Every May, the same thing happens: commencement is next week and I don’t have a gown.

Doctoral regalia costs $1,500.

For what, exactly? Custom robe, velvet panels, sleeve bars, a hood with satin lining in your school’s colors — the full medieval cosplay package. But still, it’s a ripoff. You have to order it through a single vendor your university picked for you. There’s no alternative, there’s no shopping around.

I never bought mine. My university offered to cover it as part of the hire package. I didn’t bother taking them up on it because it felt like a waste of student money for something I might not use enough to justify the cost. That was so many years ago that the rental fees since then have almost certainly cost more than the gown would have. The vendor gets paid either way.

So I check whatever the bookstore has available last minute that’s in my size and cosplay a different discipline. Commencement is basically my Halloween. What am I going to dress up as this year? A business professor? Law professor? History? I think I’ve worn my actual degree’s hood colors exactly once. This year I was tempted to grab the Doctor of Engineering gown because the orange looks cool, but it felt like stolen valor — that’s not a degree I’m earning in this lifetime. Even my trolling has limits.

I also always decline the hat — the “tam” — it looks ridiculously pretentious and it’s one more thing to lose. The whole setup is worth more than a MacBook, so I need to be sure I return it all in one piece.

I will confess I do like the Pomp and Circumstance music. It makes me misty-eyed and takes me back to my own graduations with my proud parents watching. And I love seeing the students — there’s a palpable elation, like they made it, they completed the journey. It’s like watching a team you’ve followed for years finally win the championship. Bumping into students before or after the ceremony and having them thank me on their big day, that’s everything. Makes sitting through four hours of names being called worth it.

But the gown? Nobody ever notices what discipline I’m wearing. The regalia is pure theater, but it’s theater that extracts real money.

The $1,500 Costume

A doctoral gown isn’t the cheap polyester number undergrads wear. It’s a tailored robe with velvet trim, specialty degree colors, and fabric supposedly built to last decades. A quality set runs $700 to $1,500, depending on whether you want the Bristol (entry-level), the Sussex (mid-tier), or the Windsor (the premium line). Add the Herff Jones or Jostens near-monopoly pricing — both are billion-dollar-a-year companies — and the emotional surcharge (once in a lifetime, they tell you), while swiping your card.

Even undergrads aren’t spared. A basic gown in your school’s colors, no frills, no fancy hat or scarf or cape, made overseas, can cost $100-plus for something that should be $20 max. Worn once and never touched again. For some students, buying a cap and gown means not buying food for two weeks.

But wait. The brochure proudly notes that the trademarked ‘EarthGrad™’ fabric rescues 74 plastic bottles from a landfill. So yeah, it’s totally worth it — even though the vendor is charging a 500% markup to drape your students in literal garbage while calling it a sustainability initiative. Apropos, given the absolute landfill of financial despair many of them are stepping into.

The Ecosystem

The gown is just the most visible piece. Higher ed runs on a parallel economy of third-party vendors who monetize every stage of student life behind institutional branding.

Textbook publishers sell access codes that expire after one semester, killing the used-book market. Proctoring software companies charge per-exam fees so students can be watched through their own webcams. Parking gets outsourced to contractors. Meal plans have markups that would embarrass an airport Cinnabon.

It’s not just students getting squeezed — departments burn money on this stuff too. Take Scantron: we don’t even use them anymore, but we have a stockpile sitting in a cabinet — exam sheets we paid a premium for that became a complete waste of money. A department secretary told me what those things cost at institutional rates. It’s criminal.

People love to mock the government for paying $600 for a toilet seat 40 years ago, which is, like, $1,700 in today’s money. Academia has the same problem, it’s just lesser known. Approved vendors, captive budgets, nobody in the room whose job it is to ask if the price makes sense.

A standard desk chair that costs $60 at IKEA becomes a $754 “ergonomic educational seating solution” once it goes through an approved procurement vendor. I didn’t realize this until we were renovating a classroom recently and I saw the invoice. Some of that is defensible: ADA specs, fire codes, durability. But departments aren’t spending their own money, procurement rules favor approved vendors over cheap ones, and universities don’t comparison shop.

Now that I’m department chair, I constantly get calls and emails from vendors trying to sell me something. If I don’t respond to the first email, they hound me. “Just following up on this,” they write, as if they’re a dean contacting me about an urgent administrative crisis. These vultures will even try to enlist me for sales leads. “Do you know someone else who might need this? Do you have their contact info?”

Everyone Knows

Most people inside the system don’t think about any of this. Faculty are insulated from the costs. All those administrators schools have hired over the past two decades? They just check the approved vendor list and follow the procurement policy like bots. The one thing students notice is the textbook — ask any professor how many of theirs actually buy it. But the rest of the vendor economy hums along in the background because the people paying the fees have the least power to change anything.

Higher ed is starting to look like an airport or a ballgame. The expensive ticket just gets you through the gate. Everything else — the food, the parking, the merchandise you can’t buy anywhere else — bleeds you once you’re inside.

The gown is a perfect symbol of the whole thing. You already paid to earn the degree. Now pay again for the costume, from the one company we’ll allow, by the deadline we set.

Tradition is a hell of a business model.

More dispatches from the campus that’s lost the plot: subscribe below.

Subscribe now

A professor sent us a tip last week. They had been browsing their own institution’s website and found something they didn’t expect: a page listing a numerical minimum, a specific percentage of new faculty hires that had to come from designated racial groups.

The number was real. The page was still up. A racial hiring quota, posted on a university’s publicly viewable website, in 2026.

The professor asked us not to link to it. The exact wording is unique enough that anyone could trace it back to the institution and, by extension, to them — and they’re actively pursuing a remedy.

Their point was simple: this is not unusual. Universities have this kind of language on more pages than anyone realizes. They wrote it down because the cultural moment rewarded saying it out loud. They issued press releases and built it into their marketing. They wanted it seen.

The legal landscape has since shifted. Statements that once served as marketing assets now serve as evidence. Universities are scrambling to take down what they once rushed to post.

We think you should look at your own institution.

The Cleanup Has Started

A lot of schools figured out, somewhere around 2024, that the language they spent 2020 and 2021 putting on their websites is now a legal liability. Some of it always was.

The Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision struck down race-conscious admissions in 2023 and has since been invoked to challenge racial preferences in hiring, scholarships, contracting, and virtually every other context where race is a factor. State legislatures passed new laws. The Department of Education issued sweeping guidance on proxy discrimination that threatened federal funding — guidance that has since been vacated by a federal court, though the pages have not gone back up. And the Title VII case law that prohibits racial discrimination in employment never actually changed in the first place. All of it converged on a moment where general counsels were quietly emailing communications offices asking them to take pages down.

The scrubbing is well-documented. Northeastern University removed all DEI language from its website in late January 2025 and rebranded its Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion as the “Office of Belonging.” Florida State University circulated an internal list of roughly two dozen keywords — including “antiracist,” “biases,” “ethnicity,” “inequities,” “oppression,” and “systemic” — to be removed from university webpages. The University of South Florida deleted entire pages from its psychology, history, and English department sites, and quietly renamed an existing policy from “Diversity and Equal Opportunity” to “Equal Opportunity.” The University of Denver removed its Pride Lounge and renamed its Division of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to the “Division of Community Support and Engagement.” The Chronicle of Higher Education has been tracking the changes across hundreds of institutions.

It’s a real trend. It is also incomplete.

Universities are large, decentralized, and bad at keeping track of their own websites. A page on the central HR site might get scrubbed while the same policy lives on, untouched, on a college subsite, a department page, the diversity office’s archive, and a 2022 strategic plan PDF that nobody remembered was indexed.

Even when they do scrub successfully, the Wayback Machine has the original. So does Google’s cache. So do the screenshots that critics, journalists, and disgruntled alumni took before the cleanup began.

The receipts are still out there.

Categories Worth a Look

The professor’s tip pointed at a hiring quota. That’s just one category. There are many more.

Identity-restricted scholarships, programs, or housing that conflict with the institution’s own nondiscrimination policy. Mandatory DEI training requirements that condition employment. Cluster hires — multi-position faculty searches defined by race. Bias-reporting systems with no due-process protections. Promotion criteria that require ideological commitment statements. Land acknowledgments adopted as official institutional positions. Endowed chairs with politically defined eligibility. Pipeline programs whose stated criteria contradict the federal civil rights laws under which the institution receives funding.

Every one of these things has been, at some point, written down on an institutional website. Most of them still are.

How to Look

You do not need to be a hacker to find this content. You do not need anything beyond a browser and an hour. Here is what we suggest.

Start with the institution’s main domain. Go to Google. Type:

site:youruniversity.edu “diversity”

Then variations:

site:youruniversity.edu “underrepresented”

site:youruniversity.edu “minimum percentage”

site:youruniversity.edu “cluster hire”

site:youruniversity.edu “land acknowledgment”

site:youruniversity.edu “anti-racism” (and “antiracism” — different word, different results)

site:youruniversity.edu “BIPOC”

site:youruniversity.edu “DEI training” mandatory

site:youruniversity.edu “bias incident”

Branch into specific contexts. Hiring and tenure documents are often the richest territory:

site:youruniversity.edu “search committee” diversity

site:youruniversity.edu “diversity statement” required

site:youruniversity.edu “tenure” “diversity”

Scholarships and admissions are another layer:

site:youruniversity.edu “scholarship” “first-generation”

site:youruniversity.edu “scholarship” “Black”

site:youruniversity.edu “scholarship” “Hispanic”

site:youruniversity.edu “scholarship” “women”

You will find scholarships restricted by race or gender. Many were written into gift agreements decades ago and have never been touched. Some are now legally questionable. Some are squarely illegal post-SFFA. They are all still listed on the financial aid page.

Check subdomains separately. A school’s law school often lives at law.youruniversity.edu. The medical school at medicine.youruniversity.edu. The Graduate School of Education at gse.youruniversity.edu. Each subdomain is its own ecosystem with its own communications staff who may not have gotten the memo.

Check PDFs. Strategic plans, accreditation self-studies, departmental reports, and grant applications are often archived as PDFs and forgotten. Add filetype:pdf to any search:

site:youruniversity.edu filetype:pdf “diversity goals”

The 2021 Strategic Plan, written when nobody thought the legal landscape would shift, is often where the most explicit language lives.

Use the Wayback Machine for anything that’s gone. Go to web.archive.org, paste the URL of the current version of a page, and look at the snapshots. If the page was edited or deleted in 2024 or 2025, the older versions are still there. Compare the 2022 version to the 2025 version. The difference is itself a disclosure.

Use Google’s cache. When a page has been recently changed, the cached version sometimes lingers for weeks. Search for the page, click the three-dot menu next to the result, and select “About this result” — sometimes a cached version is still accessible.

Stick to what is public. Public-facing pages, public PDFs, archived versions of pages, anything findable from a browser without a login. Leaked internal emails and restricted intranet documents are a different category, with different legal stakes, and not part of this exercise.

Why It Matters

Institutions wrote this material down because, at the time, writing it down was the point. The cultural moment rewarded loud public commitments to DEI. Schools that stayed quiet were viewed with suspicion. Schools that signaled hardest got favorable press, marketing wins, foundation funding, and accreditor approval. Posting it was the asset.

That asset has become a liability.

Harvard is now openly fundraising for endowed professorships in “viewpoint diversity” — $10 million per chair, several hundred million dollars total, with the explicit goal of broadening ideological representation on its faculty. The same Harvard whose faculty mocked viewpoint-diversity arguments when conservatives raised them under the previous administration. The only thing that changed was who occupied the White House.

The Supreme Court has spoken. State legislatures have passed new laws. The Department of Education issued guidance that accelerated the scrubbing — and then a federal court struck that guidance down. The legal pressure has eased. But the pages that survived the panic are settling into permanence, and the institutions that built an apparatus on the old assumptions have not finished updating to the new ones. If you are going to look, now is the time, before the next round of quiet edits buries what’s left.

There is something worth noticing about institutions that change positions this fast. The 2020 statements were not principled. The 2025 retractions are not principled either. The same universities that wrote anti-racism into their hiring documents in 2021 quietly removed it in 2025. Same leadership, in many cases. Different White House.

These are not institutions with convictions. These are institutions with weathervanes. Whatever they say next, remember what they said before — and how quickly they unsaid it.

The pages are public, the records are searchable, and the Wayback Machine is free. Look at your own institution. See what’s there. If you find something, post it in the comments.

The EEOC has started looking, too. In February 2026, the agency filed a subpoena enforcement action against Nike after launching an investigation based largely on the company’s own public documents such as published diversity targets, workforce representation goals, and statements about building a representative workforce. The company posted the numbers. The agency read them. Universities have posted the same kind of numbers. The agency can read those too.

More dispatches from the campus that’s lost the plot: subscribe below.

Subscribe now

The Department of Justice hit Yale School of Medicine and UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine this month with findings that both schools illegally discriminated on the basis of race in their admissions, in violation of the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA). The DOJ cited internal documents and statistical evidence showing that both schools continued to favor Black and Hispanic applicants over White and Asian applicants with stronger academic credentials.

The deflection was immediate.

Scroll through any thread on the enforcement actions and you’ll find the whataboutism within seconds: What about legacy admits? It’s a textbook red herring. The DOJ enforces a Supreme Court ruling on race-based admissions and the response is to change the subject entirely.

But even lawmakers who should know better couldn’t help themselves. Congresswoman Grace Meng argued: “You can’t have an honest conversation about affirmative action, discrimination without analyzing data on legacy admissions too.” Others called legacy admits “affirmative action for rich white kids.” Black students aren’t the issue, they say. “Yell at the legacy admissions.”

Others go further. Asian Americans who oppose race-based admissions aren’t exercising their own judgment. They’re pawns, a “model minority tool for white conservatives” who were “perfectly fine” with legacy admits and only objected when Black students got seats.

Here’s the twist: almost everyone wants legacy admissions gone.

Middle- and working-class White and Asian families don’t support legacy admissions either. Pew found that 75% of Americans don’t think legacy status should factor into admissions at all. Data for Progress found 68% support an outright ban, including majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. This isn’t a contested question. Almost nobody outside of university development offices and alumni boards wants this practice to continue.

It doesn’t help the average applicant. A landmark Opportunity Insights study out of Harvard found that legacy preferences are the single largest contributor to the overrepresentation of the top 1% at Ivy-Plus schools. Students from families earning over $611,000 a year are more than twice as likely to be admitted as middle-class students with comparable test scores. Legacy applicants from the top 1% have a 45% chance of admission at elite schools, compared to 9% for non-legacy applicants. This is a wealth program. That’s it.

