While I try my best to align my thoughts with reality, it’s nice to be validated every once in a while.

Especially when those thoughts orbit around the insanity of it all.

Higher ed, that’s what I’m talking about.

I have had nearly enough bullshit. The manure has piled up so deep in the hallways, classrooms, and administration buildings of American higher education that I am not sure how much longer I can wade through it and retain my sanity and integrity.

Even worse, the accumulated effects of all the academic BS are contributing to this country’s disastrous political condition and, ultimately, putting at risk the very viability and character of decent civilization. What do I mean by BS?

BS is the university’s loss of capacity to grapple with life’s Big Questions, because of our crisis of faith in truth, reality, reason, evidence, argument, civility, and our common humanity.

BS is the farce of what are actually “fragmentversities” claiming to be universities, of hyperspecialization and academic disciplines unable to talk with each other about obvious shared concerns.

I like the phrase “fragmentversities.” I tend to think in terms of fiefdoms and “petty turf battles,” but fragmentization is a good way to think about it. Some of this is the result of disciplinary allegiance (see below), but a good bit of it comes about because of one of the fundamental problems of American higher ed: it can’t figure out what it wants to be. Research? Education? Credentialing? Why not all three!

One of the double-edged swords of faculty culture is a primary allegiance to the discipline, not to the department or the university. This allegiance pits academic programs against each other (especially programs that compete for similar resources or students) in a zero-sum-game rather than an abundance mindset for the betterment of the university.

I really should do a writeup of The Four Cultures of the Academy. It would be really useful to refer to.

BS is a tenure system that provides guaranteed lifetime employment to faculty who are lousy teachers and inactive scholars, not because they espouse unpopular viewpoints that need the protection of “academic freedom,” but only because years ago they somehow were granted tenure.

BS is the shifting of the “burden” of teaching undergraduate courses from traditional tenure-track faculty to miscellaneous, often-underpaid adjunct faculty and graduate students.

No skin in the game, for either tenured professors or adjuncts. Nobody cares, nobody’s watching the shop, etc.

BS is the institutional reward system that coerces graduate students and faculty to “get published” as soon and as much as possible, rather than to take the time to mature intellectually and produce scholarship of real importance — leading to a raft of books and articles that contribute little to our knowledge about human concerns that matter.

Not gonna lie, this mentality was a large part of the reason I decided not to get a PhD. Scholarship as a spectator sport is not scholarship at all.

BS is the invisible self-censorship that results among some students and faculty, and the subtle corrective training aimed at those who occasionally do not self-censor.

Hi. Speaking as right winger in higher ed, this is my past and my present and my future. My last job, which had a very difficult political/people component to it, would have been 200% harder if my Trump status had become known amongst the faculty.

BS is administrators’ delusion that what is important in higher education can be evaluated by quantitative “metrics,” the use of which will (supposedly) enable universities to be run more like corporations, thus requiring faculty and staff to spend more time and energy providing data for metrics, which they, too, know are BS.

It’s not just administrators…it’s the Department of Education and all the regional accreditors as well. But then again, if you’re going to try to run a university like it’s a factory, you would do well to use factory-tested quality improvement techniques.

Read the rest at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Like the author, I too want desperately to believe in the legitimacy of the university system. I love the idea of scholarship, and one of my selves would have been perfectly content with a life of scholarly research.

Unlike the author, I’m not a fan of college sports.

Our current university system is a mess, and it contributes to the even huger mess that is the United States of America. There are many contributing factors, with such a wide-ranging cast of unselfaware players that I’m doubtful that any one university will be able to successfully navigate the coming crash. Some of the bigger universities with huge endowments will last longer, but the new tax bill seems to be squeezing them from the other end too.

The bubble will pop soon. Maybe Betsy will take a pin to it.

Then we’ll really see a meltdown.