ok. It shows up in polls showing most college kids think speech is violence and that the 1st Amendment is dangerous. It materializes when foreign students are given charter to hate America and riot - and worse when through 'intersectional' and 'deconstruction' thinking is leading American kids to despise America and western ideas, too. It shows when Chinese dicatators (and mass murderers) get standing ovations on campuses and at public events, but anyone defending the Bill of Rights is an racist and oppressor.
If you know any retired faculty from these 'elite' schools, or even recent grads - ask them what they see. If they bought into the garbage, they will descend ito loud babble if questioned. If they didn't, they generally don't want to talk about it - or only in hushed tones.
It really stinks. Sadly, I just dropped $150k+ in tuition for my kids - and they caught the mind flu they teach there. I think I got the tougher education, to be honest. At least they will grow out of it because they have to work in the real world now. But too many kids won't as long as we're funding this treadmill into decay and demise.
Correction: 3.4 diversity officers per 100 faculty. My bad.
Beautifully written but lacking in substance. In essence this essay is college itself. If you can avoid being star struck by the eloquent language you’ll notice the lack of content.
One simple fact sets the whole thing on fire. The poison cannot be the cure.
To put this in context, there has been a debate in the (online) pages of some academic publications, but most especially the blog at Heterodox Academy, about the purpose (the 'telos', to use an academic-friendly Greek term!) of the university: is it the pursuit of truth, the pursuit of justice, or something else?
That's the level at which this is pitched, and I can tell you that many of us in academia are still devoted to the pursuit of truth, which requires engaging in free and fearless inquiry and following it wherever it leads . . . even if it leads someplace uncomfortable.
This commitment to free inquiry runs counter to the demands of the Cult of True Victimhood that a university should be a "safe space" that never exposes them to anything that makes them uncomfortable.
As to the "one simple fact" test, I would beg to differ. The claim that "academia is lost" - or, worse, that "academia is poison" - is extraordinary, and any good skeptic will tell you that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. If you take "one simple fact" as proof of a claim, that suggests you are already deeply, personally attached to belief in that claim, and no accumulation of facts will shake you from your conviction.
So the question is, why are you so attached to that belief? What comfort do you derive from believing that one of the core institutions of modern society is beyond saving?
I agree on seeking the truth (the mission) and that the Cult of True Victimhood runs counter to the mission. So why does this happen ? Why do University Administrators coddle those who seek safe spaces (other than pointing to the obvious, social media) ? Their parents obviously messed up in raising these kids. And I agree it is not the Universities job to raise these kids. Universities should assume a certain level of maturity and ability to deal with challenging situations. Sadly, not exposing these kids to reality just makes it worse for when they graduate. They are worthless in the marketplace in my opinion because they have no conflict resolution skills.
The village raised these kids. They all got trophies. Grades were negotiated. We were told by teachers and counselors and other parents that this was to engender positivity and feelings of self-worth in every child. It appears to have failed.
It eliminated self-doubt. While self-doubt can be painful., It also motivates and more importantly, engenders humility. These kids have no humility; and no doubt that they are absolutely right.
I think that is very true for some, maybe most. But they are not happy. We may be faced with an entire generation of lost males. In the past that only occurred in conjunction with war. But now the suicide rate is pretty high and they are abandoning the idea of work. I spent my professional life telling young people to find something, anything, they are good at and do it. Because it builds confidence and pla ting that seed is the hardest step.
I agree.
The next obvious step would be to hold those who failed accountable.
But this is the United States, we don’t do that.
A return to accountability would go a long way to remedying what ails us IMO.
No consequences yields incredible risk.
It’s a recipe for disaster.
I hear you and yet: The First Point was the Reported Joy of Basking in the Sunshine of a motivated teacher. I value far more highly the tossing of the baby (classics and why they're classical) out with the bathwater.
Bob - You're comment is spot on. But, you are rolling a stone up the hill. You introduce nuance to the conversation and most of the FP commenters won't know what to do with it because their worldwide is static, impenetrable to new (or nuanced) observation.
