8 Rules to Fix Academia (And the One Thing That Would Actually Work)
A professor has a viral list. It’s good. It’s also missing the one rule that makes all the others possible.
FacultyLeaks.com is an anonymous dispatch from inside higher education. Some identifying details have been changed. The dysfunction has not.
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.
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10. You have to come to work, stay at work, and do things in person.
I've been teaching at this place for 31 years now. COVID, along with Zoom, has degraded the culture because so many faculty members decided they preferred staying home. These used to be so many more chance interactions—in particular interactions faculty from different disciplines—and now the hallways are relatively empty. Many faculty members are only here when they have to be.
And then there is the Zoom meeting. You can tell that some of those faces are looking at a different screen while pretending to pay attention, or their eyes downcast, playing with their phone. But even when everyone is engaged, it's just not the same as meatspace. It's robotic, non-human—"remote", you might say. I can't stand it.
I get it: human nature. You can rationalize that you're still getting the job done, so why drive your car through bad weather? Why leave the comfort of your kitchen table? I think people rationalize away something clearly visible: we are disconnected from each other, as compared with 10 years ago. I think the negative effect on the sense of academic/collegial community is strong.
Well, since I have "another job" and a side business ... it's not even close. There are too many problems for this situation to be fixed easily and I think the disruption that's already under way is probably essential. There are too many activities that go on in academia that have nothing to do with teaching and learning, including actual beneficial research as opposed to bullshit sex abuse or powertrip factories, and too few core activities. I've mentioned what happened to me before, and you're "anonymous" whereas I am totally public, a published author of 50 books, a constantly working writer for over 30 years and a former faculty member at 4 different So Cal community college districts with top evaluations up until my last semester at Saddleback College in fall 2019. I started teaching at Chapman University, by the way, and I outlasted all the other MFA student teachers by 2 yrs because "everybody liked me." A graduate faculty member who fits the description you have for the non-qualified/non-committed tenured faculty threw a book at my head during a seminar, by the way. It was unprovoked. My best guess was he was still mad at me because his idol John Fowles talked at length to me, not him, during his visit a couple of weeks prior. It might have been because Fowles and I shared many interests in natural history and shocker ... I'm a real writer! So here's some mindfood for you: I am old enough to come from the days when sci fi was vilified by "the academy" and I even experienced it myself in grad school, where another instructor similar to the book-hurling Fowles acolyte, a PhD in "Creative Writing" who absolutely ordered staff around and slept with an endless series of grad assistants, said loudly in a social setting with many other faculty and grad students present, "You're a pretty good writer. Why do you want to write that sci fi crap?" This was like 1998! Anyway ... I haven't really written much of that sci-fi crap for the past ten years - but what I did write at that time and through the early 2000s has all come true. The only thing that hasn't is "human mutational virus" and really, if we count COVID (all viruses have mutagenic properties) yes - it has. I wasn't the biggest Vonnegut reader back in the day but everything that guy wrote is not only factually true or coming true, it's spiritually and culturally true. One of my friends (I'm friends with the Stoics) is like "You don't have to have an opinion on every topic" - but academia is where a gifted, socially-appropriate student and faculty member (me) was screwed over and directly harmed in countless ways just because I wanted to first, study and obtain bachelors degrees in my area of interest; and second - decided after years of working in the private sector with 2 BAs - wanted to return to school, get a master's degree, and teach and write. I did achieve that goal. But I can promise, all the publications advertised by Chapman University's graduate writing program are "me." Whatever they say. Whatever the award or publication except for a poet with 3 chapbooks is me. They actually phrase it to make it sound like there are many, many students doing this. But - it's me. So here I actually enjoy teaching for 20 years, and I purposely selected to teach at Saddleback because the students ... wait for it ... wanted to be there! I even enjoyed teaching at 6 AM and Saturday and Sunday classes because ... the students wanted to be there. Me too, and I wanted to become a better teacher to help them and vice-versa. Well, here come life's twists and turns and all the bad things I witnessed over the years and everything so mildly and academically documented here (I was personally insulted at my last faculty event at Saddleback where not only did I have to sit through an unqualified person who fits your 'rich husband' description gave a presentation on 'diversity' using powerpoints and student emails! - and then we had lunch and I sat across from an older British woman who'd just been hired and not only was this an example of clueless rich who never held any real job, this one flew against the UK stereotyped and sprayed me with food as she talked with her mouth open, asking why any teacher could possibly be homeless? Why didn't they just get a place to live?). Everything I say is true. Young women are routinely preyed upon and at my former disowned undergrad alma mater, some of the predators are female faculty who prey on the young women, not just men. It may even predominate there, as the school has actively sought to recruit lesbian "scholars" and also to admit transgender and lesbian/queer students and focus on their social interests and needs. So, with all this in mind, exactly who will want to attend schools like this in the future? I mean like "NOW" future as in Fall 2026. Who will want to pay $90K+ a year to be "educated" in such an environment? What "studies" from labs headed by sex offending perverts like Lawrence Krauss will have value? There is SO a reason why I am working for xAI right now. And it's because I might be an "okay" writer of that slimy sci-fi shit. What a fucked up mess and it's WAY beyond these viral lists of 10 items. "What we have here, is a failure of the imagination." Enjoy!