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. There used to be so many more chance interactions—in particular interactions among 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.
I have a colleague (the latest TT hire in a dying department that will never get another tenure line ever) who went from assistant to full in under 10 years, and in the last six years this person has never set foot on campus. Covid happened and then **poof** vanished. Nobody talks about it openly; nobody knows why this young, seemingly healthy individual has been hiding at home for more than half a decade. It's our department's open secret. Nevermind that this young person was hired to revitalize a dying department, yet does not show up for a single in-person department event ever. At least this person has a relevant degree in the field we teach. Without tenure lines, we have been forced to hire thoroughly unqualified people without relevant degrees, some of whom also refuse to teach in person. Because of our geographical isolation, we hire what we can get. The department hit a new low when we hired a lecturer who does not even have an undergraduate degree in the relevant discipline; he works in the IT department. We are at the point where any warm body in the classroom will do. Meanwhile, admins and brain-dead faculty keep touting the value of a degree from our institution. A colleague of mine calls our state university a pension mill, and unfortunately he is right. Yesterday, I picked up some books from interlibrary loan, and on my way out, I looked at the new acquisitions shelf. The shelf with academic titles was all woke shit (yet another edition of "The New Jim Crow" and other titles like "Queering Shakespeare" and "The Violence of Poetry"); the shelf next to it was all YA crap with cartoon covers and pages with large typeface -- books that a 10-year-old should be reading...
Incredible that your young person hired to revitalize a dying department is allowed to do this. At my state university, everyone hd to go remote from March-May 2020. The next academic year, remote was an option, and most people stayed remote (I didn't). The next year, no remote was allowed except for courses that were already totally-remote. Oh the caterwauling from profs who preferred to not leave home.
One Art History prof simply refused to go back in-person. She filed several grievances, ultimately to no avail. Now she's gone. Good riddance. I say: profs who want to teach remote, especially with undergrads, do not care about their students and do not care whether any real learning is taking place. They are lazy, selfish, and unprofessional.
Agreed; I am forced to do part of my 5/5 load online because so many of my colleagues in other departments have created purely online program that require some of our courses to be offered online. The motivation for the shift to online education is not pedagogical; it’s self-interest.
I'm not unfeeling; certainly, a person with a disability may need to use the remote option more often.
Often, accommodations can be made. But teaching is for those who can handle the job.
I left teaching through retirement due to my declining physical health. I could have stayed, but choose to put the well being of the kids and my colleagues as a priority.
Since then, my health has markedly improved. I was able to manage financially, I had more time for doctors appointments and exercise/physical therapy, and, as a result, I'm in the best shape I've been in years.
I also have the time and energy for hobbies and strengthening my social connections. For some of those reluctant to retire, it may be that they have no life than the workplace.
Agreed; I have had colleagues who worked all online is the last few years before retirement; while it was not ideal, I understood their unique health situations. But to start as a junior faculty in your 30s and decide, after 3 years of in-person instruction, that you'd rather teach online for the rest of your career? We did not hire an elderly or disabled person, so I consider it a bait-and-switch.
I am glad you are making the best out of your retirement; few things are more heartbreaking than watching colleagues retire and then die shortly thereafter because their lives have no meaning outside of work.
I feel this big time at my institution. In our last contract we were able to negotiate a reduction in the pathetically low office hours we already must keep. Additionally most full time tenured profs are teaching at least 2 courses per semester entirely online asynchronous. So the need to be present on campus diminishes as well. I know full time faculty in my own department who are physically on campus 1-3 hours max per day and typically just 3-4 days per week. These are not just senior faculty with one foot in retirement. This is also the behavior of junior faculty just starting the tenure track process. The rot is there from the beginning the culture of the institution inadvertently supports it.
I'm looking for a rule to address a problem I heard described by an Ivy trustee some years ago. That year, the school graduated one German major and had three tenured faculty in German. So my rule goes something like "Your tenure expires when your services are no longer needed."
I think your accountability rule is good but maybe needs another rule or extension- there needs to be not just individual accountability but also Institutional accountability related to quality of research. If a department does nothing but produce political propaganda, the state has 0 obligation to support it or its faculty. If a professor produces consistently low-quality biased research, accountability. If a University supports crappy 'research' in the guise of 'academic freedom', there should be accountability. It is amazing to me the extent to which humanities/social science departments have gotten away with ideological laundering on the taxpayer dime.