And here’s another aspect they’re missing: at Harvard, about 70% of legacy applicants are White, which means roughly 30% are not. Because colleges have diversified over the last 40 years, the legacy pipeline is no longer exclusively White. Ending legacy admissions would displace non-White legacy admits too. Legacy admissions started as a WASP pipeline. In 2026, they’re a wealth pipeline. The racial composition has changed. The class composition hasn’t.

In fact, some advocates have argued that banning legacy admissions now would disproportionately hurt Black alumni families who are just beginning to benefit from the pipeline. I’d still end it. Merit should mean merit. But the point stands: this isn’t the simple racial narrative people pretend it is.

So yes, go ahead and end legacy admissions today. I agree with you. It’s a wealth privilege, not a racial one. And moving to a system based purely on individual merit benefits the vast majority of regular students of all backgrounds.

I saw this up close in high school. Two of my best classmates, one with a perfect SAT score, applied to a very elite school and didn’t get in. Meanwhile two other classmates who were legacies got admitted. They were qualified, sure. But they weren’t the strongest applicants. Everyone knew it. That was when we learned how legacy admissions actually worked. It was more about nepotism than merit. That was a long time ago. The system still hasn’t changed. But almost no one wants it to stay.

There’s also a legal reality that the “what about legacy” crowd skips over: race is a protected class under federal civil rights law. Income isn’t. The DOJ can investigate Yale Med and UCLA Med because the Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment give it the authority to do so. There is no equivalent federal statute that prohibits wealth-based admissions preferences. You can argue that there should be, and I’d probably agree with you, but that requires legislation. That’s exactly why bills like the Fair College Admissions for Students Act (FCASA) have been introduced and why states have been passing their own bans. The SFFA enforcement crowd supports those efforts too.

The difference isn’t willingness. It’s that one is a direct violation of explicit statutory text, while the other requires proving an indirect disparate impact claim, which is harder and slower. And, for the record, the Department of Education opened a disparate impact investigation into Harvard’s legacy policy back in 2023. It’s still ongoing nearly three years later. Compare that to the Yale and UCLA findings, which took about a year. That’s the difference between a direct statutory violation and a disparate impact claim. It’s not that nobody is trying. It’s that the legal tools are weaker.

Now, on the claim that Asian Americans were “perfectly fine” with legacy admits and only objected to Black students: this is flatly untrue. SFFA’s own expert filings explicitly showed that legacy preferences disproportionately disadvantaged Asian American applicants and argued that removing them would increase Asian American admissions. SFFA’s founder Edward Blum has publicly stated that SFFA opposes legacy preferences, calling them a practice that “inhibits and diminishes the opportunities of applicants from modest socioeconomic backgrounds.” The plaintiffs didn’t carve out an exception for legacy. They argued for evaluation based on individual achievement.

Telling an entire ethnic group that their legal advocacy is really just servility to White interests is not the progressive argument people think it is. It’s condescending. And it recycles the same “model minority” framework it claims to critique, just from a different direction.

The people making these arguments seem to think supporters of SFFA enforcement would balk at eliminating legacy preferences. They won’t. Most of them have been saying it for years.

You’re not exposing a contradiction. You’re describing a shared goal and pretending it’s a debate. And if you can’t grasp that this is a basic logical fallacy, maybe elite admissions isn’t the conversation for you.

More dispatches from the campus that’s lost the plot: subscribe below.

Subscribe now

A few days ago, about three dozen students booed and walked out of NYU’s commencement ceremony when Jonathan Haidt took the stage. Haidt is a social psychologist at NYU’s Stern School of Business, founder of Heterodox Academy, and the author of bestselling books arguing that smartphones, social media, and overprotective parenting are damaging young people. The Student Government Assembly had urged administrators to reconsider, calling Haidt’s platform “misaligned from graduates’ experiences.”

The takes arrived on schedule. The New York Post called them “woke students” who “whine” about a speaker who “calls their generation coddled.” MSN framed it as a story about “generational divides.” The students themselves said they were being “misunderstood.” Everyone agreed: this was a story about Generation Z. It wasn’t.

The easiest story to tell is that a few dozen NYU students proved Jonathan Haidt right about Gen Z. The more accurate story is that they proved something else: elite campuses are terrible proxies for a generation.

It was a story about money.

Protest as a Luxury Good

NYU’s total cost of attendance is roughly $92,000 a year. The students who staged that walkout are among the most economically privileged young people on earth. They are not representative of Generation Z. They are a very specific, very expensive slice of it.

The data is unambiguous. Research compiled by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and analyzed by Brookings and The Economist found that even among selective universities, schools with wealthier students were more likely to mount protests against speakers, and more likely to succeed in blocking them. A study of more than 13,000 campus protests found that activity concentrates overwhelmingly at elite research institutions: Michigan, Berkeley, Stanford, and every member of the Ivy League sit at the top of the list.

Protest, in its current campus form, is a luxury good. It requires leisure, safety nets, and the confidence that walking out of your own graduation will cost you nothing. Most college students do not have those things. Nearly two-thirds work while enrolled. 40% work full time. Half are financially independent from their parents. The underemployment rate for recent graduates is above 40%. These students are not walking out of anything. They showed up. They’d probably like to get through the ceremony and go to dinner with their families.

The Wrong Generation

The narrative that Gen Z is fragile, coddled, and ideologically captured rests on a shakier foundation than most people realize. Haidt’s work has become one of the main reference points for that narrative. The Coddling of the American Mind was published in 2018. The Anxious Generation came out in 2024. Haidt defines Gen Z as those born after 1995. That cutoff may be defensible in a broad demographic sense, but it creates confusion when applied to today’s college students. Someone born in 1996 is 30 today. That person may be Gen Z on some charts, but they are not the student walking across a commencement stage in 2026.

Defining exact generational boundaries is inherently imprecise, and reasonable people disagree on the cutoffs. But from the classroom, I saw a clear shift around students born in 2000 or later. A different temperament, a different set of expectations, a different relationship to institutions. That is the cohort we are actually talking about when we talk about Gen Z in college today. Haidt’s core teen mental health data does substantially capture Gen Z, especially from 2013 onward. But the early inflection years he highlights are mixed-cohort, the college-student data from the early 2010s includes many Millennials, and the broader cultural story he tells, helicopter parenting and the collapse of free play, reaches back 25+ years.

The problem is not Haidt. The problem is what pundits do with Haidt. They take a complicated argument about technology, parenting, childhood, and mental health, and flatten it into a cartoon: Gen Z is anxious, fragile, censorious, and spoiled. That is not analysis. It is branding. The deeper point is one scholars like Neil Postman observed decades before the smartphone era: technology reshapes every society it touches. That is not a generational defect; blaming the youngest people for being reshaped the most is scapegoating, not insight.

The students graduating this month were born around 2004. The ones entering college now were born in 2008 or 2009. They came of age in a different world: pandemic schooling, AI, inflation, housing costs, institutional distrust, and a labor market that feels increasingly unstable. They are not who the pundits think they are. I know because I teach them. I have been teaching college students long enough to watch generational cohorts turn over, and the data matches what I see in the classroom.

Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation found that Gen Z teens are twice as likely to identify as more conservative than their parents compared to Millennials at the same age. Ipsos, surveying 31 countries, found that younger generations are more conservative on gender issues than older ones. Deloitte’s 2026 global survey of more than 22,500 respondents found that Gen Z overwhelmingly favors gradual career growth over rapid advancement. Only 25% prefer fast-paced progression. More than half say they are delaying major life decisions because of financial pressure.

These are not the coddled children of anyone’s imagination. These are realists.

From the Classroom

Here is what I can report from the classroom, where they actually live, as opposed to the op-ed pages, where they do not.

Gen Z is more clear-eyed than previous generations. Realistic, maybe even a little cynical, but grounded. Many Millennials arrived with inflated expectations, assuming success was basically owed to them. Many of them were coddled. I had friends in corporate hiring who told me about Millennial candidates who brought their parents to job interviews, and whose parents called their bosses when issues arose at work. Try to imagine a Gen Z student doing that. You can’t. Gen Z has shed that entirely. They are practical, unassuming, and under no illusions about what’s waiting for them.

Before you fill the comments with your worst student stories: save it. We all have them. Every generation produces its share of nightmares. But in my experience, the entitled, impossible students are rarer in this cohort than in any I’ve taught.

Yes, their reading and writing skills are weaker than previous cohorts. This is real and measurable. But it is not their fault. COVID-19 took away key developmental years. Learning losses between pre-pandemic benchmarks and 2022 amounted to decades of lost progress. Reading skills dropped to their lowest point in 30 years. As one senior writer at the Chronicle of Higher Education put it, students are struggling with fundamental skills “through very little fault of their own.” These students had their educations bisected by a pandemic and handed back a world that had moved on without them.

And yes, they use AI. Extensively. Three-quarters of Gen Z workers report using it daily. They were handed a tool that does a passable impression of thinking, at the exact moment the institutions around them were failing to teach them how. Blaming them for using it is like blaming someone for taking the elevator when you removed the stairs.

Here is the thing I keep coming back to. For 50 years, every older generation looked at college kids with some version of envy. The freedom, the possibility, the sense that the road was wide open. You wished you could go back.

I don’t feel that anymore. For the first time, I think a lot of people my age look at today’s students and think: I would not want to be them. They are entering a job market being reshaped by automation, carrying debt loads unthinkable a generation ago, trying to build lives in cities where housing costs have decoupled from wages, and navigating a media environment designed to make them anxious. They lost formative years to a pandemic. The institutions that were supposed to prepare them have filled their course catalogs with irrelevance, replaced rigor with ideology, inflated their costs beyond recognition, and gradually stopped delivering a return on the investment. And then we call them soft.

The Real Story

The NYU walkout is clarifying, but not in the way either side wants. It does not tell you that Gen Z is broken or that they are brave. It tells you that a small number of privileged students at an expensive school did something dramatic, and much of the media treated it as a generational portrait.

The actual generational story is not dramatic. It is a 21-year-old at a state school grinding through a nursing degree. It is a financially independent student trying to figure out financial aid. It is someone who lost half of their high school education to a pandemic and pursued higher education anyway. And most of them, if they are even paying attention to this nonsense, are rolling their eyes at the NYU walkout harder than any Fox News host. By some accounts, even many NYU students were.

That story doesn’t get told, because it doesn’t perform well on anyone’s timeline.

But it’s the real one.

More dispatches from the campus that’s lost the plot: subscribe below.

Subscribe now

Something has shifted in higher education.

I felt it this past fall when I did something I hadn’t done in years: I threw my hat in the ring for an elite academic job.

I’d stopped applying a long time ago. The pattern was clear enough: strong publication record, good teaching, relevant expertise — none of it mattered. I knew what they were screening for, and I wasn’t it.

The last time I applied for a job, they made me interview on Zoom with my video off so they wouldn’t be “biased.” When I made it to the finalist round, they asked me to define social justice. They didn’t like my answer. They’d also seen my published work and disagreed with it. They suggested I educate myself by reading White Fragility and Ibram X. Kendi.

I stopped browsing higheredjobs.com after that.

Then Trump won again and suddenly universities were under pressure. The White House was threatening funding, state legislatures were investigating, the EEOC was cracking down on discrimination in academic hiring, donors were pulling back, public trust was collapsing, enrollment was declining.

There was a mea culpa in academia — or whatever passes for contrition among elite administrators. Columbia reached a $221 million settlement with the Trump administration and accepted outside monitoring. Brown reached a $50 million agreement. Cornell later reached a $60 million agreement. Harvard has been reported to be discussing a possible $500 million settlement, though school officials have disputed that figure. Harvard is also reportedly soliciting $10 million donations for endowed professorships under a “viewpoint diversity” initiative that could bring dozens of ideologically heterodox faculty to campus.

But even still, when a dean at an Ivy League school contacted me saying I was very impressive and invited me to interview for a professorship, I was genuinely shocked.

Me?!

Imposter syndrome kicked in hard. This was the kind of position that goes to people with major national awards and towering reputations. They must not have Googled me. I must have fooled them somehow.

I was anxious. When I was first entering academia, I had so many interviews it became second nature, like riding a bike. But that was a long time ago and now I was out of practice.

The interview was surprisingly pleasant. I was braced for a hostile environment, but everyone was professional and polite. I met with faculty, deans, administrators. I met so many people I couldn’t even send them all thank-you emails afterward because I couldn’t recall everyone’s names. Everyone seemed normal. No weird vibes. No one asked about my politics at all. They focused on scholarship, teaching, research agenda.

It was surreal. After years of feeling like a pariah in academia, here was an elite institution treating me like a serious candidate.

I told my dad about it. He gives praise sparingly, but he was genuinely impressed and excited. He kept asking for updates on whether I got hired.

Even my liberal white male friend — a professor who constantly posts anti-Trump memes on social media — admitted it: Trump has opened opportunities for guys like us. It was now “okay to be white” — a phrase that got students expelled in 2019.

This shift isn’t just ideological. It’s demographic too. Elite institutions overcorrected for more than a decade, and now they’re correcting the correction.

The Shift is Real

This isn’t just happening at elite private schools. The shift is everywhere.

Diversity statements in faculty job ads dropped from 25% to 11% between 2024 and 2025. State legislatures allocated tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer money to conservative-leaning civics centers during the 2025-26 school year, with the University of Texas System setting aside $100 million for a School of Civic Leadership. Ohio alone allocated $24 million to establish civics centers across campuses.

The National Endowment for the Humanities announced $75 million in grants for conservative-aligned projects, including $10 million each to UNC Chapel Hill and UT Austin for hiring conservative faculty.

Even non-elite institutions like Bentley University created a new endowed professorship, the Bartlett Chair of Free Speech and Free Enterprise, to support research and teaching on free expression and free enterprise.

Money is flowing and positions are opening. After a decade of being told we don’t belong, suddenly everyone wants the heterodox/conservative guy. We’re the “It girl/boy” now.

But It’s Still Tokenism

But here’s what you need to understand: this is still tokenism, just tokenism with better funding.

It’s like when The New York Times hires a conservative columnist. Never a firebrand, just someone slightly center-right who’s tolerable to their audience. As one pundit put it recently about auditioning at the Times: they wanted “the apologetic, white conservative guy who knows it’s our fault.”