I've been mixing it up in the comments section for a while, now, and know the lay of the land. While there are certainly some commenters who are, let's say, resistant to nuance, there are many who are perfectly happy to consider other perspectives on the issue at hand.
If defending what is good in academia is a Sisyphean task, well, my doctor says I need more resistance training . . .
Speak for yourself.
Yes, I agree. Strangely lacking in substance. Nothing so dramatic as burning them down is needed. A spot of serious defunding might do for a start.
How do you defund a private institution? While your comment might look good on the comment page of TFP, it it useless for working towards a real, possible solution.
Donor rebellion would be one way to go. It's already been happening over Israel.
You are very snide. Private institutions have to be funded too.
Agree. This essay is very ivory tower idealistic. Like some call to rise to supposed sane professors and academics. The rhetorics are useless when:
(1) university administrators realized somewhere along the line that they can grift guaranteed federal student loans and raise tuitions to the stratosphere. Consequently students are no longer scholars, but customers. When academics became a business, the customers are always right and they now have to bow to the idiotic young morons demanding "justice".
(2) The field of academics is highly political--and that's not even getting into politics political, I'm talking just about office politics. Awards of tenureship are often not based on merits, but how much the elite clique in your department thinks you're one of them and lets you in. This process has turned truly political and conservative thinkers have been weeded out entirely. So how does she expect the "sane" academics to rise under this system?
Maybe there are some ways to salvage these institutions. But it'll have to be something much more practical and not this idealistic call to arms she espoused in this essay.
As a tenured, full professor I have been speaking up. I am tired of others “thanking me for my boldness” as they say nothing. We need to address the creep of illiberal, intolerant and anti-intellectual ideas from the administration, curriculum, research conferences and journals focused on social justice’s justice across disciplines, disproportionate to actual discipline-specific research and teaching.
Well said.
Structurally, how can we as a society counter this ?
The suggested solution is not workable. Asking professors to “police” themselves, to be brave, etc… given what has transpired over the past two decades is a fools errand. I say burn down just enough of these schools in order to eliminate the excess degrees that cannot be absorbed by the marketplace. I appreciate that academia needs bench strength to experiment and explore. And that’s fine. But this investment needs to be more tightly managed and not hoisted and the backs of graduates whose earnings potential cannot absorb “experimentation.”
Universities are founded on a principle of faculty self-governance, in much the same way other professions (e.g., engineering) police themselves through professional societies. The idea is that it takes people with expertise in a field to assess the merits of the work of someone in that field and, for the most part, the system can work pretty well.
I would note that an increasingly managerial mindset toward academia is part of the problem, as it makes the work of faculty more and more subject to pressure from administrators and, in the case of public universities, to outside authorities.
If administrative offices are captured by the Cult of True Victimhood, then faculty had best watch what they say, and make sure their erstwhile free inquiry does not ruffle the feathers of the True Victims.
If it's a public university in a more conservative state, legislators and trustees might over-react and start to put pressure on faculty in the other direction, making it extremely dangerous even to raise certain questions, even in the interest of free inquiry concerning important issues of practice and policy . . . or even scientific fact.
Remember when there was intense conservative pressure against teaching evolution? I do, and it often felt exceedingly daring even to mention Darwin in class!
Free inquiry withers in the face of those kinds of administrative pressure.
Having difficulty separating this response from that to which it is a response -- other than having far more words, and throwing in (free of charge!) an anti-"conservative" shibboleth.
So, suppose you work at a public university in a certain state in the Southeast, and the state government has made it clear that you are not to teach "critical race theory." Suppose you are teaching a course that necessarily touches on matters of race. What do you do? Should you avoid talking about race at all?
If I lived and worked in that state, should I avoid teaching the work of Kant in my philosophy courses? After all, he described what he was doing as "critical philosophy", and more than one dumbass conservative commentator has on that basis accused Kant of being the founder of "critical theory" - which is as ignorant and ahistorical a claim as I can imagine. But will state officials care about any of that nuance? Or will they just can my ass for corrupting the young?
