Bait and switch at the academy

Public higher ed in the U.S. is nearly as old as the country itself. But taxpayers expect an education rooted in American values and a cure for cancer, not DEI, administrative bloat, and socialism.

Yesterday, a headline of interest came across my newsfeed concerning a university at which I spent nearly a quarter of a century: “Audit finds Idaho State University likely misused state funds for defunct pathology center.”

Say it ain’t so.

I know that unforced malfeasance is a tough pill to swallow for the everything-that’s-wrong-with-liberal-institutions-is-a-conservative-fever-dream crowd, but it certainly appears that administrators at ISU concocted an arrangement to improperly use most of $900,000 obtained from the state of Idaho for the purpose of creating a local forensic pathology facility. The problem with ISU spending the $900k is that there is no forensic pathology facility. The project was canceled amidst controversy.

Once the lab was nixed, ISU decided to spend the money elsewhere to avoid having any left if someone came along later looking for it. A spokesperson for the university, while acknowledging the seriousness of the situation, responded with the usual caught-red-handed pablum: We worked in good faith on the project right up until it was canceled.

At this, I laughed aloud. During my career, I attended many university meetings convened for the sole purpose of scheming ways to ensure that there was no such thing as unspent money. Allowing accounts with a positive balance to expire at the end of a funding cycle was considered a cardinal sin. You used any means that you thought you could get away with to make sure that not a dime in any budget line ever reverted to state or federal coffers—no matter the original intent.

The first time I suggested that it might be simpler if we just returned the leftover funds from a grant for which I was the Principal Investigator (PI), complete silence befell a room full of people not typically known for an overabundance of reticence. Every pair of eyes in the room fixed on me as if I’d pooped on the table. Later, a little concerned about fratricide, I sought advice from the federal grant administrator (it was a lot of money). When I called the office in DC, they acted as if we had a poor telephone connection and suggested that I call back no sooner than a decade after the fiscal year in which the grant expired.

This is fundamentally the opposite of acting in good faith, but it accurately reflects how the entire public higher education ecosphere operates. I’m sure that ISU expected no pushback over misappropriating nearly a million bucks because they do it all the time and get away with it. This time, when an independent watchdog group FOIA'd some documents, things went sideways. You know, $900k here and $900k there—pretty soon you’re talking about real money.

The contrast between what the public expects of higher education and what they get is quite stark. When taxpayers support public universities in the United States, I’m reasonably sure that they think they are supporting upward mobility for their children, comprehensive exposure to classical ideals, a deep dive into American values and exceptionalism, moral virtue, a search for excellence, some exposure to the vast repository of knowledge that human beings have accumulated over the past few millennia, and perhaps a cure for cancer. What they actually are supporting is DEI, administrative bloat, poorly paid adjuncts, a swath of expensive programs and facilities that have little to do with core missions of education and research, inculcation into socialism, moral turpitude, student debt, and degrees conferred without having met much in the way of requirements for rigor.

It’s a classic bait and switch. And it comes with a tab equal to that of a starter home but with terms no competent fiduciary would allow anyone to accept.

But the times they are a-changing. Like NPR (which is tied at the hip to higher ed through college radio stations), the free ride at taxpayers’ expense may be coming to an end. Right now, public support for higher education in the U.S. is on life support. Just like NPR, it’s an entirely self-inflicted wound. We’ll just have to see if both institutions fall the same way.

As a former academic, am I distraught over this? A little. But it was impossible not to see any of this coming without a lot of willful ignorance. Part of me wouldn’t mind seeing the clueless academic frauds and administrative tyrants who doomed the academy with idiotic policies and egos massive enough to serve as their own source of gravity get their comeuppance. If I ever find that my favorite provost finally smoothed out the wrinkles in their karma by greeting shoppers at Walmart, it would make my day.

The only thing more stunning than the arrogance of many activists who’ve diminished genuine scholarship by masquerading as academics is the impenetrable nature of the Dunning-Kruger bubble that surrounds them. I’m talking about people with advanced degrees and credentials out the whazoo who genuinely and absolutely have no clue. It’s breathtaking to experience up close.

But another part of me recognizes that it’s a lot easier to burn institutions down than building them was in the first place. Public higher education is what we created to pursue fearless freedom of inquiry and the search for evidence-based truth. The only qualifications for academic arguments are supposed to be that they are coherent and supported by evidence. That’s how we move things forward. It’s a wonderful system when it works.