Same in academia. They don’t want a firebrand. They don’t want a Matt Walsh or a Chris Rufo. You have to be a genteel heterodox, someone like Jonathan Haidt who critiques from within the norms of academic discourse. Meanwhile, they hire far-left extremists routinely without a second thought. Here are just a few examples: Trinity College cleared a professor who shared content about letting white people die. Rutgers cleared a professor who wrote “I now hate white people” and “Fuck these people.” Penn State administrators reportedly told white faculty they needed to “feel the pain” George Floyd endured. All faced no consequences, often explicitly protected under academic freedom.

To be clear, genuine extremists on either side — those who prioritize activism over scholarship or substitute invective for argument — probably lack the temperament for serious academic work. But the enforcement has been radically lopsided. Academia has spent years treating far-left extremist rhetoric as protected “punching up” while subjecting even mild dissent from the right to investigation, social ostracism, or professional ruin. Given the Overton window that has long prevailed in most departments, meaningful balance would require voices considerably to the right of someone like Walsh or Rufo just to offset the baseline.

The bias isn’t just about who gets hired — it’s about who gets where. A study in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy found that conservative and libertarian law professors tend to have stronger credentials and higher publication rates than their liberal peers, yet end up at noticeably lower-ranked institutions than their records would predict. In other words, you don’t just have to be good. You have to be measurably better just to get in the door.

One hire won’t fix systemic monoculture. Let’s be honest about what this is. I’m the acceptable heterodox voice who proves they’re “open-minded” without changing departmental hiring practices or intellectual culture.

But a prestigious token position with real resources beats being marginalized at a worse institution. So take it if it’s real. Just don’t mistake it for institutional change.

The culture that spent a decade screening us out remains intact. We’re ornamental, proof they tried. And in a couple years, when Trump leaves office and if a Democrat takes the Oval Office, they’ll do a 180.

The Committee Trap

Meanwhile, back at my current university, the president wanted to meet about “speech policies.”

I told her I was only interested if we were expanding protections — adopting the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s (FIRE) model, creating a real marketplace of ideas. If she wanted new speech codes or restrictions, I’d pass.

She replied within minutes, eager to meet before the next full faculty meeting, where she planned to announce her initiative. Translation: she needed cover.

I laid out the facts: faculty speech is union territory; student speech belongs to the student conduct office (which I’ve already worked with — no more punishing off-campus tweets). But a faculty committee? Guaranteed failure. Campus is full of “I love free speech, but…” professors who want protections for themselves and carve-outs for views they dislike. When I previously pushed to align the CBA’s academic freedom statement with the First Amendment, they preferred vague caveats about “harmful speech.” Only when the administration started punishing their own pro-Palestine activism did some suddenly discover the value of robust speech protections.

So, what exactly did the president want from this initiative? She didn’t have a clear answer. Just something on campus speech. Classic administrative box-checking.

No thanks. I declined.

A toothless report that gets ignored — or worse, used to justify new restrictions — helps no one. And my name would be attached to it. “Look, even our free speech guy agreed!”

The fact that I’m known as “the free speech guy” on a campus of more than a thousand faculty says everything. That label shouldn’t be distinctive; it should be baseline. At elite places, you might find a small cohort of conservatives. Here, I’m it. The others who think like me stay quiet for career survival. That’s why I’m visible —and suddenly valuable.

The president doesn’t want viewpoint diversity. She wants a shield. During 2020-21, when anything less than exuberant progressive orthodoxy could get you cancelled, she was nowhere. Now she needs the token heterodox professor for the photo op. Convenient.

I told her I’d rather spend that time where I can have an impact: my department. Where I can hire faculty who want to educate, not proselytize. Build courses that teach students marketable skills instead of activism. Make an actual difference.

How to Tell the Difference

Right now, there are real opportunities: endowed chairs at places under genuine pressure, civics centers with actual budgets and faculty lines, positions with resources and autonomy.

But there’s also lots of performative theater: committees with no authority, task forces that produce reports nobody reads, “dialogue initiatives” designed to check a box.

The performative stuff comes with vague mandates and no resources. “We’d like you to assess the landscape.” “Engage in dialogue with faculty.” “Make recommendations.”

Translation: spend your time producing a document that gets filed and ignored, while we use your participation to claim we consulted the conservative/heterodox/viewpoint-diversity hire.

Your job is to tell the difference fast. We’re in a brief window where we have leverage.

After more than a decade of being told we don’t belong, they finally need us.

Don’t be so grateful you waste it. Make them pay for it with real resources and real authority, or tell them to find someone else.

The shift is real. The opportunities are real. But most of what’s coming your way is a performance designed to let them say they tried.

Choose carefully.

More dispatches from the campus that’s lost the plot: subscribe below.

Subscribe now

The DEI apparatus that’s a staple throughout higher ed isn’t just legally dubious. It’s also a layer of red tape that can undermine its own goals. A FacultyLeaks.com reader at a large public university recently shared with us an anecdote that illustrates this.

Their social science department needed to hire a professor. The job ad was ready to post. Under normal circumstances, it should have gone live within days.

It didn’t. First it had to clear a DEI review committee run by the college’s new Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, which took about two weeks. Then it went to a second DEI committee, this one created by a newly hired Vice Provost, for another two weeks.

What were they reviewing? Boilerplate stuff — the same equal-opportunity language that appears on every faculty job posting at the university, which had already been approved by legal, already approved by HR. Yet, it took two committees four weeks to rubber-stamp a form that should have been pro forma.

The Window

In this field, timing matters. While this department’s ad sat in a queue for a month, competitors were already scheduling interviews. Three or four strong candidates of color had accepted jobs elsewhere during the delay. The math was simple: a four-week holdup in a fast-moving job market means the best candidates are gone before you’re allowed to even evaluate their CV.

What remained, according to a committee member, was a pool of highly qualified white men and a handful of less-qualified white women — the stronger female candidates, like the candidates of color, were already gone. One went to an Ivy.

The Spreadsheet

So, the committee worked with what remained. Candidates were rated on a simple 1-2-3 scale: top, middle, bottom. The search chair rated most white male candidates as a 3: bottom tier, across the board. In most cases, she was the only committee member who scored them that low.

The rest of the committee saw qualified scholars. She saw the wrong people studying the wrong things — white men whose research didn’t touch on The Current Thing™. Those assessments were then shared with the full department.

The Pitch

When the faculty met to make a decision, she made her pitch: let the search fail. Hire nobody, repost the ad earlier next year, and hope for a more diverse pool. Better to lose a year than hire a white man.

Nobody argued the top candidate was unqualified. By several accounts, he already had a record strong enough for tenure. The question wasn’t whether he was good enough. It was whether he was the right color.

The department overruled her and hired him.

The Chain

But think about what just happened.

The university created two new DEI positions. Those administrators created two new committees. The committees delayed a time-sensitive search by a month. The delay cost them every diverse candidate in the pool. And when the remaining pool was too white, the search chair tried to kill the search entirely.

The machinery built to increase diversity made diversity less likely. When the machinery failed, a human tried to rig what was left.

A committee member reported the search chair’s conduct. Nothing happened.

The Incentive

The search chair wasn’t freelancing. She’d been told this position was earmarked for a candidate of color. She had institutional permission, maybe not a direct order, but something close, to deliver a demographic outcome. When the process made that impossible, she improvised.

The DEI committees were doing what they were created to do: review things. So they reviewed things. Nobody asked whether a month mattered.

This is how institutions eat themselves. You hire administrators to promote diversity. They create committees. The committees create delays. The delays eliminate the candidates you wanted. Then someone on the ground, under pressure to hit a demographic target, tries to fix it by rigging what’s left.

The machine sabotaged its own purpose. But, unlike many of our stories, this one has a happy ending.

The DEI committees have since been dissolved. The white guy who got hired? He’s doing fine.

More dispatches from the campus that’s lost the plot: subscribe below.

Subscribe now

On Tuesday, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a federal lawsuit against The New York Times, alleging the newspaper passed over a white male employee for a promotion because of his race and sex. The complaint, filed in the Southern District of New York, says the Times’s “stated race and sex-based representation goals” drove the decision not to advance his candidacy for a deputy editor role.

The Times called the suit “politically motivated.” On X, Harvard professor Maya Sen posted the complaint with a punchy observation: “Very short hop, skip & jump to academia.”

Whether others view that as a warning or a welcome, the connection is hard to argue with. More on that later. But let’s stay with journalism for a moment — because the EEOC lawsuit isn’t the revelation. It’s the confirmation. The discrimination has been happening in plain sight, announced in press releases and class photos, for years. The only news is that a federal agency finally decided to look.

The Class Photos

If you want to understand what’s happening in American journalism hiring, skip the mission statements. Look at the pictures. Try finding a white male in a recent intern class photo. It’s like a game of Where’s Waldo — except in most of these cohorts, Waldo isn’t hiding. He’s just not there.

This has been visible for years. In 2016, a Huffington Post executive editor tweeted a photo of an all-female editors meeting as a celebration of diversity. The backlash wasn’t about the absence of men — it was that the women were too white. The missing men weren’t the bug. They were the feature. A decade later, the pattern has only intensified — and it starts at the gate.

To understand why that matters, you need to understand what these programs are. These aren’t volunteer gigs at the campus paper anyone can do. These are the most prestigious and competitive entry points in American journalism — many of them paid, highly selective, and functionally essential for anyone who wants a career at a major outlet. Think of them as the journalism equivalent of a summer associate position at a BigLaw firm or a top medical residency placement. If you want to make it in this industry, this step is all but required.

Here’s what those entry points look like right now.

The Los Angeles Times Fellowship Class of 2026 has 13 fellows. Based on the published photo, none appear to be white males. The program doesn’t hide its origins — it’s the direct descendant of what was originally called the Minority Editorial Training Program, launched to “build a pipeline and provide opportunities for journalists of color.” They’ve since renamed it. The outcomes haven’t changed. The LA Times’s 2025 summer intern class had 26 interns. Perhaps one was a white male.

At NPR, the fall 2025–26 intern class of 18 appears to contain one white male. At Politico, seven interns were selected from nearly 700 applicants for fall 2025. All seven were women. Not a single male of any race. The spring 2026 class had nine — one white male.

The New York Times Fellowship — the paper’s own early-career pipeline, the one that feeds directly into the newsroom now being sued by the EEOC — has 31 fellows in its current class. Only eight are male. At most four are white men.

This pattern extends well beyond national flagships. The Charlotte Observer’s 2025 summer class: one white male out of 10. The Seattle Times 2026 summer cohort: one out of 11. And at the Dow Jones News Fund, the central pipeline program that places interns at the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and dozens of other outlets, the class of 81 is — per the Fund’s own announcement — 63% women and 65% students of color. Their stated mission: producing journalists who “better reflect the demographics of the communities they cover.”

Add it up across these programs. Roughly 206 entry-level positions. White males hold somewhere around 13 to 21 of them, depending on how generously you count the ambiguous cases. That’s somewhere between 6 and 10% — for a group that represents approximately 22% of current college enrollment.

These weren’t cherry-picked. They were the first programs that came up in a quick search of publicly available journalism intern and fellowship announcements. If anything, a more exhaustive survey would likely make the picture worse.

The Inexorable Zero

In Teamsters v. United States (1977), the Supreme Court held that when a demographic group’s representation in a workforce is so far below its share of the qualified population that the disparity “is itself a telltale sign of purposeful discrimination,” detailed statistical analysis becomes unnecessary. The Court called this an “inexorable zero” — a pattern so stark it supports an inference of discrimination on its face.

No regression model required. No hiring memo needed. The evidence is on Instagram.

And the baseline isn’t some theoretical abstraction. As Jacob Savage documented in Compact last December, “the pipeline hadn’t changed much — white men were still nearly half the applicants — but they were now filling closer to 10% of open positions.” A senior hiring editor told Savage directly: “It was a given that we weren’t gonna hire the best person… It was jarring how we would talk about excluding white guys.”

None of this is a knock against the women and journalists of color who earned these positions. This is about the math. When a group that constitutes a significant share of the applicant pool is represented at rates approaching zero in the selected cohort — across an entire industry, year after year — something other than merit is doing the sorting.

The Architecture

What makes this particularly difficult for the outlets to defend is that many of them have published the institutional architecture behind these outcomes.

The Philadelphia Inquirer maintains an entire public-facing DEI webpage dedicated to its commitment to becoming an “anti-racist organization.” It features an “Anti-Racist Workflow Guide,” a racial content consultation channel, and employee resource groups organized around BIPOC identity, LGBTQ+ identity, and women — with no corresponding group for viewpoint or ideological diversity. The internship program sits on the same page, nestled under the anti-racist framework.

NPR describes its internship program as helping the organization do “the kind of journalism that embraces the rich diversity of the country.” The LA Times Fellowship was literally called the Minority Editorial Training Program until they renamed it. These aren’t hidden internal memos. They’re public mission statements.

And here’s the legal irony: many of these outlets have moved away from explicitly race-restricted fellowship criteria. The language is now neutral — “various backgrounds,” “diverse thinkers and doers.” But the outcomes are statistically identical to the old race-restricted programs. Under Title VII, that’s not a defense. If anything, it makes things worse — when neutral language produces the same discriminatory results, courts can conclude the neutrality is just window dressing — or what the law calls “pretextual.”

They didn’t stop discriminating. They just stopped saying the quiet part out loud. Most of them, anyway.

The FRONTLINE/Firelight Investigative Journalism Fellowship, run in partnership with PBS and funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is “open by invitation only to emerging, diverse filmmakers.” Not open applications — invitations, to pre-selected “diverse” candidates, with taxpayer money.

The Downstream

The consequences extend beyond individual careers. White men are the most reliably conservative-leaning demographic in American politics. When you systematically exclude them from the journalism pipeline, you’re not just discriminating against individuals — you’re engineering newsrooms that are ideologically homogeneous by design.

Public trust in media sits at historic lows. Americans — particularly conservatives and independents — consistently report that they perceive liberal bias in mainstream coverage. Newsrooms respond by pledging to “rebuild trust” and “serve all communities.” But their hiring practices are doing precisely the opposite: constructing editorial staffs drawn from an increasingly narrow demographic and ideological slice of the country, then wondering why the public doesn’t see itself reflected in the coverage.

These outlets say they want newsrooms that reflect the communities they serve. America is roughly 30% white male. Their intern cohorts are running at 6-10%. They are not reflecting their communities. They are curating them.

The Reckoning

The EEOC v. New York Times is a single case about a single employee denied a single promotion. But the complaint’s core allegation — that “stated race and sex-based representation goals” drove an employment decision — describes something far larger than one newsroom. It describes an industry.