The post to which I was responding called for "tight management" of academia; my response is that "tight management" is antithetical to free inquiry.
Your bias is loud and clear, professor (if I may make an admittedly bold assumption); how do you propose to address the anti-Semitic (or DIE or CRT, et al) wave? Or is that a Legitimate Matter of "Academic Freedom?"
Actually, I agree that actual academia is inherently un-"manageable," or it ceases to be academic in any meaningful way. Unfortunately, here is far too much evidence that in too many instances, publicly displayed, it's being de facto, if not de jure, managed (or merely driven) in highly pernicious ways. Any internal resistance, beyond abandonment by those who would resist (ie, the OP) being nowhere in evidence, places external "management" quite firmly on the table. IMHO.
I am a professor, yes. The problem with the ideological influence of CRT and DEI and other grievance-driven ideologies has much to do with leverage, driven in large measure by social media, which puts faculty and administrators who are devoted to free inquiry on the back foot.
In my own state, there is an interesting dynamic between the ideological leverage from the left and the political leverage from the right, wielded through the state: it actually gives the upper-level administrators and faculty in leadership roles at my own institution some space to shore up the traditions of academic freedom and free expression on campus.
Even the diversity office here has been more prone to emphasize equality of opportunity and due diligence rather than equality of outcomes and favoritism.
I don't know how stable that balance is, but I have the sense that much depends on having a president and a provost (essentially the Chief Academic Officer) with some backbone and a clear-eyed commitment to the true mission of a university, and perhaps an alumni base not much given to ideological fads.
But I still sometimes feel like I'm walking a tightrope . . .
Be a Blondin... and be well.
Also, is my “bias” really “clear”? I’m curious to know what you think my biases are, based on what I’ve posted here. I may surprise you.
I've previously sensed -- perhaps erroneously -- a whiff of woke. In the present instance: A rather uncompromising "go away and leave us alone" stance, including an equally unflattering characterization of the ambient commentariat. Trotting out the Snopesian strictures on teaching evolution -- as far as I know, that's been pretty far out in the fringes for a long, long time. And selecting CRT as the vehicle for illustrating that which must be defended. However... I've already been somewhat reoriented by one of your later responses (that I wished I seen sooner)... bias is a human condition, one of which I'm certainly guilty. I'm surprised already. Pleasantly so.
The person that wants to teach CRT at a University that does not want that subject taught should leave and find an accommodating University. The employer has the upper hand here, not the employee.
I disagree that tight management is antithetical to free inquiry. I worked at a company for 35 years that was tightly managed but allowed free inquiry. If investments needed to be made in new ideas, that was allowed, provided there were guard rails and accountability.
There's also a nuance in what it means to "teach" something. I may teach students about CRT, which is not the same thing as indoctrinating them into CRT as an ideological commitment.
CRT is a theoretical framework that exists and has some influence. Students should probably be aware of it and be able to deliberate about its merits relative to other accounts of race and of civil rights, just to be informed citizens and, in some cases, responsible professionals.
But if I teach about CRT, in this sense, will state officials assume I'm indoctrinating my students and can my ass for corrupting the young? Who can say? Legislators and public officials are not always the brightest lights.
True story: Years ago, I met an alum of my institution, a member of the class of 1955. He intoned that, when he was a student, "certain faculty" were teaching "communistic ideas" . . . and he raised his eyebrow in an eloquent expression that said, "you're not doing that, now, are you?"
I informed him that just that week my students and I had read and discussed the Communist Manifesto in a course on political philosophy. He looked shocked, and I explained that my goal was not to convert my students to Marxism, but to give them an insight into the history of Western thought. You don't have to agree with Marx to notice that his ideas helped to shape the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so it's best to understand him, at least.
The alumnus seemed . . . unconvinced, and I was just glad he didn't have the power to drive me out of my (at the time not-yet-tenured) position.
Interesting story. Thank you. I am with you on the difference between teaching and indoctrination. Students do need to learn a lot of uneasy history. So where is indoctrination happening ? On social media ?
My favorite part of my job was teaching younger staff. It’s the part I miss the most in retirement. But my teaching was on the job, not in the class room.