You, Kevin Bryan, Alex Tabbarok, and the Yale Report somehow overlooked the Zeroth Rule:
Rule 0. Teach only those capable of learning. Exclude all others so they may discover more personally productive, morally upright, and socially useful and satisfying pursuits.
To fully understand the problem, I suggest reading, thinking about, and discussing an 18 year-old book written by a modern-day soothsayer you and yours have chosen to banish from academia specifically and polite society in general. A lifetime producing brilliant social science: meticulously researched, beautifully organized, and clearly explained to lay, professional, and academic audiences. All for naught as far as the leading lights in your profession are concerned.
I am, of course, speaking of Charles Murray and his 2008 book "Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality." While the entire (short) book is well worth reading, I especially recommend Chapter 2 on the failure of the highly intelligent to understand the practical limitations of lower-IQ people to navigate our complex society (I term the phenomenon "Inverse Dunning-Kruger"). The book is freely available online, and Charles Murray generously invited all who so desire to feel free to access it and test its ideas against their own experience.
With that preamble, the relevant recommendation of Mr. Murray (for associational reasons, he eschews 'Dr.') is that no more than 15% of college entrants (in 2008) were intellectually capable of handling true college-level material. As I recall, Murray was willing to extend the overall "catch" of the admissions departments all the way up to the top 25% of the applicant pool just to make things go a bit easier during the transition back toward rigor and serious instruction (a goodly number of substandard profs and admins would necessarily have to look elsewhere for employment). Surely you folks know you're at better than double Murray's most generous cull, and only your rising tuitions and tighter student loan provisions limit that figure.
In my opinion, you and everyone else participating in this national suicide pact are engaged in an all-but-criminal con job, literally stealing the wealth and destroying the futures of countless millions of young people, men and women. Surely those incapable of succeeding at or even escaping from your tenured shakedown are the most obvious victims. They are not, however, the only ones. Trading futures as productive laborers and tradespeople for the push to get a degree costs much more than lost years, bad credit, and cratered self-esteem. With your growing loss of male matriculants and consequent desperate drafting of ever more females to replace them in this grand scam, you are now directly responsible for the massive increase of young females of prime marriage and childbearing age pouring into the corporate drone workforce to occupy do-nothing, go-nowhere jobs, until they age out of the dating market and, alas, out of ever marrying and producing the next generation of home-grown Americans.
I have been trying to get people to read that Murray book since it came out. It is ever more true today. In particular, he points out that we cannot admit what is demonstrably the case: cognitive/intellectual talent is just as real a thing as athletic talent. And so modern academia's mission is, at its core, incoherent: trying to train many people who do not have scholarly gifts or habits in ... scholarship!
This incoherence also produces the hucksterism and shallowness of a significant part of the faculty at any institution: Those who somehow say they are able to square that impossible circle. In any list of rules, I agree that the Zeroth is non negotiable.
"The book is freely available online, and Charles Murray generously invited all who so desire to feel free to access it" I just looked for Murray's book and it was on sale for $13.99. I was able to find a copy from my library for free, though.
I hope you find the book as thought-provoking and solidly reasoned as I did. When, some years back, I happened on a PDF copy of the book posted online from a foreign domain, I wrote Mr. Murray and let him know of my discovery. He responded that the book was probably doing more good for him being freely available to all on the internet than it ever did when it was current and selling only a limited number of copies for those brave enough (certainly NOT book reviewers) to read such a controversial author. Enjoy.
P.S. Please let me know what you think of my "Inverse Dunning-Kruger" moniker applied to Murray's Chapter 2 explanation of just how limiting low intelligence can be in the modern world.
I’ve just started reading it and I agree, it’s very thought-provoking. I previously leaned towards what Murray calls the “educational romanticist” view, that all kids can reach the same level of academic achievement if we just provide enough resources. But after reading through Murray’s examples and reasoning, I am changing my view. I don’t know that I’d have thought of “inverse Dunning Kruger” as a moniker for the argument in chapter 2, but it is indeed easy to overlook how growing up in a bubble of similar people and keeps us from getting a clear perspective on the diversity of abilities and skills across the population. Thank you for the recommendation, because I probably wouldn’t have come across this book otherwise.