The receipts have been public the whole time. Every spring, summer, and fall, the class photos go up like trophies — in press releases and Instagram carousels and fellowship announcements. The evidence was never buried. It was celebrated.

Professor Sen’s observation stands on its own terms. It is a very short hop, skip, and jump — not just to academia, but to every institution that spent the last decade building a pipeline designed to exclude a specific demographic group, then published the receipts.

The class photos were always the evidence. The EEOC just finally looked. Now look at new faculty hire announcements at universities across the country — you’ll see the same trend. EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas should take a peek.

More dispatches from the campus that’s lost the plot: subscribe below.

Subscribe now

Martin Hackworth, a retired Idaho State University faculty member and Substack writer, recently published a piece arguing that FacultyLeaks.com is part of the very problem it aims to expose. His argument is straightforward: tenure exists to protect speech. Use it. Put your name on it. Stop hiding.

It’s a fair critique. It deserves a serious answer. And Hackworth is not alone in making it. Some version of this challenge shows up in the comments to almost every essay published here: Provide names, tell us which school.

I recognize that my anonymity has costs. Readers should be skeptical of any anonymous source. They should demand evidence over assertion. They should wonder about motive. That’s not a flaw in the audience. That’s the audience doing its job. The burden falls on the anonymous writer to earn trust the hard way — through documentation, through specificity, through being right over and over again until the pattern speaks louder than a byline.

For what it’s worth, I share the skepticism. When I see a news article that relies on anonymous sources (and often for something that doesn’t really merit anonymity) my first instinct is to discount it. Readers should bring that same instinct here.

I accept that burden.

But Hackworth’s critique rests on an assumption that should be stated plainly, because it is wrong: that the person behind this Substack has not spoken up.

I have.

I have raised these issues internally, through every channel that exists. Multiple times. Over the span of years. I have the receipts. So do those who can do something about it.

The question is not whether I have spoken up. The question is whether they will act.

Hackworth imagines a simple calculus: risk the chair position, hire a lawyer, enforce tenure, be a grizzly. It’s a good story. He lived it, at real personal cost, and he’s earned the right to tell it. But it is his story. It is not everyone’s story. The assumption that the only thing standing between an anonymous writer and a byline is a shortage of nerve is the kind of thing that sounds right but isn’t.

There are situations — legal, institutional, professional — where identification does not merely create inconvenience. It ends the work. Not because the writer is fired, but because the writing becomes impossible. Every sentence becomes a grievance filing, every observation a conflict of interest, every documented failure a personnel matter that someone will claim cannot be discussed publicly. The institution does not need to destroy you. It just needs to make the conversation about you instead of about what you wrote.

That is not a hypothetical. Anyone who has worked in a university for more than 15 minutes knows exactly how this operates.

Hackworth describes spending decades writing under his own name, making just over $40,000 a year as a senior lecturer, and watching colleague after colleague refuse to follow his example. He draws the lesson that people should be braver. Maybe. But there is another lesson in that data, and it is the one his colleagues actually learned: the system often punishes exactly what he is advocating. He is proof of his own counterargument.

He compares this Substack to Miles Taylor, the anonymous Trump administration official whose credibility took a beating once his identity was revealed — not because he was anonymous, but because he had denied being “Anonymous,” and because a DHS deputy chief of staff, later chief of staff, turned out to be a less dramatic figure than the cabinet-level insider many readers had imagined. Taylor’s problem was not anonymity. Taylor’s problem was that the reveal was smaller than the mystery.

Faculty Leaks is built on documents. On institutional policies. On hiring data, governance structures, and accreditation standards. Some identifying details have been changed — that is done for anonymity, and readers should weigh it accordingly. But the patterns are real. The dysfunction is real. And the evidence exists whether or not you know who is writing about it.

Will identification come eventually? Maybe. Anonymity gets harder to maintain the longer you do this. It’s possible some people have already figured out who I am. But they’re not the doxxing type — and I haven’t committed any crime. The goal of this Substack is not to remain anonymous forever. The goal is to remain honest for as long as possible. And right now, those two things are the same.

To the readers who remain skeptical: good. Stay skeptical. Read critically. Demand evidence. That is the appropriate relationship between an audience and an anonymous source.

To Hackworth: the critique is reasonable. The assumption behind it is not.

And to the people at federal government enforcement agencies who have heard my concerns directly:

I am still waiting for you to do your job. It’s been almost 500 days.

More dispatches from the campus that’s lost the plot: subscribe below.

Subscribe now

Many readers have assumed our essays are satire. Believe it or not, they aren’t. The events, meetings, documents, and institutions are real — only identifying details are changed, for obvious reasons.

The animations are different. These are satire, loosely inspired by real experiences in the same academic world. The comic frame allows for what direct reporting cannot: caricature, absurdity, and the alien-invasion metaphor that academia has been earning for years. Productions are AI-assisted. All writing, direction, and editorial decisions are the author’s.

Episode 1: “The Faculty”

A short animated film about a new professor’s surreal first day on the tenure track. The premise comes from our recent essay, “The Faculty,” about the alien-invasion feeling of contemporary academia.

More episodes if this lands.

More dispatches from the campus that’s lost the plot: subscribe below.

Subscribe now

There is a 1998 cult classic movie called The Faculty in which students at a high school slowly realize their teachers have been replaced by aliens. The teachers look the same, talk the same, but something is unmistakably off.

I have started to feel like I am living that movie every time I step onto campus.

Speaking Klingon

A few weeks ago I emailed faculty across a few departments to let them know that a film director from India would be visiting campus to give a talk, in case any wanted to bring their classes. A Dutch art historian hit reply-all to inform everyone that the word “Bollywood” was perhaps problematically colonial — and to wonder whether “Filme” might be a more inclusive alternative.

This was the first time I heard of “Filme.” I had to Google it. The director himself uses “Bollywood.” So does the Indian film industry and every Indian and Indian-American friend I’ve ever had, including academics. But somewhere in the (mostly Western) scholarly literature the term had been flagged as problematic, and a European academic had appointed herself its guardian on behalf of people who had never asked for her help.

This is the kind of conversation that now clutters my inbox routinely. The technical vocabulary of the contemporary academy is functionally a separate language. Consider “intra-action”: professor Karen Barad’s term for the idea that everything is connected. Don’t worry, it only takes her about 400 pages to say so. Or consider “cisheteropatriarchy,” “onto-epistemology,” or the now-ubiquitous demand to “problematize” literally everything from parking permits to plotlines. Then there’s “trauma-informed pedagogy,” which began as a clinical concept and now floats through committee minutes about syllabus deadlines, flexible grading, and whether campus spaces are sufficiently trauma-informed and decolonized.

The function of this vocabulary is not communication. Most of these terms can be replaced with regular English without losing anything except the pretension. They are loyalty tests, not concepts. Drop “diffractive methodology” or “agential cut” in a paper and three reviewers nod; ask what it means in plain English and you’ve outed yourself as an outsider.

It’s like these people are speaking Klingon. But at least Klingon has a dictionary and a consistent grammar. Academic jargon is designed to be untranslatable on purpose.

The Reception

This is why I skip faculty receptions. The wine is mid at best and the company is stranger still. I would need a copious amount of alcohol just to stand being in the room for 10 minutes, and there is a non-trivial risk I would say something honest and get called in for a talk with the dean or HR.

Once, in line at the campus coffee shop, I overheard a colleague telling another professor that she and her partner had originally planned to send her child to an academically stronger school. They had decided instead, she said, that they wanted her around “a more diverse student body, because that’s really important.” I looked the chosen school up later. Online forums described an environment that was demonstrably unsafe. She had either not looked it up or not clocked it. She had simply enrolled her child in someone else’s experiment and decided this was the moral choice. If her child has a rough experience, will she chalk it up as the price of cultural enrichment?

Some of the weirdness is harmless. Academics have always been odd. But the current version has settled into a tone that is neither charmingly eccentric nor seriously scholarly. When I was in college, my professors sometimes took the class out for pitchers of beer at the off-campus dive; the faculty went to baseball games together during summer breaks. The contemporary version’s idea of a Saturday off campus is attending a “No Kings” protest — promoted, as it happens, by the American Association of University Professors.

My colleagues also find it strange that I give students my cell phone number. My professors in graduate school did, and it was one of the reasons I found them approachable. But one of my colleagues said it was “ew,” apparently appalled that I would let undergraduates call or text me. Every other profession calls this accessibility. Students barely read email anymore — if they won’t come to the mountain, the mountain texts. But many faculty treat students less like people they serve and more like subjects they preside over. Some practically panic if they run into a student off campus, as if the encounter might contaminate their private lives.

The campus staff, by contrast, remain reassuringly human. The landscaper who trims the hedges has a clearer view of the world than almost all full professors I know. The IT guy who fixes the projector when it’s glitchy is the sanest person I will speak to all day. I rely on weekly chats with staff like this to keep functioning, the way most people depend on coffee.

Sealed In

None of this is accidental. The system selects for it, and the numbers confirm it.

A 2018 study by Mitchell Langbert found that among 8,688 tenure-track faculty at America’s top liberal-arts colleges, registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans 10.4 to 1. At elite humanities and social science departments, the registered Republican is functionally extinct.

This is not a complaint about Democrats. It is a structural observation about a guild that has spent 40 years applying a single cultural and ideological filter. When a profession self-selects that aggressively, it stops looking like the country it claims to educate. It develops its own dialect, its own etiquette, its own taboos. Insiders experience this as normal. Everyone else experiences it as The Faculty.

Class homogeneity makes it worse. A 2022 study in Nature Human Behaviour found that U.S. tenure-track faculty are 25 times more likely than the average American to have a parent with a Ph.D. The professoriate is now overwhelmingly drawn from the same narrow socioeconomic slice. Combine ideological inbreeding with class inbreeding and you get an organism statistically incapable of producing the range of views and life experiences that a normal human institution would contain.

William F. Buckley once said he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. The line used to be a joke.

People who have never met a working-class family in Middle America will nonetheless spend their careers theorizing about that family’s interests, prescribing policies on its behalf, and explaining to one another why it keeps voting the wrong way. The room is full of people who agree, and none of them has ever had to convince anyone outside it of anything. Worse, they look down on those families — and are actively hostile to certain ordinary jobs the country depends on. Last semester a colleague mentioned, in passing, that she would never write a recommendation letter for a student applying to military Officer Training School. She said it the way one might refuse to recommend someone to a multi-level marketing scheme.

The alienness exists on a spectrum. You will find much more of it in humanities than STEM, more at a small liberal arts college on the coasts than at a state flagship in the South or Midwest — but the cultural gravity pulls in the same direction everywhere. Conservative spaces have their own brand of weirdness — attend CPAC or a Federalist Society event and you’ll see it. The difference is that conservatives typically know they are not the norm. The academy has convinced itself it is the baseline of human normality. That is what makes the alien invasion feel so complete.

Self-selection alone does not explain the full pathology. Confinement does. In the early 1990s, eight researchers sealed themselves inside Biosphere II, an Arizona greenhouse meant to simulate a closed planetary ecosystem — they had, in effect, built their own alien planet and moved into it. Within months the crew had fractured into two hostile factions that stopped speaking to each other. By the end of the two-year experiment they had developed their own folk grievances, their own surveillance norms, their own informal hierarchies of moral standing — a closed society in miniature, with all the dysfunctions of a real one and none of the exits. They had, quite literally, moved into a giant pod.

The academy is the 30-year version, with better food. Harvard professor Arthur Brooks recently argued in The Free Press that the deepest problem on American campuses is not ideology but the pressure to conform — a diagnosis Yale itself confirmed this April in a self-critical report acknowledging that “echo chambers do not produce the best teaching, research, or scholarship.” Closed groups develop their own gravity. People who would speak up in any other context find that here, the social cost is too high. Chris Brunet, whose must-read Substack covers higher-ed scandals, has written about making peace with never pursuing a PhD after learning exactly how high.

The Other Nay

There is one small ray of hope. In faculty senate, whenever the latest ceremonial resolution comes up — a land acknowledgment, a denunciation of something the university has no power over, or a vote to revoke an honorary degree given a decade ago because the recipient has since expressed wrongthink — there is invariably one other “nay.” Votes are cast by handheld clicker, anonymously, so I will never know who the other holdout is. The room is too big to guess by faces. I would buy that person a drink if I could.

Two votes against, every single time. More than I expected. A quiet reminder that not everyone in the building has been replaced by bodysnatchers.

Letters from the Outside

I am not the only one who sees it. A Ph.D. anthropologist from the South messaged me to describe her years at a major state university up north. A professor announced, in front of her, that the world would be better if “we just nuked Mississippi.” A famous woman in the department told her to cut her hair because “nobody wants a Southern belle.” She cut it. A senior faculty member used to sing “My Magnolia!” down the hallway at her — and later declared in class that if he ever discovered a Republican in the program he would form a committee to have them expelled.

She was, for the record, a registered Democrat. Her peers suspected her of being conservative because she dressed up for class and once criticized the United Nations.

These stories are not outliers. They are the median. Education researchers sanitize the dynamic into terms like “rapport,” “approachability,” and “classroom climate,” but spend 10 minutes on Reddit or graduate forums and the subtext is not subtle. A 2024 survey found that 60% of college students do not feel comfortable disagreeing with their professors. The professors involved nonetheless believe they are the reasonable ones in the room. Their colleagues agree. They have been inside the building so long that nothing inside it registers as strange anymore. The pod people never notice the pods.

The Verdict

The public has overwhelmingly noticed too. Gallup’s measure of confidence in higher education fell from 57% in 2015 to an all-time low of 36% in 2024, with a modest rebound to 42% in 2025. The most common reason cited is politicization — 38% of skeptics now point to political agendas.

This is an industry that spent a decade telling the country the country was the problem. The country finally answered.

In the movie the students defeat the aliens with a drug they manage to procure. There is no equivalent in real life. The aliens in academia were hired through a national search, granted tenure by peer vote, and will remain until retirement. They will train the next generation in their own image. They will continue to ask, when a director from Mumbai arrives on campus, whether we shouldn’t really be calling it “Filme.”

The students figure it out first. They always have.

More dispatches from the campus that’s lost the plot: subscribe below.

Subscribe now

A federally funded program at a Midwestern public research university — one known for its engineering and computing programs — trained deans and faculty chairs to keep sending hiring shortlists back for revision until the demographic breakdown satisfied the institution’s preferred benchmark.

We have the document courtesy of a FacultyLeaks.com reader.