Great perspective from deep from within.
Thank you.
BZZZZT. Not a real solution or an attempt at one. Please try again.
Or try “bazinga”.
I was dismayed and disgusted by the intellectual and moral rot universities displayed in mandating the Covid vaccines for students. These novel shots did not stop transmission—kind of an important point!—had zero liability, despite Pfizer having previously paid an over two-billion dollar fine for malfeasance, and of course there was no long term safety data. Students were known to be at an extremely low risk of death from Covid. Yet the professors were silent and complicit. No shot, no education—no problem! In many colleges, students studying remotely had to be vaccinated (Another sign of the great brains running our universities.) Even now some colleges maintain the Covid vaccine mandate while in many European countries the shot is not even offered for this age group, much less coerced. Professors and university administrators who tacitly supported this egregious violation of medical rights are not to be intellectually admired on any level. Uh, what’s the Latin word for coward?
Professors that did sound out about vaccinations were silenced by the government, the administrators, etc. There were a brave few who signed on the the Great Barrington manuscript and a few others who were end of career academics beyond reproach. This was the scariest part of the whole pandemic for me.
The impression I get is that the universities basically sold their whole student populations off as a market in exchange for some secret payment/enticement from pharma or government entities. There was no to little attempt to justify it medically beyond TV catch phrases. Indeed some universities had no mandate for professors and staff—older and statistically at much greater risk—but an ironclad mandate for students. I see no possible scientific justification for this.
Not so secret. Most universities have made themselves, at least partially, dependent on government grants. Fauci made it clear what he would fund and wouldn't and he has a history of denying funding to people/institutions that defy his narrative. This is well known within those who jobs depend on getting government grants. Same with pharma.......
I absolutely think this essay is great. He is cogent, sticks to his theme, and uses language beautifully. Not only that, but he's not speaking from some ivory tower of academia; he was thrown off that a few years ago... He genuinely seems to be practicing what he's preaching and knows the value of passion and wisdom, not academia pigeon-holed into so-called activism. He very briefly touches on something that bothered me in this sphere, and it's the necessity of publish, publish, publish... even when there's nothing to say. It floods fields of study with useless or repeated, often wrong or useless information. Not every academic endeavor needs to be or should be shared with the public; this is an artifact of the commercialization of academia. When profs have to rely so heavily on outside funding to secure their job, their academic freedom or academic integrity is usually at stake to some degree. Either they are swayed to produce results that align with the funders' wishes, or they feel pressure to publish drivel that adds to the noise of many published papers that say nothing or that say something wrong. The dramatic increase in admin staff, the ever-increasing need to provide students with unnecessary luxuries in order to lure them to their institution, and the subsequent inflation of college tuition to support this business model are not cohesive with academic freedom and learning about Homer and the Hittites.
I think we need to quit approaching college as a consumer and start approaching it as a student or apprentice again. I also think this logically means that not everybody should attend university; it should be reserved for the passionate, curious, and independent. It's not a rite of passage into adulthood, where you learn how to curb your alcohol intake; that's a very expensive way to learn how to make mistakes (guilty). It should be a bastion of academic learning (learning for learning's sake). I'm not sure how to reclaim this idea, but I think if we follow the money, that's a good start.
Anyone that has taught in the university understands we have matriculated too many marginal students/intellects. They generally end up in the education/social science/communication/business departments. Not that these disciplines aren't needed, they most certainly are, but giving people degrees that can't do math and can't construct paragraphs/read complex tracts is madness. I watched my own discipline, sociology/social psychology move from a quantitative orientation and hard core intellectual basis to a qualitative/social activist basis. This was done bit by bit by hiring practices and recruitment of students into the major (required by deans/administrators for department funding). I became the go to guy to teach statistics to social science and education majors in a mid tier public university because they were hiring women/qualitative researchers who had no interest or aptitude in statistics which were once the basis of sociological research. I was on a temporary line of employment while tenure tract was reserved for the others.
