Is higher education doomed?

It's not a rhetorical question, at least not yet.

Explaining to a roomful (except for the first three rows) of academics at a national conference why Bigfoot isn’t real. Circa 2012

I’m not bashful when it comes to criticizing contemporary higher education. In the event that you are new here or my reputation has not preceded me, you may discern for yourself my views on higher ed here, here, here, here, here, and here. A fair-minded person wading through all of this would rationally surmise that I have issues with contemporary academia. And they’d be entirely correct.

It didn’t start out that way. When I received my faculty appointment in 1992, I was thrilled and elated. I was certain that I was going to spend my career with the best and the brightest, making the world a better place. I know that sounds corny and incredibly naive for a person in their mid-30s with an advanced degree in science, but it’s what I believed.

And though I did encounter amazingly bright, charismatic, and productive individuals along the way, a quarter century of disappointment in the academy eventually got the better of me. I retired from a coveted position a decade earlier than most would have simply because I couldn’t justify any longer being a cog in a machine that I was convinced had become corrupt, in my particular circumstance, beyond redemption.

To my great relief, the past few years have seen calls for the reform or outright remaking of higher education growing—and coming from luminaries with much higher wattage than the likes of me. Jonathan Turley, J. Scott Turner, and Glenn Harlan Reynolds, among others, have very recently addressed what I believe to be some of the fundamental problems in contemporary higher education, particularly in the sciences.

I’m also noticing the number of academic insiders who are beginning to speak out on both the need for reform and the fear that it will not be undertaken voluntarily. Reform in higher education may require a revolution. It’s taken a while for me to arrive at this point of view, but I think that I’m down with it.

The reason that I am reluctant to advocate for greater impetus for change than may be necessary is that I am, at heart, an institutionalist, not a revolutionary. It’s far easier to reach for the sky standing on the shoulders of others than it is from ground level. I have always respected what others before me created with hard work and dedication. It takes a lot to build something of substance, far less to reduce it to ashes.

That’s why I am such a fan, in general, of the American experiment and all that it encompasses. It took a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to build this nation and most of its institutions. If you don’t get that, I don’t know what to say except that I pity you.

But as much reverence as I have for the ideal of higher education (and what it is supposed to encompass), I see little evidence that those pulling the levers in higher education are, beyond an observant few, generally even aware that their enterprise has some pressing issues. And to the degree that many faculty and administrators may occasionally demonstrate a scintilla of awareness that something is rotten in the state of higher ed, those problems are generally attributed to Republicans, heretics, and other riff-raff beyond the echo chamber that is the modern ivory tower.

When there isn’t even awareness that a problem exists, accountability isn’t on the table. That’s the lay of the land in contemporary higher ed. Name for me another human endeavor besides higher education (Ok, and government) in which generously compensated individuals can be revealed as completely incompetent screw-ups and subsequently matriculate to a better position after running their current enterprise into the ground.

There is no dearth of current examples.

Meredith Raimondo, who, as Dean of Students at Oberlin College in Ohio, engineered a $36 million judgement against Oberlin in favor of a local business, Gibson’s Bakery, parlayed her incompetence into a new position as Vice President of Student Affairs at Oglethorpe College in Georgia. Though Claudine Gay is still at Harvard after a disastrous stint as its shortest-tenured president, she’s still pulling down a salary of nearly a million dollars a year. Melissa Click, after being fired from her faculty position at the University of Missouri for threatening a student journalist, became Chair of Communications Studies at Gonzaga. CUNY adjunct Shellyne Rodriguez got fired from Hunter College, not for cursing at, then disrupting a student display with which she disagreed, but for subsequently chasing a reporter down the street with a machete.

After being almost immediately hired to another faculty position by Cooper Union upon her dismissal from CUNY, Rodriguez lasted less than a year before being dismissed there for antisemitism. I expect Rodriguez to become the president of an Ivy League school any day now.

Close to home, a Idaho jury recently took less than three hours to reach a unanimous verdict awarding $3 million in damages against Boise State University to Sarah Fendley, the owner of Big City Coffee, who happens to be an acquaintance of mine. The same jury awarded an additional $1 million in damages against former BSU Vice President for Student Affairs and Enrollment Management, Leslie Webb. Webb is now the Vice Provost of Student Success and Campus Life at the University of Montana.

This verdict was awarded when the jury in Boise agreed with Fendley that Big City Coffee was forced from the Student Union building at BSU because Fendley had displayed a thin blue line flag at another location off-campus during the heyday of Black Lives Matter and the George Floyd protests. This was a bridge too far for a vocal minority of students at BSU, who loudly complained about the presence of Big City Coffee at BSU to sympathetic administrators.

Even in the reddest of red states, BSU stands out as a hotbed for unproductive issues not in step with most of Idaho. The Big City Coffee debacle, anti-police billboards by BSU student and activist Tanisha Jae Newton, and the saga of adjunct faculty member/Black Lives Matter spokesman Terry Wilson, who was found to be in possession of a firearm and drugs while resisting arrest for vandalizing a statue of Abraham Lincoln in a Boise park. Though these folks all had strident constituencies on the BSU campus, they were decidedly less popular a zip code in any direction away from the blue turf.

To be clear, I support the right of faculty to support any cause they want, no matter what I think about it, as a fundamental tenet of academic freedom. The problem in contemporary higher education is that this is a one-way street. You can support all of the silly, unproductive, demonstrably false progressive nonsense in the world and hear nary a word of protest. But try pointing out the flaws in DEI (or professing to be a Republican) and see where that gets you. Hint: It’s not far.