One thing I've always been curious about: ideological diversity is always brought up as a fix and it makes sense, but...are the scholars actually there? That is, after decades in which the humanities in particular have been hostile towards conservative thought are there actually conservative or even moderate history, sociology, political science, etc PhDs who could fill these roles? And if there are but they're far, far fewer than liberal/progressive PhDs do you seriously compromise the quality of your department by effectively scraping the bottom of the academic barrel as a form of affirmative action for right wing humanities profs? Serious question, because I am not in academia and have no idea as to the actual prevalence of conservative grad students/post docs.
And furthermore, some of the liberals who have more heterodox views STFU because they are cowards and fear retaliation from their colleagues. I think having an environment where there is more diversity of opinion would mitigate the fear of retaliation for wrong-think.
Conservatives don't seem to be interested in academics in the humanities. But in many other areas of the sciences, agriculture, engineering, business , I don't see what holding them back and could be well represented. On the other hand, most higher educated folks would be 'liberal' in voting as they care about helping others, social safety net, and are not for controlling other people's lives like Conservatives seem to be.
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!
I totally hear you on this: "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." Although I love being in a classroom discussing meaningful ideas with serious students (which I did for 25 years), I chose to walk away from academia in 2020.
What informed your choice, Carrie-Ann? Mine was forced. SOCCCD's union had finally passed a rule that part-time instructors would get guaranteed assignments based on seniority and guess who was the most senior? The good instructors who'd hired me years before had all retired leaving a really sad, incompetent department of lazy, entitled fulltimers, dozens of adjuncts, and other departments, even worse. This all turned out great for me and my husband. But I look at how my students have struggled, my daughter and all her friends - I feel it is all interconnected. It is a malaise, a cultural disease, a failure of the imagination.
I chose to walk away from a tenured position as an associate professor of philosophy and department chair. There were many factors brewing for years. Without writing a book about it, I would summarize the core reasons as:
(1) The pernicious politicization of higher ed where some vocal professors and their students wanted to substitute indoctrination and activism for education and scholarship. This was extremely toxic in creating chilling effects in classroom discussions and faculty meetings alike.
(2) Increasing unpreparedness of incoming students, with increasing numbers of them not being able to write a coherent sentence or paragraph and barely able to read a short essay. They were being set up for (expensive) failure by a K-12 system that told them they were qualified to graduate from high school.
(3) Massive grade inflation. I was one of the few faculty at our small private liberal arts college who insisted on fighting grade inflation, which I got chastised for laterally and from above.
(3) Administrative bloat, with every new position and office trying to justify their existence and high salaries by coming up with some puffed-up initiative. That translated to more meaningless paperwork for faculty to document everything numerically in relation to "Bloom's taxonomy." I had a 4/3 course load (as department chair, mind you), and the amount of admin work was creeping up to 50% of my time, which would have been far better spent on meeting with students during office hours to go over their rough drafts (and actually getting more than five hours of sleep per night).
(4) Connected to all of the above, but especially (3) is my health. I was mentally and physically exhausted.
"Increasing unpreparedness of incoming students, with increasing numbers of them not being able to write a coherent sentence or paragraph and barely able to read a short essay." I could get them up to paragraph to essay level and reading Oliver Sacks in 16 weeks. That took 20 years of solid work and figuring out how to teach actual work and critical thinking. I'm glad to know you, Carrie-Ann, and I can recognize real character when I see it. Only a tiny number of people would be able to make your choice, for your good reasons. It is a true tragedy, what has happened. I'm sure you're familiar with the work of Iain McGilchrist (and it's heavy in its own way - exemplified by the very problems it identifies!). A relentless focus on unimportant details and minutiae to the expense of real work. The weight of administrative nonsense combined with horrible K-12 problems ... and then we add the criminal/subversive behavior. Those are not things worth "saving" at all. Not in any way. I am urged by present circumstances to write about ways to move forward - and health and well-being for each of us is a solid start. I'm sorry you missed so much sleep and became so exhausted. I very much hope you're better now.
As someone working outside academia (in communications and infrastructure for a research NGO) I'll take the liberty of suggesting one more rule:
Knowledge dissemination and public engagement should be a structural obligation of academic institutions.