It is a 42-page institutional guide titled “Guide to Inclusive Faculty Hiring.” Produced by the campus’s NSF-funded ADVANCE program, it was circulated to search committees, department chairs, and deans. It is a roadmap for proxy discrimination in faculty hiring, detailing exactly how to evaluate candidates, what training faculty must complete, and how to intervene when the demographic outputs of a search don’t match a predetermined target.

The Mechanism of Proxy Discrimination

The guide defines a “diverse” candidate pool as one that “reflects the current demographics of the field.” Before a search even begins, leadership is instructed to set a benchmark drawn from the NSF’s Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED).

The process is coldly mathematical: if a field like Health Sciences is 67.44% female nationally but your applicant pool is lower, the search is flagged. But the most revealing part of the document is the “Short List Audit.” When a dean receives the demographic breakdown of finalists, they are instructed to compare those percentages to the original pool.

Crucially, this audit is asymmetrical. The guide only mandates a “pause” and a “redo” if the shortlist is “not as diverse” as the pool. If a shortlist significantly over-represents the demographics the guide is designed to increase, no such audit is required. This is not a search for “neutrality”; it is a one-way ratchet.

The Mind-Reading Protocol

The guide includes a legally significant instruction. Deans are told not to identify specific candidates by race or gender and demand their addition. Instead, they are told to send the rubric back for re-evaluation until the results change.

The guide explicitly advises: “You shouldn’t be telling them, you need to add X type of person... Instead, try to convey that the two pools don’t match and the selection needs to be revisited.” It is a game of institutional charades. The dean essentially tells the committee: I cannot legally tell you to hire based on race, so I will keep rejecting your work until you spontaneously arrive at the racial breakdown I want. This is the definition of proxy discrimination.

The Scoring of Ideology

Beyond demographic counting, the document reveals how candidates are screened for ideological alignment. The guide provides a “Contributions to Diversity” rubric (Appendix B) that treats DEI statements as a technical competency on par with research excellence.

Candidates are scored on a scale. A high-achieving researcher who provides a generic or “vague” statement on diversity can be ranked lower than a less-productive candidate who uses the correct institutional lexicon. This effectively functions as a political litmus test, allowing committees to penalize applicants who do not affirm the institution’s diversity framework under the guise of standardized scoring.

A Total Institutional Siege

The guide ensures demographic accounting touches every stage of the professional lifecycle:

• Job Postings: Descriptions must be run through a “gender decoder” to scrub “masculine wording.”

• Committee Formation: No faculty member may serve without a “Diversity Literacy Certification.”

• The “Bias Interrupter” Scripts: The guide provides scripts for committee members to “interrupt” colleagues during deliberations. It encourages members to challenge their peers’ professional judgments with scripted prompts like: “Are we assuming he is more productive because he is a man?”

• Negotiations: Deans are instructed to monitor “start-up packages” (lab equipment and funding) to account for “gendered” communication patterns, potentially adjusting financial offers based on the candidate’s sex rather than the negotiation itself.

The Federal Connection

The ADVANCE program is not a rogue operation. It is a long-standing initiative of the National Science Foundation. Since 2001, it has funded programs at over a hundred institutions—typically through multi-million dollar awards.

While the NSF archived the ADVANCE program on January 31, 2025, and active grants were terminated in April 2025 under the current administration, the infrastructure remains. Once these guides are baked into the bureaucracy, they become the default setting for HR departments. The document we obtained cites similar materials from Yale, Columbia, Maryland, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Penn State. This does not appear to be a localized glitch; it looks like part of a national blueprint that continues to function even after the federal funding has been pulled.

The Post-SFFA Landscape

In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), the Supreme Court clarified that race-conscious practices violate the Equal Protection Clause. Chief Justice Roberts famously noted: “What cannot be done directly, cannot be done indirectly.” By mandating that committees “re-discuss the rubric” until they achieve a specific demographic output, universities are attempting to do indirectly what the law now forbids. Justices Thomas and Alito have specifically highlighted that “race-neutral” plans adopted with the intent of achieving racial outcomes constitute unconstitutional proxy discrimination.

Check Your Own Campus

We have one 42-page document. There could be hundreds more like it — perhaps a university you’re familiar with as an employee, alum or tuition-paying parent. See for yourself: search for the “ADVANCE guide” or “Search Committee Handbook” at your own institution. Look for the “shortlist audit” requirements and the “diversity literacy” mandates.

If they wrote it down, the receipts exist. If they have since deleted them, the Internet Archive remembers. The quota was never supposed to be written down. But here it is.

More dispatches from the campus that’s lost the plot: subscribe below.

Subscribe now

Open the admissions page of any American university and somewhere on it you’ll find a percentage: first-generation college students, X%.

Schools advertise the number the way they advertise SAT averages and student-to-faculty ratios. The higher the figure, the better the optics. There are reasons why deans beam about this statistic — and one of them they would likely not name out loud.

Nobody asks the obvious follow-up: First-generation compared to what?

The category only makes sense if college attendance is the exception — something unusual, something that marks you as having overcome a hurdle. But somewhere between 38% and 54% of current undergraduates are first-generation, depending on which definition you use. The National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA) puts the figure at 54%. That’s more than half of all undergraduates in the country.

A diversity category that describes half your student body isn’t a diversity category. It’s just college. In fact, a generation ago, when two-thirds of American undergraduates actually were first-generation, nobody called them that. The category became a category only once it became useful as a legal blind.

The Box

What that looks like, on the ground, is something else.

Every spring, my department awards scholarships, many of which require the recipient to be first-generation. And every spring, financial aid emails me back to tell me my first pick isn’t eligible.

The disqualifying credential is sometimes a parent who briefly attended college, or a parent who graduated decades ago in a country the student has never lived in. Whatever it is, the rule is the rule. The category, it turns out, rarely tracks the hardship it claims to.

This isn’t just local dysfunction. In 2017, the New York Times reported on a high school senior whose mother had never enrolled in college and whose household was low-income. His father had earned a degree but died when the boy was a toddler. The school still said no. The father had a bachelor’s, and the rule was the rule. The credential lived on after the man holding it did not.

The category itself is a checkbox on an application. Some students don’t even know what the term means — “first-generation” is admissions-office jargon, not common usage, and the definition can vary significantly by school. But others are very aware that answering “yes” can be the difference between a rejection and a scholarship. If you Google “lying about first generation college student,” the top results are Reddit and TikTok threads of kids workshopping how to game the box. When a system rewards gaming, gaming becomes the rational move.

The Performance

The whole thing is bizarre because everyone is the first in their family to do something. This is a distinction only out-of-touch administrators could invent.

I’m the first in my family to earn a terminal degree. Nobody adjusted the expectations, and nobody gave me extra credit for showing up without a legacy. I was expected to perform at the same level as colleagues whose parents held endowed chairs, because that’s what the job requires.

My brother was the first in our family to earn a Division I athletic scholarship. The coach didn’t give him sympathy points for it. He cared about one thing: what he could do for the team. Performance was the metric. It still is, in every high-stakes field except this one.

The hardship-marker logic assumes credentials still determine outcomes, but that hasn’t been entirely true since the first dorm-room startup became worth a billion dollars. Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard. The Thiel Fellowship pays talented kids $250,000 to skip college entirely. Pro athletes routinely sign multi-million dollar contracts at 18. The deans bragging about their first-gen numbers are, in many cases, bragging about something close to the median American experience. They’ve mistaken the ordinary for the remarkable.

The Proxy

None of this is an accident. First-generation status is useful precisely because it sounds class-conscious while functioning as something else entirely. It’s a demographic proxy — a way to sort by race without sorting by race.

The numbers tell the story. According to federal data analyzed by NASPA and Forbes Advisor, 60% of Hispanic undergraduates and 59% of Black undergraduates identify as first-generation, compared to 36% of white students. By recruiting aggressively for first-gen status, an institution can produce racial diversity outcomes nearly identical to race-conscious admissions without ever actually checking a race box.

After the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, universities began treating first-generation status as a safe harbor. They aren’t exactly hiding it. In early 2025, one law school dean explained that while they can no longer sort by race, they can launch “innovative pipeline programs” open to first-generation students.

But this safe harbor may be an illusion. Justices Thomas and Alito have already signaled a shift toward the theory of “proxy discrimination” — arguing that race-neutral plans adopted with the specific purpose of achieving racial diversity are themselves unconstitutional. As The Atlantic noted back in 2016, first-gen and low-income are not the same thing, and conflating them isolates the very students the category is supposed to help. Many first-generation students are middle-class. Their parents are tradespeople, small business owners, immigrants whose foreign credentials don’t transfer. The student is the first to finish a four-year American degree. They are not the first to make rent. The institution wants the categories to be one and the same. Universities are racing to build infrastructure around a category that may not survive the next round of litigation, and they are doing it anyway.

The Fierceton Case

The most public collapse of this fiction was Mackenzie Fierceton, the University of Pennsylvania student whose Rhodes Scholarship was rescinded in 2022. Most outlets reported it as a story about a student who lied about being first-generation. The actual record, as documented in The New Yorker, suggests Penn’s own incoherent definitions were the real culprit.

According to Penn’s own criteria, you are first-generation if one of your parents took more than six years to complete their degree. Under that rule, if your parent paused their MIT degree to run a billion-dollar startup, you are first-generation. You also qualify if your parents didn’t complete their degree in the United States — meaning Prince William’s children meet Penn’s definition of a marginalized community.

Most tellingly, you qualify if you have a “strained relationship” with the parent who holds the degree. Penn wrote a definition broad enough to capture foster kids, Oxford legacies, and every teenager who has ever had a moody adolescence. When a student like Fierceton walked through the loophole they created, the institution pretended it had been duped. The category cannot mean “no parental degree” and “low income” and “cultural mismatch” and “no embarrassing edge cases” all at once. Eventually one goal collides with another, and the student standing in the collision gets blamed for the institution’s incoherence.

The Outcome

The completion data tells a more honest story than the admissions brochures. If the goal were actually helping these students, the conversation would center on the fact that only about half of first-generation students have earned a credential six years after enrolling. Even an analysis of NASPA data acknowledges that institutions invest heavily in first-gen swag and celebrations while their tutoring, transportation, and scholarship resources for those same students go unused.

Instead, the conversation centers on the enrollment number — the stat that looks good in the annual report and the fundraising materials. The institution loves the first-gen student on move-in day. They are remarkably quiet about them on graduation day.

Count the students coming in. Don’t look too hard at whether they make it out. Brag about the pipeline. Ignore the leak.

The Students

The institution sees a demographic category; I see a recurring tragedy of paperwork.

Every spring, my department processes scholarship applications. Many of the awards we administer require the recipient to be first-generation. The donors who established them are mostly dead, which means we cannot ask them what they actually meant by the term, so we use the institution’s definition.

The minimum GPA on most of these scholarships is 3.0. The average GPA in the department is much higher. The threshold was set decades ago when the average was lower. Nobody has revised it. Functionally, “3.0 minimum” means “everyone.” The selection criterion that matters is the first-gen box.

Every spring, I see students who would be transformed by these awards passed over because of a technicality in the parental-credential rule. Every spring, I see students who do not need the money receive it because the category — as the institution defined it — applies to them. Every spring, I write the same emails to financial aid, and every spring, I get the same response.

The category was supposed to capture something real. It captured something else. Now the institution depends on the confusion.

More dispatches from the campus that’s lost the plot: subscribe below.

Subscribe now

A source sent us a 2020 diversity plan from a flagship state business school. It’s 64 pages long, with seven department-level tactical plans and an appendix listing more than 150 DEI initiatives.

After George Floyd was killed in May 2020, every major institution was under pressure to show it was taking racial inequality seriously, and business schools were no exception. The result was a wave of documents like this one — formal plans with demographic targets, lists of programs and committees, and a paper trail proving the school was doing the work. Most of those plans have since been quietly pulled from their websites.

Plans of this kind usually use careful language to disguise what they’re actually doing. The preferences are real, but they’re dressed up to look like something else. This school didn’t bother.

Marketing couldn’t be bothered

Every department in the school got its own appendix in the plan. Most wrote in the cautious dialect of HR memos, with phrases like “proactively engage,” “broaden the pool,” and “intentional outreach.” The Marketing Department apparently didn’t get the memo, because its tactical plan lists, in plain bullet form, four official steps to “increase recruiting and retention of underrepresented (URM) faculty and tenure-track women faculty”:

• Pursue the URM or women faculty, if two candidates appear equal.

• Target hiring a tenured URM faculty member.

• Target URM and women graduates of the school.

• Target the top URM and women students at the flagship campus.

Those aren’t paraphrases or summaries. That’s what the document says.

The Chair of the EEOC on tiebreakers

The Marketing Department’s first bullet describes what employment lawyers call a tiebreaker, where two finalists look equal on the merits and the employer uses race or sex to decide between them. The current Chair of the EEOC, Andrea Lucas, has been telling employment lawyers since 2024 that tiebreakers based on race or sex are illegal under federal civil rights law, and that this remains true whether the employer treats race as a plus factor, a tipping point, or anything in between. Rooting out what she calls unlawful DEI-motivated discrimination is now her stated enforcement priority at the agency.

The Marketing Department wrote the tiebreaker into a formal recruitment plan four years before she said so, on school letterhead, and circulated the document to peer institutions.

Extra lines

Universities don’t usually create faculty positions out of nothing. A department gets a “line” — a slot to hire — when there’s a specific gap to fill, like a retiring labor economist, an unmet teaching need in operations, or a research area the school wants to grow into. The line follows the academic need.

Page 10 of the plan describes a different practice. The dean’s office hands out extra lines, beyond the usual allocation, to departments that can recruit URM candidates. The plan admits that these candidates’ research areas “may not coincide closely with” what the department actually needs. In other words, the line is the reward for the hire, rather than the other way around.

Finance gets creative

The Finance Department’s appendix opens with a table ranking the department first in its athletic conference for global diversity, which isn’t relevant to anything except that they wanted it on the record.

The department then floats some longer-term ideas. One is to offer the MBA as an “intermediate exit” from the PhD program, meaning a student who can’t finish the doctorate could still walk away with a master’s, and to use this as a recruiting inducement for minority students. A different degree pathway, designed around race. Also on the list: scholarships for URM and women high schoolers conditioned on an interest in finance or STEM, to feed the eventual faculty pipeline a decade out.

Forms for everyone, forever

Every tenure-track professor at the university — not just at the business school, but across every college on campus — fills out an annual report each fall documenting their research, teaching, and service from the previous year. The report goes to the central university administration, where it feeds into merit raises, promotion reviews, and tenure decisions. The software is called Digital Measures.