Notice that I left out practical. As useless as I think some of the things that I’ve encountered in my career as an academic happen to be—pseudoscience, DEI, postmodernism, politicized academics, and really questionable scholarship—I was never for banning any of it. I wanted to argue against it. As long as the system isn’t rigged, sunshine is the best disinfectant. You bring your goods, I’ll bring mine, and we’ll hash it out.

I don’t even want to ban something as toxic as DEI; I want people to be free to call it out for what it is without retribution. If ideas are allowed to compete without restraint or coercion, things tend to sort themselves out properly.

College campuses should be incubators for this process. The problem is that they are not. This represents a betrayal of the original purpose for which we established public higher education. And now that the word is out, I predict hard times ahead.

Support for public higher education in the United States is nearly as old as the country itself. The original impetus came from a sense that exposure to the classic disciplines was important for the citizenry in our fledgling democratic republic. The first public university in the U.S., the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was founded in 1789. Construction began in 1793, and the first class was admitted in 1795. Upon graduating its first class in 1798, UNC became the first public institution in the United States to award degrees and the only one in the 18th century. Other institutions rapidly followed.

The early rationale for public funding in higher education included producing a well-informed citizenry, training future professionals, and bootstrapping ourselves to the forefront of science, engineering, law, business, medicine, and government. It worked well for a very long time.

But the goal of producing productive, employable, well-informed citizen-scholars capable of advancing our nation is simply incompatible with much recent academic orthodoxy. An example of this is an idea based in progressive pseudoscience (and until recently backed by the force of federal policy) that insists “birthing persons” should have no objection to competing in sports with biological men who “identify” as women (or face sanctions). I don’t think this is what Mom and Dad have in mind when they help little Suzie fill out all of those applications the year before she goes off to college.

There’s more. I doubt the public is comfortable with the common practice of matriculating science, medical, engineering or other professional students with alternative coursework if they express anxiety about the subjects they intend to pursue as careers. I doubt that there’s a broad appetite, even just a few blocks from the ivory tower, for replacing scientific rationalism with “ways of knowing”—especially among those waiting for a cure for some disease. I’m fairly sure that most everyone depending on the professional class for medical care and life-sustaining tech finds the idea of granting credentials based on factors apart from merit confusing. Most people couldn’t care less about achieving equity in engineering. What they do care about is that the bridge they are about to drive over isn’t going to collapse. And I’m certain that the average taxpayer is not down with using their money to create safe spaces for people who identify as cats.

The betrayal of the public by higher education runs deep. A disturbing amount of what passes for scholarship these days is bullshit. This is increasingly true even in the physical sciences, and it’s the reason that academic research is mired in a reproducibility crisis.

A lot of what passes for scholarly research anymore is thinly veiled activism. It's shoddy by design, as the truth might be inconvenient. Even when this isn’t the case, scholarly journals are filled with academic work that is later revealed to have been poorly done or fraudulent by well-credentialed researchers.

Some entire academic fields are corrupt from instruction and research to peer review and professional oversight. To correct what’s gone wrong with higher education, we are going to have to start with the difficult task of confronting poor scholarship and activism disguised as research. There isn’t enough shame in the world to make these people go away on their own. They’ll have to be shown the door. This won’t prove easy.

It wasn’t always this way. At one time, professors were proud of their area of expertise and demanded a lot from students who wanted to enter the field. It was called keeping standards high.

Whining about rigor was, shall we say, not rewarded. There was no such excuse as test anxiety for more time on an exam. There was no such thing as a minimum grade for merely allowing others to bask in the radiance of your mere presence (at least not one above failure). There were no safe spaces.

But you had a lot of help in other ways. A professor who had probably spent decades toiling in the esoteric study of the nuclear cross-section of Ununennium showed you the ropes, monitored your progress, gave you a dope smack when necessary, and helped you get your first job. Everybody that you interacted with professionally was there to prepare you for something. They were good at it too. When called upon, you had to cowboy up, but if you did, the rewards were great. It might have been rough, but it was fair.

With that system of public higher education in place, we developed a professional class that sent 24 astronauts to the moon and back using slide rules and vacuum tubes. We reduced pestilence and suffering by advancing medical science forward in leaps and bounds. We unleashed the power of the atom. We even managed to use something that we barely understood, quantum mechanics, to successfully create modern electronics and computers. Optimism about the future was everywhere. And the United States boasted the system of public higher education that was leading the way.