Thanks for sharing your experience, Dave, that's very interesting. (That word falls very flat, but I need some time to process exactly what I mean with that word. Perhaps, "telling" is more appropriate?)
This matriculation issue is present even in the hard sciences, where "retention" has become an idol, especially for DEI purposes in some schools. (Which is rather insulting and prejudiced, that DEI is the "solution" for "retention" issues.) I understand, appreciate, and empathize with some of these DEI initiatives in theory (and in practice sometimes), but like anything, they can run rampant over the purpose of college, which is subject mastery and rigorous education to prepare one for a career. (I also want to say that I don't think highlighting minority representation has "watered down" the curricula that I've experienced. It's not as direct as that... It's more of an entitlement/consumerist issue I think. I know it can happen, but it's more the "retention" issue for me, particularly when a STEM student graduates and can't perform in industry.)
I speak from an engineering background, where retention is indeed low and there are some very practical reasons for the need for diversity in the field. For me, it's when these groupings/representations become ultimate, academia suffers. It's sad to me that education is lumped into the group of students that are "marginal" intellectually. I feel like we need to correct this, but the solution should be mutli-faceted (education reform, better pay, more rigorous education, less centralized curricula industry, etc)
My experience comes from receiving my PhD from an elite institution known at that time (30 years ago) as the most radical sociology department in the country. Yet, there was a total open environment to study what you want, letting your intellectual curiosity lead you. Few classes, yet lots of units of study where you could study under a variety of professors from the Boston Collective (the top 7 universities in the Boston area). I took classes/audited classes from Professors at MIT/Harvard/Tufts along with my institution. I taught around the Boston area and then ended up in Florida finishing my dissertation and eventually on a non-tenure line at a middling university. Yet, I used The Communist Manifesto in my social theory class (along with Durkheim, Weber and even Marcuse). Found that few of my students could grapple with the original texts (except the Communist Manifesto) and ended up using other books demonstrating the same theories in easier to understand ways. I used books from the sociology of consciousness (along with others) in my introduction to sociology classes. No one said boo to me about what I was teaching even though it was some pretty radical stuff (not necessarily leftist radical). In my interdisciplinary social science classes I taught subjects like War and Peace and sociology/social psychology of work along with the aforementioned statistics. Frankly, genreally the students gave me great reviews and were much more engaged than in other professors classes. My classes were always oversubscribed. But, in all, I had to water down the discussion/reading from what I was use to in by Boston area classes. I still remember when my students wanted to discuss AIDS, I had them read a tract that talked about AIDS/HIV from a failure of government/science/homosexual practice perspective and one of the students wrote on the evaluations that he wanted to study AIDS but didn't expect or want to look at it from that (sociological) perspective. He gave me a bad evaluation, LOL. Point being, that they refused to give me an open tenure tract position, even though they saw how much work with the students I was doing in favor of a women using post-modern theory for her feminist research. The department head (a women) told me a couple years later after I had left for a private firm that her dean told her not to pick me for a finalist and to hire a woman working in feminist studies, which they did. I left and they made her teach the statistics class which she hated and had little background in. So that is my experience..............certainly wasn't alone with that critique of the academy back then either.
The problem with higher education is too many people. There’s too many students and too many teachers. There’s a bunch of mediocre intellects teaching classes and many more mediocre minds taking those classes. When you have functionally illiterate people graduating university, there’s a wee bit of a problem.
Tax the endowments. No student loans for “studies” majors. Eliminate DEI. Then we can talk about not taking a wrecking ball to the ivy towers.
I would be more precise about "studies" majors, as the term can be used for interdisciplinary programs of serious merit, both in terms of academic rigor and in fostering professional development. I'm thinking of things like international studies, policy studies, and even environmental studies - if well structured with a hefty dose of the natural sciences and rigorous history.
Those are distinct from "grievance studies" programs like gender studies, which are often constituted along ideological lines.
It comes down to the debate which occasioned this article, concerning the 'telos' (the goal) of the university: is it the pursuit of truth, or the pursuit of justice? A program with "studies" in the name could go either way.
Maureen, sorry about liking your comments so often!