In September 2020, the dean of the business school wrote to the university’s Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and asked him to modify the software so that every professor, in every department, would be required to document their DEI activity each year alongside their research and teaching. He agreed, and the change was scheduled to take effect in 2022.

The dean of one school had successfully lobbied the central administration to add a permanent DEI reporting requirement for every tenure-track faculty member at the entire university. The plan describes this approvingly. It explains that the addition will “elevate the importance and value placed on DEI activities” and let the school “better track faculty involvement.”

AACSB

Most readers have never heard of AACSB, but every business school dean is terrified of it. AACSB is the international accrediting body for business schools, and it reviews each school every five years to confirm the faculty are “qualified” — meaning still actively engaged in research, teaching, and professional development. A school that loses AACSB accreditation effectively dies, because employers stop recruiting from it and students stop applying. So the worksheets get filled out.

In September 2020, this school added DEI teaching and research activities to those worksheets. AACSB didn’t require it; the school did it to itself. Points for DEI now count alongside points for publications on the form every faculty member fills out to demonstrate they’re still fit to teach.

This is how capture happens — not by memo, but by metric. A tenured professor can roll her eyes at a DEI committee, but she can’t roll her eyes at the accreditation worksheet.

The part where they admit it won’t work

The plan concedes, in writing, that the URM doctoral pipeline is tiny, that every business school in the country is chasing the same handful of candidates, and that only two of seven departments hit the 10% URM faculty target. The response, from a school that prides itself on data-driven management, is more committees, more task forces, more tactical plans, and more extra lines.

What the plan doesn’t count

The plan counts committees, initiatives, and hires. It doesn’t count what those cost — the faculty hours consumed by mandatory training and DEI committee service, the hiring decisions run through ideological screens before a CV gets read, the promotion process that asks every faculty member to document DEI activity alongside research and teaching, or the signal this sends to research-oriented scholars about where the school’s priorities actually are. Research-oriented faculty with outside options notice these signals, and then they leave. The plan documents the machinery that replaces them.

Reading it in 2026

In June 2023, the Supreme Court decided Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. The holding was about college admissions: race cannot be a factor in whether a student gets in. But the reasoning was broader. The Court held that treating people differently based on race — even to correct historical imbalances, even as one factor among many, even with good intentions — violates the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act.

The reasoning didn’t stop at admissions. Lower courts and federal agencies have been extending it ever since, into private employment, scholarships, contracting, and faculty hiring. Andrea Lucas told employment lawyers that tiebreakers based on race or sex are illegal, Trump made her head of the EEOC, and rooting out unlawful DEI-motivated discrimination is now her enforcement priority.

And a flagship state business school left a 64-page document sitting on its website with pursue the URM candidate if equal printed in bullet form. That’s not a legal argument. It’s an exhibit.

The school has quietly pulled the plan from its website, but the PDF lives on in the files of peer schools, consultants, and the source who sent it to us. Whether any of this is still in effect — the extra faculty lines, the annual report DEI questions, the AACSB worksheet additions, the tactical plans — we can’t say from the outside. If you know, write in.

The lesson isn’t that the policies were wrong. That argument is available elsewhere. The lesson is narrower: if you’re going to do this, don’t write it down. This one did.

More dispatches from the campus that’s lost the plot: subscribe below.

Subscribe now

Professor Kevin Bryan has written eight rules to restore public trust in universities. Professor Alex Tabarrok, who blogs at at Marginal Revolution, likes them. I like some of them too.

But let’s talk about what’s missing.

Rules 1, 2, and 4 are genuinely good. Produce useful knowledge. Serve the public. Do neutral, objective research. Hard to argue with any of that — which is exactly why they’ll be endorsed without hesitation by the same departments that just hired someone because her dissertation “centered marginalized epistemologies.” Everyone will nod. Nothing will change.

Rule 3 is where it gets interesting.

“Attract Talent from All of Society. Useful knowledge can be created by people from any social or economic background. Do not waste talent. Do not select talent based on who knows ‘how to play the game.’”

Bryan frames this as a socioeconomic problem. In practice that framing gets captured immediately — translated into demographic proxies that sound neutral and aren’t. The actual missing diversity is ideological. A department that’s 40% women and 0% conservatives hasn’t solved the diversity problem. It’s replaced one monoculture with another and given it a better press release.

There’s a second problem Bryan doesn’t name. A huge swath of academia — especially the humanities — is populated by people who have only ever known one institution: school. K-12, college, grad school, maybe a postdoc or a visiting position, then tenure track. No detours. No jobs where a customer could walk away or a boss could let them go. No skills tested against anything except a faculty committee. Many of these people have never negotiated a contract, managed a budget, or worked alongside someone whose hands were dirty at the end of the day. I’d wager a meaningful number couldn’t change a flat tire.

Some of them would consider that last sentence a compliment.

My department’s administrative staff — people who have worked alongside faculty for decades — can tell you immediately which faculty actually need their jobs and which ones don’t. It’s not subtle. And the ones who don’t need the job are almost always the ones who treat support staff like personal assistants. Print this out for me. Move those boxes out of my office. The people who’ve never had a boss tend to become the worst ones.

You hear it directly, if you’re in a position to hear it. I don’t understand why we have to recruit students or attend admissions events. That’s not my job. It’s always the same people. Privileged senior faculty with nice homes, rich spouses, or one foot already out the door. People for whom the paycheck is an afterthought.

I think about enrollment constantly. Whether our courses fill. Whether we stay relevant. Whether we still have a department in 10 years. Because at a tuition-dependent institution — which is most institutions — you are not just an ivory tower. You are also a business. If your courses don’t enroll, you face budget cuts. If you don’t develop new courses students actually want, you lose them to departments that do. Even elite schools aren’t fully insulated: if the cash-cow master’s program stops attracting students, or the business school isn’t offering AI or fintech concentrations while competing schools are, yield suffers. The endowment cushions the fall. It doesn’t eliminate it.

The faculty who came up through working industries — the ones who spent years in the field before entering the classroom — tend to understand this instinctively. They update their syllabi. They show up to open houses. They know students aren’t an interruption to academic life. They’re the point of it.

The ones who went K-12 straight through to tenure have never had to think this way.

I want to be clear about something. I’ve worked in industries where layoffs were routine — where one bad quarter of earnings could trigger a round of cuts and you knew your name might be on the list. Where your predecessor’s firing was the reason you had a job at all. Academia, by contrast, is the brass ring. Teach what you want. Research what interests you. Share knowledge with students for as long as you choose. Barring something genuinely illegal — embezzlement, sexual harassment — the job is yours for life. Only Supreme Court justices have something comparable.

I feel lucky every day. And that’s exactly why it bothers me to watch colleagues treat it like a waiting room. In my experience, the ones who treat the job as optional are almost never the ones who needed it in the first place. If you’ve stopped publishing, stopped updating your courses, stopped showing up for students — why are you here? The job is a gift. Coasting through it isn’t just bad for students and institutions. It’s a kind of grift. You’re collecting a salary for a performance you stopped giving years ago.

Which brings me to what’s missing from Bryan’s list.

Rule 9: Accountability must be structurally possible.

Bryan’s Rule 7 says fraud brings “immediate dismissal.” That sentence could only have been written by someone who has never tried to remove a tenured faculty member. In the real world, if you repeatedly skip required office hours, stop updating your courses, or simply check out for a decade, you get fired. Not after a governance review. Not after a strongly worded email. You get fired, because that’s what employed adults understand employment to mean.

In academia, the strongly worded email is the endpoint. The faculty governance process exists to protect you from whatever comes next. Tenure doesn’t just protect bad actors. It teaches them that performance was optional.

The Yale Report was polite about this. Bryan’s rules are polite about this. Everyone is very polite about this.

The incentive structure actively punishes the people who try to enforce standards and protects the people who violate them. The whistleblower gets frozen out. The ideological bully gets a named chair. The colleague who quietly does good work watches the Dean’s office rearrange itself to accommodate whoever screams loudest.

Eight rules is a good start. But rule nine is the one that determines whether the other eight are a reform agenda or a reading list.

What rule would you add? Comment below.

More dispatches from the campus that’s lost the plot: subscribe below.

Subscribe now

Since we launched, the messages have been coming in. In our DMs on X and Substack. Readers who recognize their own institutions in these pages. Readers who say: I have a version of this story. Readers who share it privately because they can’t share it any other way.

We’ve heard enough to know: it’s not just us.

So we’re opening the floor.

If you have a story — a hiring committee, a curriculum vote, a performance review, a faculty meeting, a dean’s memo, a rigged search, a grievance weaponized against the wrong person, a DEI training that made you question your career choices — we want to hear it.

We will read everything. We will publish the most instructive ones. We won’t use your name, your institution’s name, or the names of anyone involved. But the best protection is yours — change anything identifying before you hit send. We’re not a vault. Protect yourself accordingly.

Keep it under 250 words. One incident, specific details, no editorializing. True stories only. We’re not a creative writing workshop. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.

Send your story to: facultyleaks@proton.me

ProtonMail is end-to-end encrypted. You don’t need an account to send us a message.

One request: tell us what happened, not what it meant. The meaning tends to be obvious.

More dispatches from the campus that’s lost the plot: subscribe below.

Subscribe now

In April 2025, Yale President Maurie McInnis asked a committee to examine the problem of declining trust in higher education. A year later, the Committee on Trust in Higher Education has submitted its report.

The committee consisted of 10 tenured Yale faculty members.

They studied Yale.

To their credit, the committee acknowledged this problem early. Public commenters questioned whether tenured Yale faculty could objectively examine trust in Yale. The committee said this concern “redoubled their commitment” to humility and broad outreach. Then they spent a year producing a 50-page report. By tenured Yale faculty. About Yale. Submitted unanimously.

The humility, it seems, had limits.

What the Numbers Say

The report is, in places, admirably honest. The data it presents is genuinely damning, and the committee deserves credit for not burying it.

Trust in higher education has fallen from 57% in 2015 to 36% in 2024 — a historic low. 70% of Americans say higher education is heading in the wrong direction. Among self-identified Republicans, confidence dropped from 56% to 26% over the same period.

At Yale specifically, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 36 to 1 across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Law School, and the School of Management. Nearly a third of Yale undergraduates don’t feel free to express their political beliefs on campus — up from 17% in 2015. In 1963, 10% of Yale grades were A or A-minus. In 2022-23, that number was 79%. The median Yale student receives an A.

The committee presents all of this straightforwardly. They call grade inflation a “collective action problem.” They call the political homogeneity real. They acknowledge the culture of self-censorship. They even note, with apparent sincerity, that “echo chambers do not produce the best teaching, research, or scholarship.”

So far so good. Then come the recommendations.

The Postponement Agenda

There are 20 of them.

Recommendation 1 is “Take Responsibility.” It is addressed to faculty, trustees, administrators, and — this is real — first-year undergraduates. When responsibility belongs to everyone, it belongs to no one. This is the institutional version of a statement condemning all forms of hate.

The remaining 19 recommendations are a masterclass in institutional can-kicking. Self-studies. Joint committees. Faculty-student committees. More committees to study the committees. A civic education initiative. A grant program. Town halls. Advisory councils. And — this one is real — a recommendation that Yale “communicate effectively.”

Declining trust is, apparently, a communications problem. The solution is not to change what Yale does. It is to explain what Yale does better. To people who have already decided they don’t trust Yale.

This is not a reform agenda. It is a postponement agenda dressed in the language of reform. The committee spent a year studying institutional inertia and responded with institutional inertia. These institutions aren’t failing because the world became harsher. They’re failing because they mistook a collapse of legitimacy for a PR problem. Yale’s 20th recommendation proves the point.

Grade Inflation: Talk, Don’t Act

In 1963, 10% of Yale grades were A or A-minus. Today it’s 79%. The median student receives an A. The committee calls this a “collective action problem” — no individual professor wants to be the strict grader whose students are disadvantaged relative to peers.

To address it, the committee recommends a 3.0 mean grade — an idea, they note, that “will require further conversation among the faculty.” The faculty who have been inflating grades for decades will converse about whether to stop.

This is a choice. Mandatory grading curves are standard at most law and medical schools, implemented through administrative policy rather than faculty consensus. Harvard Law, Columbia Law — schools operating in the same elite tier as Yale — enforce grading curves by administrative decision. Someone made the call.

Yale College’s solution: further conversation among the faculty. The faculty who created the problem will discuss whether to fix it, on their own timeline, with no enforcement mechanism and no deadline.

The difference isn’t academic freedom. It’s institutional will.

Governance: The Dog That Didn’t Bark

The committee spent a year trying to determine what share of Yale’s budget goes to academic functions versus administration. They could not get the answer. “The difficulty,” they write, “is itself the finding.”

A university that cannot account for its own administrative growth to its own committee does not have a messaging problem. It has a governance problem. The recommendation: another committee, with faculty representation, to review administrative structure.

One imagines the committee that will be appointed to study that committee’s findings.

What the Report Refuses to Name

Here is what a 50-page Yale report on declining trust in higher education does not mention: DEI offices, DEI hiring criteria, mandatory DEI statements, ideological litmus tests in faculty searches, campus speech codes, Safe Zone culture, or the systematic exclusion of conservative speakers and perspectives from campus programming.

The report acknowledges a 36-to-1 partisan imbalance. It does not ask how that imbalance was produced or what institutional mechanisms maintain it. It recommends self-studies and pipeline programs. It does not recommend examining whether the hiring process itself filters for ideological conformity.

A report on why the public doesn’t trust Yale that cannot name the thing the public doesn’t trust Yale about is not a diagnosis. It’s a press release.

The Line That Explains Everything

Buried in the section on politics and intellectual pluralism, the report notes that “nearly everyone we spoke to agreed on one thing: Echo chambers do not produce the best teaching, research, or scholarship.”

Nearly everyone agreed. In a report submitted unanimously. By a committee of 10 Yale faculty members who apparently all reached the same conclusions after a year of deliberation.

The irony does not appear to have registered.

What Would Actually Help

The report’s honest data points toward a real problem. The public has stopped trusting higher education because higher education has, in measurable ways, stopped deserving trust — through grade inflation that renders degrees meaningless, through political homogeneity that produces ideological conformity, through administrative expansion that consumes resources without academic justification, and through a culture of self-censorship that punishes heterodox thought.

Nationwide, more than half of graduates are underemployed one year after graduation. Ten years out, 45% are still working jobs that don’t require a degree. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia projects up to 80 college closures per year.