Not a personal choice, not a bonus activity, not something that happens when a researcher has spare energy and goodwill.
This means: developing practice and infrastructure for communication, building capacity, and supporting researchers and scientists on this path (which is hard, often undervalued, and treated as a distraction from "real" work).
Because an academy that has isolated itself from society - from civil society, practitioners, and general public audiences, not just stakeholders and funders - is an academy without genetal trust.
And that vacuum in society doesn't stay empty. It gets filled first with pseudoscientific TikToks, and then with pseudoscientific decisions in real policy and real lives.
American colleges and universities, once idyllic communities of civil discourse, free inquiry, and ultimate frisbee, were the envy of the world. Now they are home to hatred, violence, and ignorance, aimed squarely at Western Civilization. And they're proud of it. Just look at the recent graffiti at Swarthmore and the guest speakers at NYU who refer to college students fellow members of Islam's struggle to take over the West. Leftist professors and administrators got rich, fat, and drunk at the trough of bottomless student loans, which are backed by the full faith and credit of the very government they say they want to dismantle.
Require instructors to have worked a job for 5 to 10 years that is not paid by taxes or charity and that they depend on as their source of income. A job where the business has no right of existence.
Require instructors to serve in the miliary. You need to inculcate into your bones the country of citizenship and who you are fighting for and why.
Do not allow instructors to hire additional staff. They just hire a copy of themselves and engage in ideological genocide. Hire by a third party and step up to quotas of 50/50 left versus right. Diversity is our strength right?
Mandatory retirement at 65 versus hanging around with half efforts and keeping younger people with more energy and commitment from the position.
They won't do one even of these suggestions. They don't want to change.
In many places, the tenure protections are not as robust as you imagine. I have seen tenured faculty lose their positions due to not showing up. And in places like Florida, tenure exists in name only at public institutions now that the legislature has instituted mandatory "post-tenure review." Perhaps things are different at the elite private schools.
Unfortunately, personnel is policy. I don’t see anything short of thoroughly cleaning house or starting up new institutions reducing the rot eating away at academia.
The progressives who have captured the universities are constitutionally incapable of meaningful reform. “Diversity hiring” and using academic positions to pursue “social justice” activism instead of truth are non-negotiable for these people. It is who they are down to the core.
Review must include the participation of non-academics, preferably leaders in business who could and would apply business principles to review and retention. Review must begin early (first year teaching) and often (twice a year) to address problems before they become, well, problems. This does not mean outsourcing the review process to consultants. Nope! Actual business persons are what is needed.
From my perspective, the root of the problem is that the incentives are broken or missing and so is the value proposition.
The incentive problem had always been the case, but in 1978 when I graduated high school, 16% of the population had achieved a four year degree. In 2025 40% of women and 37% of men had attained a four year degree.
This explosion in the student population, along with a drastic increase in foreign student attendance, combined with a shrinking supply of jobs supported by domestic industry as those markets were being offshored to Mexico and China and other countries, transformed the education industry into a money and wealth making opportunity for many more people that would work in that industry.
Suddenly all people needed a college degree to have any chance of achieving and economically self-sufficient.
This and the easy student debt access provided no need for the education industry to demonstrate value. Parents and students were not questioning the value... they were just committed to get the student to attend the most prestigious college they would be accept to.
But this lead us to the current situation of administrative bloat and it causing hyper inflation of education costs... while at the same time the quality of that education has significantly declined.
We need to change the incentives so that the industry focuses on value. It never has before, but fewer people sought a higher learning degree and they were less of a requirement for achieving a good life.
The way we do that is to re-industrialize and fund private sector job training programs that become a good career path alternative to any that otherwise require a traditional higher learning degree. We also cut back on student loans. We prevent the colleges and universities from recruiting foreign students for the higher tuition they pay (American colleges and universities should reserve primary space for American students). We stop subsidizing colleges and universities with federal and state money. We require large endowments to be spent on student cost reduction and education value improvements. We require all higher learning to report on student job placement as part of their performance report card (if they have access to government-backed student loans, government education grants, etc.). We have the IRS remove their non-profit status if not using their funds for educations only (for example, no political action or ego shrine building).
All these rules being proposed are band-aides to the gaping wound of broken incentives and crashing value.