Given that the prefrontal cortex doesn't gel fully until the age of 25, there is some practical danger in allowing 18-22 year-olds to stew in perversity and self-destructive anti-Americanism for four years. And they're already primed for it by their teenage internet use, much of it supplied by foreign powers that wish us ill. Maybe Justice Scalia was wrong; perhaps the constitution really is a suicide pact. I admire the blue sky optimism of this piece, but I wonder if the rot is too deep for wishin' and hopin'.
When universities began in the late 1980s to openly attack rather than debate the concept that great men mold and shape history through the force of their character, the decline in civilization was instantaneous. Ideas and creativity are defiled by universities.
Anyone who has managed large groups in important enterprises knows the reality of leadership.
So obvious: Caesar, Christ, Einstein, Shakespeare. Benjamin Franklin & Thomas Edison & Graham Bell created the modern world with unprecedented inventions of business and form of government and electricity. Rockefeller and Carnegie's will power for industry transformed the planet. The vast majority of their critics are anklebiters, gnawing at some inconsequential cinder flung from the foundries of invention. Today, Musk is endlessly censured for displaying those same qualities and his critics too, are mere gnats.
When professor or university attacks or ridicules historical precepts that have been wildly successful for thousands of years, that culture is in jeopardy.
Only the trustees have the power to effect positive change. Do they have the courage it takes? Here is my open letter to them: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-get-into-harvard-open-letter-to-trustees
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 Those really are the only three choices
My 11 year old son is sitting next to me translating Greek texts for fun. He found my books and hasn’t been able to put them down.
He won’t be going to Yale, nor will he be governed by Yale or any of the rest of the inbred pipelines of power.
The time has come for a New Republic with new towers. This young man, and others like him, aren’t Tick Tok drones. They need a nation in which to thrive. The angry, thoughtless drones are a burden. Send the drones to the ivory towers. Let them learn the religion of the drones, seek their priorities, and pursue life through whimsical delusion. The rest of us want truth. We want peace. We want to thrive. We need a New Republic.
I’d love to know what you are considering for your son, for real. I have a daughter like him in 3rd grade, and can’t stomach the idea of sending her off to one of these school. So now what? Time is ticking…
I don’t know. I told him he doesn’t have to go to college. It’s possible to be a wise, knowledgeable, skilled human without sitting at the feet of self-important state employees.
His older brother is going to a small Christian college for two years to engage in the Liberal Arts in a place where questioning is encouraged and delusion enjoys its natural consequences. It’s the same school where I first learned to read old Greek. I’m engineering research faculty at Georgia Tech. Of my seven degrees (please discourage 7 degrees), including the PhD, the Liberal Arts Associates Degree from that school did more to shape my reasoning skills than any other, at a foundational time in my life. Those two years spent in engaging humanity, mostly in ancient contexts, with engaged professors and thinking, curious peers formed the foundation of every pursuit since. My only restriction for him, if he chose college at all, was to find a similar experience for his first two years. When we went looking for that experience for him, there weren’t very many options. He’s going to Florida College in Temple Terrace, FL. I don’t know what son #3, the little scholar, will do. He’ll have the same single constraint from me, if he chooses college.
That’s the longest, most pompous way to say “I have no idea.” Good luck. Your daughter is in good hands though. I’m sure whatever you do will be just right.
The points made are good, but the author himself left the university setting. It remains unclear how the universities can be rebuilt from within, if all the academics who value free thought and open inquiry have to leave to be able to safely speak out. Abandoning the ones that won't support open discourse sends a more impactful message, while simultaneously building new universities or strengthening those that aren't too far gone. Maybe that's the point he was trying to make. But ultimately he also abandoned academia, in the sense of leaving the university setting.
How can the universities be rebuilt from within if one cannot get hired into a position in faculty without convincing the hiring committee that you are "woke"?? One cannot qualify for such a position without publications, and if the journals are staffed by victims of the mind virus, one's submissions are rejected. I think a lot of academic talent ends up in other fields because people who do the hiring are looking for social justice activists, not scholars.