The implicit promise — trust us, we are the gatekeepers — is collapsing. People are finding faster, cheaper, and often better alternatives on their own. Yale’s report doesn’t confront that. It assumes legitimacy remains intact and that better communication will restore public confidence. That’s not a reform strategy. It’s denial.

The Actual Cure

Not 20 committees. Not better messaging. Not a civic education initiative that reaches first-year students three times a year.

The cure is the report’s own first recommendation — actually followed: Take responsibility. Name the problem. Change the practices that caused it.

The committee submitted its findings unanimously. Yale will now form committees to consider them.

The 21st recommendation writes itself.

More dispatches from the campus that’s lost the plot: subscribe below.

Subscribe now

Let me tell you about The Candidate.

Before I do, some context. Every faculty hiring committee I’ve ever sat on has operated on an official premise: find the best person for the job. What actually happens in the room is another matter entirely. But this search was something else — even by the standards of a process that has never been as neutral as advertised.

The Spreadsheet

It started before the first application was reviewed. A colleague — one of the committee’s true believers — laid it out plainly: any new hire “must not be white.” Not “diversity is a priority.” Not “we should broaden our search.” Must. Not. Be. White.

This wasn’t a suggestion. It became the operating framework. The committee created a scoring matrix: teaching, research, terminal degree — and diversity. Except “diversity” didn’t mean what the university’s official policy said it meant.

The committee’s original definition of “diverse” meant non-male — excluding white men while allowing white women. When I pointed out that women are not exactly underrepresented in academia, and that excluding white men specifically would constitute gender discrimination, the definition was revised. The solution: expand the discrimination. It now meant non-white. All white candidates, men and women, were out. Progress.

White applicants were filtered out in the first round. Not evaluated and found lacking. Filtered. Pre-screened by name before anyone read their application. If your name sounded WASPy — think Milford C. Wellington III — your CV went in the trash unread. No one checked your teaching record. No one looked at your research. The name was enough. Ivy League PhDs, Emmy Award winners, Fulbright Scholars — an enormous swath of the applicant pool, gone before anyone read a word.

The methodology was so crude it almost certainly cut both ways. Promising minority candidates with Anglo-sounding names were likely never considered either. A black applicant with a name like Cortland Finnegan — look him up — would have been screened out before anyone read a word of his file. The committee wasn’t actually advancing diversity. It was advancing the appearance of diversity, as filtered through name-based racial guesswork.

One white female, Blair, made it through, courtesy of a colleague in another department who lobbied for her interview as a personal favor. She was also, by the committee’s informal calculus, somewhat diverse-adjacent — a self-identified LGBTQ+ member, which apparently counted for partial credit. Still, after her interview, a committee member summarized her candidacy in an email: “incredible” and “a perfect fit for us... but she is white.” The “but” doing considerable legal work in that sentence.

But not all non-white candidates were created equal. It was, effectively, a Diversity Olympics. The informal hierarchy rewarded intersectionality — the more identity boxes checked, the stronger the candidacy. Race, religion, national origin, gender identity: each one added points. Qualifications were a distant second. Political and ideological alignment was an unofficial but very real tiebreaker — the right kind of diverse, with the right kind of politics.

One candidate was advanced by a committee member despite not teaching anywhere near the subject area we were actually hiring for. The identity profile was exceptional. Enough boxes checked to make the missing qualifications feel beside the point.

And ideological screening cut in unexpected directions. I supported a minority candidate I thought was genuinely strong. A committee member objected. His reasoning: the candidate was “from Texas — and you know how they are!” He didn’t elaborate. The same committee member who would later accuse those of us who objected to the hire of racism.

One finalist, Marco, slipped through the racial filter because his last name sounded Hispanic. The committee was briefly excited. Diversity! But when he showed up in person and appeared to be white, the mood shifted. The committee chair wrote that despite Marco’s qualifications, he “doesn’t offer anything from a diversity perspective” — a Spanish-sounding name, she noted, doesn’t change the fact that someone is still white. She wrote this in a university email. The kind that can be subpoenaed. In fact, pretty much everything in this dispatch is documented — emails, text messages, voicemails, and official records. Just so we’re clear on that.

They had accidentally interviewed a white person. They were not pleased.

I raised concerns throughout the process. I told the chair directly: “This is discrimination. Someone is going to sue.” Her response was dismissive. She had a legal obligation to escalate. She didn’t.

Instead, a committee member sent an email to the entire group accusing anyone with reservations of racism. The department “desperately needs a voice from a person of color.” Anyone who disagreed was, by definition, part of the problem.

That wasn’t the only pushback. When I raised concerns during the meeting where finalists were being selected, I was shouted down. Not disagreed with — shouted down. As the meeting ended and one colleague headed for the door, he turned, wagged his finger at the room, and made it clear: no one was to go telling the dean about this and derail the process. Then he left.

That’s how the vote went unanimously — everyone but me for The Candidate.

The Candidate

So who was The Candidate?

A doctoral student — nearly seven years into a soft interdisciplinary degree he had not yet completed at the time of our offer, with a publication record consisting almost entirely of activist writing and left-wing arts journalism — the kind of work that counts as a "publication" if you squint and want it badly enough. So many publications for a young scholar, the chair gushed. When you’ve decided someone is the answer before you’ve read their file, everything looks like evidence you were right. It didn’t matter that he founded an anarchist group with a documented public record of violence, vandalism, and incitement against certain ethnic and religious groups.

His group had organized a coordinated rampage through a city’s public spaces and buildings. Equipment destroyed. Property vandalized. Multiple arrests. Significant property damage. The group’s own social media had urged followers to come out and cause destruction. The city’s own left-wing elected officials — not exactly a law-and-order crowd — condemned it publicly as criminal activity.

This was not obscure information. It was covered extensively — newspapers, local TV, viral social media posts. The Candidate was named. The group was named. The Candidate was identified as the group’s founder. All of it was searchable on Google at the time of the hire.

The committee’s response: hit pieces. Right-wing smears. He’s just an activist. A colleague who taught photojournalism dismissed the video evidence as a coordinated “far right” witch hunt. And besides — this was about viewpoint diversity. Academic freedom. Free speech. Never mind that the committee had spent months filtering applicants by race. Never mind that the anarchist group’s activities — coordinated property destruction, guides on harming police, threatening journalists — sit rather outside the boundaries of protected expression. The search committee members pushing hardest for this hire were, in their own estimation, moderates. Pragmatists. The reasonable center. People who had never voted for a conservative in their lives but considered anyone to the right of themselves a fascist. From that vantage point, yes, hiring the founder of a government-flagged anarchist group probably did look like a bold centrist move.

The anarchist group’s website, available to anyone with internet access, featured tactical guides for street protests including instructions for overpowering opponents and shutting down public spaces. Other leaders associated with the anarchist group had publicly boasted about past acts of political violence and were reportedly banned from entering certain countries. Members had been documented ejecting journalists from events they organized and declaring political opponents unwelcome. The Candidate himself appeared on video doing exactly that.

I flagged the video to the committee before the hire was even interviewed. Actions speak louder than words, I wrote. We have conservative students. Journalism majors. A professor who ejects people from public spaces for their political views and threatens journalists is a problem — particularly for an institution that publicly prides itself on free expression. The irony of invoking academic freedom to protect someone who practices that kind of selective tolerance appeared lost on everyone.

The committee offered him the job anyway.

The Visa

Here is where it gets interesting.

The Candidate couldn’t come. He was abroad, and the U.S. government would not let him back in the country.

Initially the committee chair blamed processing delays. Backlogs. Paperwork. It happens.

Then the real reason emerged, in pieces, over months of emails.

The U.S. government had flagged his work visa application. Nobody knew which agency — FBI? Homeland Security? State Department? — but something had triggered a hold. His own lawyer was trying to find out what.

And then, almost in passing, buried in an update email: when he had departed the United States the previous year, he had been stopped at the airport. Authorities had confiscated his cell phone and laptop. A bomb squad had been called.

A bomb squad.

Governments don’t call bomb squads over minor activism. And they don’t call them by accident — this person had clearly been on someone’s radar for a while.

The committee chair reported this the way you’d report a flight delay. “Ugh, what a headache. Anyway.”

Mind you: this was not a Trump-era immigration crackdown. The bulk of this — the years of security holds, the visa flagging, the final ban — happened during an administration that prided itself on welcoming immigrants and dismantling exactly the kind of restrictions its opponents were accused of building. Which makes you wonder what else was going on that we didn’t know about. Even colleagues who had initially supported the hire started quietly asking the same question.

The committee was baffled by the security hold. Baffled, despite the fact that a basic Google search would have explained everything — a Google search I had already done for them, links and all, which they had dismissed as right-wing hit pieces. The university’s official background check found, per their own account, nothing out of the ordinary. Just your average faculty candidate. Bomb squad and all.

The Workaround

A normal institution, at this point, would have moved on.

This institution did not move on.

The committee chair — a colleague known for her books on crisis communications, using her personal email account because, she noted, some of this “shouldn’t be on university accounts” — continued coordinating on The Candidate’s behalf. The first rule of crisis communications, of course, is transparency. She chose a different approach. She held regular update calls with The Candidate directly. She lobbied administrators. She strategized with the committee about how to keep the position open.

And then, in a moment of creative institutional problem-solving, someone came up with a plan.

The Candidate would teach. Remotely. From abroad. Without work authorization. Three courses that required hands-on, in-person instruction, delivered online from another continent.

To make this work legally — and I use that word loosely — the university listed another professor as the instructor of record. The Candidate taught the courses. The Candidate was paid as a “guest lecturer.” No benefits. No official employment. Just a tenure-track hire teaching university courses under someone else’s name.

The committee chair had previously written, in her own email, that this arrangement would be “not legal.” She did it anyway.

The university’s union was eventually consulted. HR eventually pumped the brakes. After one semester, the arrangement ended. Not because anyone decided it was wrong — but because the visa situation kept dragging and it became untenable.

The Provost’s office was later asked about this arrangement. The official explanation: they didn't want non-union personnel doing union work. The union, apparently, was the problem. Not the unauthorized foreign national teaching under a false name.

The Vote

Two years had passed. The Candidate had not set foot on campus. His initial appointment had technically expired.

A new interim department chair — reasonable, decent, trying to do things right, and newly responsible for both the undergraduate and graduate programs — called a full department vote on whether to continue the appointment. This was appropriate. Standard procedure.

The vote was tied. The reappointment had not been approved.

Then the pressure campaign began.

Search committee members threatened to sue the university if the appointment was rescinded. They warned the administration of potential litigation — not just from The Candidate, but from within the institution itself. They argued that expanding the vote to include non-committee faculty was procedurally improper. They got a U.S. Senator’s office involved in lobbying for the visa. They pursued every available legal avenue — including options that cost thousands of dollars and put them in direct legal confrontation with the federal government. They solicited letters of support from academics and activists in his network and deployed them as leverage. They made calls. They sent emails.

The administration caved.

I cannot recall another hire in my career that received this level of accommodation. Repeated deadline extensions. A legally dubious employment arrangement. Administrative override of a faculty vote they did not win. A chair-for-hire bargain. The university’s own legal counsel working the case. Years of institutional resources devoted to a single position for someone who had never set foot on campus (though he had, technically, taught there once — illegally, remotely, under someone else’s name).

The Coverup

Nearly four years in, with The Candidate’s lawyers filing a final legal appeal to force a government decision on his entry ban, the committee chair sent an urgent email: everything about the legal proceedings must be kept confidential. Do not share this outside the committee.

I replied: a lot of this stuff — government proceedings, communications with senators, agency decisions — might be public information, subject to FOIA.

Her response: panic. She mentioned that journalists had already been asking the Dean very specific questions about department activities. Phone calls during dinner. Stress for everyone. (The journalists were almost certainly tipped off by allies of The Candidate who thought they were generating a sympathetic story. They were not wrong that there was a story. They were wrong about which one.)

Another committee member followed up with his own confidentiality demand: “There is a great deal at stake, and we must ensure that sensitive information is not leaked.”

Huh? Normal hiring disagreements don’t require NDAs. “We thought the candidate’s research was thin” doesn’t make the news. But “No whites allowed” might. And they knew it.

These are the same people who spent years lobbying a U.S. Senator, joining a legal petition against the federal government, threatening colleagues with lawsuits, and coordinating directly with The Candidate’s legal team. Suddenly very concerned about leaks. They had watched enough legal dramas to think they understood how this worked. They did not.

For what it’s worth: they were right to be nervous. Government records have a way of becoming public. This post exists.

The Escalation

I went to the Provost. In writing. Twice. I laid out the discriminatory hiring process, the illegal employment arrangement, the national security concerns, all of it. I recommended the university seek guidance from the relevant federal agencies.

The chair of the search committee — the one who had written the “not legal” email, the one who had organized the workaround, the one who insisted we keep everything confidential within the committee — found out I’d gone to the Provost and sent an email to the entire department faculty calling me out. She claimed this was the first time I had raised any such concerns. Why now, she wanted to know — years after the fact.

It was not years after the fact. I had raised concerns during the search itself, before a single interview had taken place. I had raised them directly with university leadership years earlier. The paper trail existed. She knew it existed.

Moreover, she insisted the process had been perfectly fair — proof being that they had interviewed a white finalist. She appeared to have forgotten that her own emails explained how that finalist had slipped through only because his Hispanic-sounding name had temporarily fooled the committee into thinking he wasn't white.

The alibi and the confession were in the same inbox.

I replied, to the whole group and to the Provost, with the receipts. Here is the email I sent you years earlier in which I told you directly that I believed we engaged in discrimination and could face a lawsuit. Here is your non-response. Here is the hostile work environment that followed.

The Provost’s response to all of this: she sent an email telling everyone to stop discussing it.

The Ending

Almost four years after the original hire, The Candidate was still appealing his visa and travel ban. Still technically employed by the university. Still never having worked there.

A judge denied his final appeal.

The Provost wrote to me. She informed me the university had consulted with lawyers and, notably, the university’s own DEI office. That’s right: the investigation into whether the hiring process had been improperly diversity-driven was conducted by the diversity office. The background check had found nothing unusual. The matter was now concluded.

Nothing to see here.

I won’t pretend I wasn’t relieved when it was finally, definitively over — door closed, no more appeals. I’d learned not to celebrate early. After all, these people had lobbied a senator, threatened to sue their own employer, and held out hope through years of government rejections. I half expected a presidential pardon.

When the dust settled, the university’s administration quietly reassigned the faculty position to a different department entirely. No announcement. No explanation. Just: that line belongs somewhere else now. Make of that what you will.