But somewhere along the way, the game began to change. The mission of public higher education morphed from providing a sound education and conducting solid research to becoming a haven for credentialed activists and supporting them by extracting lots of money from students, parents, and anyone else who was on the hook for federal, state, or local taxes.

Public higher education has become somewhat of a pyramid scheme. It’s a degree mill where, for the sake of expedience, it’s necessary to confer credentials without asking too many questions. These days, there’s no guarantee that degree holders in many fields know a damn thing.

At the same time, public higher education has become a powerful tool for transferring funds from one sector of the industry to another with a tidy profit—a practice that most other contexts would consider usury. It all works by courting legions of ill-prepared students and encouraging them to acquire massive, government-backed loans—lifelong debt that cannot be discharged even through bankruptcy—to support an explosion of programs that most students don't need and an exponential growth of non-traditional administrators beyond all reason or need.

When it comes to these newly minted administrators, an idle mind truly is the devil’s playground. It turns out that if you pay someone enough to do very little, they’ll invent things to do just in case anyone ever checks in on them. DEI, ADA, various “studies,” and “wellness” programs are the result. These are the greatest job-security schemes ever conceived since achievement is aspirational. It’s great work, really, if you can get it.

The rest of the administrative bloat is attributable to the need to leverage every resource for more money. Public higher ed has become far less about Main Street than about Wall Street. Now you might think that this is a good thing. And it could be, if it were not for the utterly self-serving nature of the avarice. To wit: when was the last time you heard of a public institution responding to a new pile of money by lowering student tuition? They even get a cut at the bookstore.

So should we do something about all of this or just shake our heads while thousands of “studies” graduates with massive debt work as Uber drivers? If we are going to institute reforms, what should they look like?

I think that there’s no question that we must reform public higher education. The fact that poor scholarship and research inform much public policy in the United States is an excellent reason all by itself. These reforms should be initiated from within the system, where the most knowledgeable can lead them. This is possible, but I think that the chances of significant, meaningful reform originating from within many academic fields is about the same as my chances of jumping from the trampoline outside my window to the surface of the moon with my Red Ball Jets.

Here are my ideas.

Tenure should not be a lifetime appointment. Instead of using tenure for its intended purposes, such as advocating for risky ideas, engaging in cutting-edge research that may take time to yield results, or defending academic freedom, far too many academics use it to put in minimal effort, advocate for nonsense, and produce rushed, sloppy research. The activist class loves tenure because it’s a bulletproof vest against accountability.

Many institutions conduct a process called post-tenure review. This process should be mandatory, provided that there are clear standards and expectations to guide it. And it ought to occur several times over the course of a career.

Universities typically skim more than 50% right off the top of grants and contracts, ostensibly for the purpose of paying utility bills. What this actually funds is administrative bloat. It’s time to starve the beast. Research overhead should be limited to no more than 20%.

Shady and exploitative intellectual property policies need revision. Some universities claim intellectual property rights to everything from the notes that one uses to prepare for class (this happened to me once over a book I published) to patentable ideas that one develops that have nothing to do with their employment. If you relentlessly hammer your faculty, it usually doesn't take long for them to resort to doing just what is necessary to survive.

Every academic administrator with responsibilities that involve students or faculty should have to teach at least one course. Higher ed is fundamentally about two things: students and teachers. If you don’t understand that dynamic, you shouldn’t be responsible for affecting it. A few semesters in one of my astronomy classes would have done wonders for convincing various provosts that I worked with that academic integrity in the classroom was a problem and that they were clueless about despite bearing some responsible for.

Unqualified students recruited merely to fill seats or check boxes should not be admitted. This diminishes the entire academy, and it’s not fair to the students who earned their place based on merit. I am entirely unsympathetic to the idea that everyone deserves a place at a state university. Higher education isn’t desirable or even appropriate for everyone. Exit exams should be mandatory for all four-year degrees. Any public institution of higher learning that has a high failure rate on these exams should face sanctions. A good one would be ineligibility for federally backed student loans.

Research fraud, plagiarism, and any other form of academic misconduct must be taken seriously and addressed. These should serve as valid reasons for revoking tenure. Anyone can commit an honest error. But a gander at Retraction Watch is all it takes to show that the reproducibility crisis is real, and it’s not all an accident.

Lastly, higher education needs to eschew its sanctimonious attitude toward almost everything that isn’t it. When you condescend to the rest of the world, especially when you are wrong, you’re eventually going to get clipped. Many academics forget what made their careers possible: everyone else. You forget that at your peril.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on X at @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.