"Be brave" is not a solution to the structural problem of institutional capture. This argument here is that something good remains amidst the rot - and it is striking that this argument needs to be made - but Katz has no suggestion of how to cut out the rot while saving what is healthy. If this is the best argument for conserving universities, then I think the case is made that we do indeed need to burn down the ivory towers and start over.
BZZZZT. Not a real solution or an attempt at one. Please try again.
Many thanks to the Free Press for publishing this! It’s bracing to read an account of what is still good in academia, and what can be done in its defense.
Yes, don’t burn it all down, it needs to be selective.
I read a while back that the typical USA university used to have less than 0.2 staff per student but is now over 0.7 in some cases?
That seems like the entire problem. DEI, humanities programs and too many overseers/comisars.
It seems like countries only need 1-2 social justice grads per year.
I’d suggest severely curtailing funds for soft courses, let Soros fund those out of his own pocket.
Instead all public funds, and allow directed donations, all go only to STEM. Useful studies.
Stem is suffering because it’s hard, soft “sciences” are all about feelings.
Back when only the brightest students were expected to go to college, it was almost guaranteed that they would easily find a good job upon graduation. But once going to college became the thing that *everyone* should do, the supply of the college-educated began to outpace the demand.
Now we have a system that completely ignores the issue of demand.
One thing that might have an impact on this problem is putting colleges on the hook for the tuition costs of any student whom they cannot place in a job upon graduation. If colleges had to worry about whether students were actually employable, they might start to recognize that admitting too many students into degree programs with minimal demand in the real world was a bad idea.
Correct. Meanwhile those of us who work in the trades earn. As an extended family we've kept the majority of our progeny out of so called higher education outside of specific courses taken for value and not for the purpose of obtaining a degree. The two that have become physicians are also rabid leftists. It is taking several holiday cycles to return them to reason. Hope springs eternal.
I think that you should be documenting those "holiday cycles" during which the straying are, un, redirected?
100% correct. Supply has greatly exceeded demand. But because our government provides loans to students, rather than the school, we have an entire generation saddled with debt and no skills. We do have very rich universities though. Always follow the money.
Humanities programs as such are not the problem and, if well structured and well staffed, may be part of the solution. In my own context - as a philosopher working in an interdisciplinary program - I am continually pushing for a return to an earlier way of conceiving of the liberal arts as, well, the arts of liberty: a rich education that can foster in students the capabilities of free people living in an open society.
If we're going to save democracy, we need citizens who can think their way out of a paper bag. And if you want doctors and engineers and scientists who are more than just efficient functionaries who can do math really well or who have memorized lists of technical terms for things, they need a wider perspective on what it means to be a professional and why it matters for professionals to be worthy of trust . . . which they may get, say, from a course in professional ethics or, I don't know, maybe even learning about Homer and the Hittites . . .
(You might be surprised how eager many engineering students are to read Aristotle, just to pick an example at random, or to have the opportunity to talk about what 'democracy' means.)
Administrative staff are a separate problem and, I think, much of the source of trouble in academia. Many who occupy offices in student affairs and diversity and the like come out of education programs which are not well known for their academic rigor. They are especially vulnerable to capture by the most trendy of ideologies.
If we could take back freshman orientation, we could do a lot of good!
I see your point. Humanities as they used to be certainly had value. At the moment they are hijacked with endless nonsense.
I wouldn't generalize that way. Yes, there is a lot of nonsense, and much of it originated in the humanities. Currently fashionable gender theory was new on the scene when I was a graduate student in philosophy, for example, and I have watched it metastasize in the decades since.
But the spread of nonsense has not been uniform, and there is still lots of very good work being done at the core of the traditional disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. I tend to gravitate toward colleagues and programs in which the search for truth - rather than the nursing of grievances - is still the goal.
What I would like to see is a restoration of the liberal arts as a bulwark of an open society, and I'm not convinced we're all that far from such a restoration. It's a matter of countering the leverage now held by devotees of the Cult of True Victimhood, which gives them influence far greater than their actual strength.