Then came the grief emails. One committee member announced she was resigning from the university in protest — a principled stand against an institution that had, through no choice of its own, failed to employ someone the federal government had permanently barred from the country. She turned up at another university shortly afterward. The protest, it seems, had a soft landing already arranged.

Other committee members sent long, distraught emails — late at night, because they were, in their own words, “sick over what happened” and “it’s going to take me a long time to get past this” — to the department about how this young person’s dreams had been crushed. How his life had been derailed. How they would never understand — never forgive — what had been done to him. By us.

I want to be precise about something: the department didn’t end this. Colleagues who raised concerns didn’t end this. The United States government ended this. Homeland Security. The State Department. Federal law enforcement — the same agencies that stopped him at the border, confiscated his electronic devices, called a bomb squad, and ultimately barred him from returning to the country. The implication, never quite stated but very much felt, was that somehow we had engineered all of this — as if a few dissenting faculty members had the pull to get someone deported by the federal government. As if we had Mayorkas on speed dial.

The people weeping about ruined dreams were blaming academic colleagues for a decision made by the national security apparatus of the United States government. Not the bomb squad. Not the security hold. Us.

The colleagues who raised concerns about an anarchist group that organized coordinated attacks on public buildings and property, promoted violence against certain groups, published guides on harming police officers were, it turns out, correct. Vindicated. Not by a vote, not by an HR complaint, but by the government itself.

For the record: other figures associated with the anarchist group faced consequences at their own jobs — including one fired from a notoriously liberal organization. Apparently even they had a threshold our spineless institution lacked. Meanwhile, our university was actively fighting the United States government to keep The Candidate employed while simultaneously demanding that everyone involved keep quiet about it.

He came, incidentally, from a wealthy family — the kind with a compound back home, household staff, the works. The staff, it should be noted, were not there by choice in any meaningful sense of the word. The Candidate’s social justice activism did not extend to them.

Oh, and a candidate the committee never even bothered to consider the first time around because his name read as white? He was hired through a position that opened when one of the committee's most vocal members resigned in protest — and with the ideologues gone, a fair process ran. Took about five minutes for everyone to agree he was the obvious choice.

Funny how that works.

More dispatches from the campus that’s lost the plot: subscribe below.

Subscribe now

Last week, Jonathan Zimmerman — a historian of education at Penn — published an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education with a simple thesis: academia won’t look itself in the mirror. It’s easier, he wrote, to dismiss critics with condescension than to reform.

He had proof. He’d watched it happen in real time.

At a Washington meeting of education scholars last year, Zimmerman attended a panel on Trump’s threats to university funding, free speech on campus, and more. During the Q&A he raised his hand and asked a reasonable question: could academia examine its own role in bringing about the current crisis, rather than just circling the wagons?

Dead silence. Then an audience member announced she was deeply offended by the phrase “circle the wagons” — Native American displacement, genocide, hateful history. The moderator thanked her for reminding everyone to be “careful in the language we use to describe others.” And that was that.

A free speech panel. That couldn’t discuss free speech. Without policing speech.

Afterwards, several people told Zimmerman privately that they’d wondered the same thing he had. But they were too scared to say so during the panel. Why stick your neck out?

Zimmerman walked away with his thesis confirmed in real time. I read his piece and thought: yes, and here’s what it looks like from the inside.

A couple of weeks ago, at 1:37am on a Wednesday morning, a colleague on my curriculum committee left a comment on a course proposal I’d submitted.

“I’d recommend reconsidering the use of ‘Master (B)’ in section 4C, as this type of hierarchical language can carry racialized and gendered connotations. ‘Skillful’ might serve as a more neutral alternative.”

This is a curriculum committee. Its job is to evaluate pedagogy, learning outcomes, and course rigor. Instead, at 1:37 in the morning, a member was parsing standard accreditation language for hidden subtext.

The Dean has read this committee the riot act. New programs are stalled. Faculty are waiting. His message was direct: move faster, do your jobs, stop holding up approvals.

Their response: a 1:37am comment questioning whether standard academic language is a racial slur.

For the record: I changed it. After waiting months for the committee to even take up the proposal — they’d tabled it at the previous meeting because they’d spent the entire session on other matters and never got to a single course — “Master (B)” suddenly didn’t seem worth the fight. I made the edit and moved on.

That’s how this works. Not through dramatic confrontation, but through the slow attrition of people who have better things to do than defend accreditation terminology at 1:37 in the morning.

Zimmerman called it “a culture of fear, timidity, and conformity.” He’s right. The panel went to lunch. My committee continued sleeping on approvals.

More dispatches from the campus that’s lost the plot: subscribe below.

Subscribe now

The Wall Street Journal is out with an editorial on how the ABA uses its accreditation monopoly to mandate DEI coursework in law schools. Worth reading. But it’s not just law schools.

My institution requires all students to take an anti-racism course before they graduate. Not as an elective. As a requirement. They’re not alone — a quick search confirms that dozens of universities have identical mandates baked into their general education requirements. Some institutions are reconsidering. UConn’s faculty senate recently voted to put its mandatory anti-Black racism course on hold after the university’s own legal counsel warned it could be considered illegal under current federal guidance. Not because anyone decided it wasn’t working. Because the funding was at risk.

That tells you everything about why these courses exist in the first place.

Here’s the thing: our student body is majority non-white. Black students, Hispanic students, Asian students, international students from dozens of countries, kids from rural plains states sitting next to kids from New York and LA. The genuine diversity of lived experience in any given classroom would make most DEI consultants weep with joy.

And we’re going to have them sit through a lecture from a 55-year-old upper-middle-class white professor who has never experienced what they’ve experienced — but has definitely read about it.

Students tell me privately they hate these courses. They want waivers. They want out. Nobody has ever asked me to get them out of chemistry.

The actual diversity problem on our campus isn’t ideological. Walk into any cafeteria and you’ll find self-sorted tables. That’s not a diversity failure. That’s human nature. Fix the programming. Fund the social spaces. Create reasons for people to actually mix.

The anti-racism class doesn’t do any of that. It’s not education. It’s a credential. It tells the accreditor that something happened. The students know it. The faculty teaching it know it.

Everyone is pretending otherwise.

Time to stop.

More dispatches from the campus that’s lost the plot: subscribe below.

Subscribe now

A 2026 study published in Theory and Society analyzed 600,000 social science abstracts published between 1960 and 2024. It found that 90% of politically relevant research leaned left. Every discipline shifted leftward between 1990 and 2024. Fields with greater ideological homogeneity showed greater leftward orientation. The trend accelerated through the 2020s.

The study has been circulating widely on X this week — and for good reason.

This came as no surprise to any academic still tethered to reality. The field has drifted so far left that colleagues who would have been considered liberals a generation ago now think of themselves as moderates — and anyone to the right of a David Brooks as center-right at best, dangerous extremist at worst.

The study confirmed what anyone paying attention already knew: most of what passes for scholarship in these fields is a lengthy left-wing op-ed dressed in the costume of academic research — with APA citations linking to research that may not even support their proposition.

I wanted to see how deep it goes. I had long suspected this was the case in my own field. Early in my career, still on the tenure track, I deliberately chose a research area I knew was acceptable in my field — a policy topic that academia and media had coded as left-wing, even though polling consistently showed strong support across the political spectrum. Conservative voters wanted it. Conservative politicians opposed it, likely due to regulatory capture and campaign donations from industry. The nuance didn’t matter. The label did. My conclusions aligned with the approved narrative. It won an award that carries real weight in my field, and that effectively anchored my tenure portfolio. Subsequent research — same methodology, same rigor, same commitment to following the data wherever it led — produced findings that were neutral or, in the culture war vocabulary my field now speaks fluently, coded right. No award. I didn’t change my methodology. I didn’t change my conclusions — the data did. That was enough.

A chart making the rounds on X, based on decades of faculty ideology survey data, shows what that pressure produces over time: Far Left/Liberal faculty went from 45% in 1969 to 74% by 2021-22. Middle-of-the-road collapsed to 15%. Conservative/Far Right: 11%. The center didn’t hold. It got pushed out. I wrote about what that looks like on the ground in a recent dispatch. The data here shows where it comes from.

A 2018 study by Brooklyn College’s Mitchell Langbert found that among sampled communications faculty, there were 108 registered Democrats and zero registered Republicans — the most lopsided ratio of any discipline studied. By 2022, just 3.4% of working journalists identified as Republican, down from 18% in 2002. The pipeline is working.

So I ran an AI analysis of the 2025 programs of the two largest annual gatherings of communication scholars: the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) and the National Communication Association (NCA).

What came back confirmed everything I suspected.

The Numbers

In the AEJMC conference program — the flagship gathering of the academics who train the next generation of journalists — the word “resistance” appears 36 times. “Queer” appears 29 times. “Feminist” 17 times. “Activism” 24 times. “Intersect” 23 times. “Decoloni” 7 times.

The word “impartial” appears zero times.

“Accuracy” appears 4 times.

The word “objectivity” shows up. Just not the way you’d hope. The dissertation award went to a paper arguing that objectivity itself is a tool of white supremacy: Racializing Objectivity: How The White Southern Press Used Journalism Standards to Defend Jim Crow.

At NCA — the larger conference, covering communication broadly — the numbers are worse. “Resistance” appears 76 times. “Queer” 121 times. “Feminist” 112 times. “Activism” 86 times. “Social justice” 58 times. “Liberation” 30 times. “Decoloni” 12 times.

“Impartial” appears zero times at NCA as well.

“Objectivity” appears zero times.

“Accuracy” appears once.

Here is what the full picture looks like.

Ideological keywords across both conferences:

Professional/neutral keywords across both conferences:

“Resistance” outpaces “accuracy” by a factor of 28 to 1 across both programs. Combined across both conferences, “resistance” appears 112 times. “Accuracy” appears 5 times.

For context on what the field considers worth studying: “Trump” appears 34 times across both programs. “Fascism” appears 8 times. “Impartial” appears zero times.

To be clear: these are keyword counts. Context varies. The paper titles speak for themselves.

The Papers

The numbers are striking. The titles are something else.

A sampling from AEJMC:

• “Joy as Resistance: Finding Happiness and Purpose in Academia When DEI is Under Fire”

• “Algorithmic Decolonization: AI-Mediated Resistance to Cultural Hegemony in China’s Science Fiction Cinema”

• “Practicing Everyday Resistance Against Intersectional Oppression in U.S. Higher Education”

• “From Episodic Coverage to Active Resistance”

• “Feminist Resistance in the Game Industry: Female Players Exiting Genshin Impact”

• “Racializing Objectivity: How The White Southern Press Used Journalism Standards to Defend Jim Crow” — this one won the dissertation award

• “Decolonizing Journalism Education: Integrating Indigenous Knowledge Systems”

From NCA:

• “Rest as Resistance to the Ideal Worker Norm” — taking time off is now resistance

• “Teaching While Black: Abolitionist Critical Communication Pedagogy”

• “Didn’t Earn It: Decolonizing the Rhetoric of the Letters D.E.I.”

• “Breaking Compliance: Communicating to Elevate Asian American Resistance to Rightward Shifts”

• “Destruction as creation: Slag Wars and Queer Worldmaking”

• “I’m Not a Monster Stephen, I’m a Mother: A Queer Theoretical Reading of Marvel’s Wanda Maximoff”

• “Elevating Palestine: Intersectionality, Solidarity, and Resistance” — a named session, not just a paper

The deeper you dig, the worse it gets. At AEJMC, the panel description for ‘From Episodic Coverage to Active Resistance’ called for “rejecting ritualistic objectivity” in favor of a “social justice lens.” This was not a panel about covering resistance movements. It was about training journalists to practice resistance themselves. The assumption that journalists should be activists, not reporters, was the premise, not the conclusion.

This is not a fringe view. Ted Glasser, a former AEJMC president and Stanford journalism professor emeritus, put it plainly: “Journalists need to be overt and candid advocates for social justice, and it’s hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity.”

The Graduates

Communication departments and schools are the academic home of journalism, public relations, film, advertising, and strategic communication — essentially every profession that shapes what the public sees, reads, and hears.

People sometimes ask why the media leans left. They ask why Hollywood leans left. They ask why advertisements feature an oddly specific demographic mix, or why the white dad in every commercial is the bumbling one who can’t figure out the dishwasher. They ask why corporate communications and public relations departments have been taken over by activists.

This is why.

The people entering those fields were trained by the professors who attended these conferences, brought the framework back to the classroom, and presented it as the state of the field. They sat in classrooms where “objectivity” was taught as a suspect concept — a tool of hegemony, a relic of white Southern journalism, something to be decolonized. They wrote papers on feminist resistance and intersectional oppression.

Then they graduated and went to work at newspapers, TV networks, PR firms, advertising agencies, and studios. And they brought the framework with them.

A recent entry-level job application from Diffusion PR, a New York and Los Angeles firm, illustrates exactly how far the framework has traveled. Of two required essay questions, one asked applicants to assess the “backlash” against American Eagle’s Sydney Sweeney partnership — a campaign allegedly misinterpreted as promoting “good genes” rather than “great jeans” — and prescribe steps the brand should take to “repair its image with consumers.”

The premise of the question is that the backlash was legitimate and the brand was damaged. The market disagrees. American Eagle’s stock more than doubled in the months following the campaign’s launch. The ad worked. Consumers responded. The “backlash” was a social media pile-on that did not reflect actual consumer sentiment in any measurable way.

But a PR firm training its next generation of professionals has absorbed the lesson its employees learned in school: that backlash from the right constituencies is always real, always requires a response, and always demands that brands demonstrate contrition. The question isn’t whether the campaign succeeded by any objective measure. The question is whether the right people on social media were upset.

Worth noting: the second essay question asked candidates to pitch creative ideas for a product launch. Normal PR work. Totally fine. The tell is that question one wasn’t “analyze a successful campaign.” It was “fix the damage.”

This is not a communications firm. It is a graduate seminar with a client list.

What business would hire a PR firm that looks at a 144% stock surge and calls it a crisis? They used to teach that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. This firm apparently teaches the opposite: it’s okay to go broke as long as you’re woke.

This is not a conspiracy. It doesn’t need to be. It’s a pipeline. The academics set the terms, the graduates carry them into newsrooms, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue, and anyone who pushes back gets told they haven’t read the literature.

These are the people training the next generation of journalists, filmmakers, and advertising executives. And then everyone wonders why the media leans left.

More dispatches from the campus that’s lost the plot: subscribe below.

Subscribe now