Such is the insular nature of the woke bubble in modern higher education. The only thing more stunning on the average college campus than the general arrogance of the progressive activists masquerading as faculty and administrators found in abundance a stone’s throw in every direction from the quad is their cluelessness.

A word on Sarah Fendley. Having battled myself with hostile university administrators who attempted to use mirror images of my worldview and values against me, I feel her pain. She closed Big City Coffee due to the stress of the lawsuit. I understand her pain because I’ve experienced it firsthand.

I was a semi-professional climber for a decade. I helped to put myself through college with the proceeds from a couple of guidebooks that I wrote. In high-standard climbing, the duration of most stressful situations is measured in minutes, perhaps hours at the most. And no matter whether you saw it coming or not, you chose to be in the middle of the bad thing.

That’s an entirely different thing from what Sarah went through. When you are in the gunsight of any major opponent in a lawsuit (generally not by choice), stress comes at you in waves twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, whether you are ready for it or not. In Sarah’s case, this lasted for four years.

In the end, I’m very happy that the jury saw this case for what it was. It’s not over just yet, as BSU is, in my opinion, suicidally contemplating an appeal. In the immortal words of Amos Burton:

But given the fact that those entrenched inside ivory towers rarely possess any useful self-awareness, humility, or wisdom, I wouldn’t bank on BSU coming to its senses. People inside of academic bubbles bring to mind, in a completely non-complementary way, the loud-pipes-save-lives motorcycle crowd, i.e., being oblivious to the degree of their own obnoxiousness.

So what should the rest of us do about all of this? Let’s begin with: should we do anything about this? I say, unambiguously, yes. With a few rare exceptions, American taxpayers fund, to some degree, every college and university in this nation, including private ones. That makes the enterprise of higher education everyone’s business. Add to that the fact that higher education produces much of the sketchy science and research that’s driving bad government policies, and it becomes imperative that the public expect and demand better.

If higher education were to manifest the self-awareness to institute some of these reforms from within, it would indicate, at least to me, that a critical mass on the inside knows that higher education has some issues. That’d be a start all by itself. And this is possible. I know a lot of folks in higher education who know what’s broken and what it will take to fix it. The question is, can they?

Possible and likely are two different things. The chances of significant, meaningful reform originating from within higher education seem to me to be about the same as my chances of jumping from the trampoline in the pasture out back to the surface of the moon with my trusty Red Ball Jets.

So, what to do? My own ideas for fixing higher education fall in line with many of what the aforementioned Turley, Turner, and Reynolds have suggested. I would propose, additionally, a few other ideas that I think would go a long way toward reform.

The first is that tenure should not be a lifetime appointment. Far too many academics use tenure not for its intended purpose: to advocate for risky ideas, to be involved in cutting-edge research, or to defend academic freedom—but to be able to put in minimal effort, advocate for woke nonsense at the expense of academic freedom (of others), and produce terrible research on silly crap like the colonization of light, intersectionality, and Bigfoot (conducted at taxpayer expense at an institution at which I was a faculty member, over my frequent and vociferous objections).

Many institutions currently have a form of this known as post-tenure review. The problem is that the default position of most faculty and administrators on these committees seems to be to continue the appointment unless the faculty member under review runs afoul of the impermeable progressive academic bubble. I’d propose a term of six years, with the onus on the faculty member to prove that they have been productive enough to earn another six-year term.

Another reform involves administrative bloat. Every institution of higher education in America that receives as much as a dime of taxpayer support should be required to reduce their professional administrative staff within five years to no more than 2% of the number of students enrolled. If an institution has 20,000 students enrolled, they get 400 administrators and professional support staff. That’s still an exceedingly high number.

Administrative bloat is a well-known malady of contemporary higher education. From a recent piece in Forbes on a selection of top schools, “Between 1976 and 2018, full-time administrators and other professionals employed by those institutions increased by 164% and 452%, respectively. Meanwhile, the number of full-time faculty employed at colleges and universities in the U.S. increased by only 92%, marginally outpacing student enrollment which grew by 78%.”

From the same article: “A recent report… found that on average, the top 50 schools have 1 faculty per 11 students whereas the same institutions have 1 non-faculty employee per 4 students. Put another way, there are now 3 times as many administrators and other professionals (not including university hospitals staff), as there are faculty (on a per student basis) at the leading schools in country.”

This is a single report, but it mirrors what has widely been reported elsewhere. I suppose that one may quibble about the exact numbers, but the idea that there is no such thing as administrative bloat would be absurd.

The one thing that I know about administrators in higher education is that an idle mind is, indeed, the devil’s playground. It turns out that if you pay someone enough to sit around and do very little, they’ll invent all sorts of mischief to make sure that the free ride continues in perpetuity. DEI, which accounts for no small part of academic bloat, is the greatest job-security program ever invented since performance in any position is aspirational rather than linked to merit or achievement.

Finally, every institution of higher education in America has some sort of governing board. Typically, these positions are appointed by governors and go to alums, business executives, and politicians who are susceptible to intimidation even from a subpar PowerPoint presentation. Perhaps, at least at public institutions, these should be elected positions as they already are in four states: Colorado, Michigan, Nebraska, and Nevada. That would be a step in the right direction for public accountability.

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 Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.