The People Who Who Never Leave School are worth shining a spotlight on. I think there is a link between this growing phenomenon and that of the Feminization (emphasis on feminine, which can refer to both women and men) discourse. School is safe and generally favors conscientious rule following and adherence to bureaucratic principles. There is nothing wrong with being feminine, and there is nothing wrong with some schools being organized around these principles, but I'm inclined to believe that much of the societal discontent with higher Ed is that the People Who Never Leave School have organized most/nearly all these institutions around their own proclivities / predispositions.
While it would be unfair to say that graduates and the public don't benefit from these institutions, it is fair to question whether these institutions are now benefiting the People Who Never Leave School far more than the former. And why the monopolization / homogeny?
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. There used to be so many more chance interactions—in particular interactions among 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.
I have a colleague (the latest TT hire in a dying department that will never get another tenure line ever) who went from assistant to full in under 10 years, and in the last six years this person has never set foot on campus. Covid happened and then **poof** vanished. Nobody talks about it openly; nobody knows why this young, seemingly healthy individual has been hiding at home for more than half a decade. It's our department's open secret. Nevermind that this young person was hired to revitalize a dying department, yet does not show up for a single in-person department event ever. At least this person has a relevant degree in the field we teach. Without tenure lines, we have been forced to hire thoroughly unqualified people without relevant degrees, some of whom also refuse to teach in person. Because of our geographical isolation, we hire what we can get. The department hit a new low when we hired a lecturer who does not even have an undergraduate degree in the relevant discipline; he works in the IT department. We are at the point where any warm body in the classroom will do. Meanwhile, admins and brain-dead faculty keep touting the value of a degree from our institution. A colleague of mine calls our state university a pension mill, and unfortunately he is right. Yesterday, I picked up some books from interlibrary loan, and on my way out, I looked at the new acquisitions shelf. The shelf with academic titles was all woke shit (yet another edition of "The New Jim Crow" and other titles like "Queering Shakespeare" and "The Violence of Poetry"); the shelf next to it was all YA crap with cartoon covers and pages with large typeface -- books that a 10-year-old should be reading...
Incredible that your young person hired to revitalize a dying department is allowed to do this. At my state university, everyone hd to go remote from March-May 2020. The next academic year, remote was an option, and most people stayed remote (I didn't). The next year, no remote was allowed except for courses that were already totally-remote. Oh the caterwauling from profs who preferred to not leave home.
One Art History prof simply refused to go back in-person. She filed several grievances, ultimately to no avail. Now she's gone. Good riddance. I say: profs who want to teach remote, especially with undergrads, do not care about their students and do not care whether any real learning is taking place. They are lazy, selfish, and unprofessional.
Agreed; I am forced to do part of my 5/5 load online because so many of my colleagues in other departments have created purely online program that require some of our courses to be offered online. The motivation for the shift to online education is not pedagogical; it’s self-interest.
I'm not unfeeling; certainly, a person with a disability may need to use the remote option more often.
Often, accommodations can be made. But teaching is for those who can handle the job.
I left teaching through retirement due to my declining physical health. I could have stayed, but choose to put the well being of the kids and my colleagues as a priority.
Since then, my health has markedly improved. I was able to manage financially, I had more time for doctors appointments and exercise/physical therapy, and, as a result, I'm in the best shape I've been in years.
I also have the time and energy for hobbies and strengthening my social connections. For some of those reluctant to retire, it may be that they have no life than the workplace.
Agreed; I have had colleagues who worked all online is the last few years before retirement; while it was not ideal, I understood their unique health situations. But to start as a junior faculty in your 30s and decide, after 3 years of in-person instruction, that you'd rather teach online for the rest of your career? We did not hire an elderly or disabled person, so I consider it a bait-and-switch.
I am glad you are making the best out of your retirement; few things are more heartbreaking than watching colleagues retire and then die shortly thereafter because their lives have no meaning outside of work.
I feel this big time at my institution. In our last contract we were able to negotiate a reduction in the pathetically low office hours we already must keep. Additionally most full time tenured profs are teaching at least 2 courses per semester entirely online asynchronous. So the need to be present on campus diminishes as well. I know full time faculty in my own department who are physically on campus 1-3 hours max per day and typically just 3-4 days per week. These are not just senior faculty with one foot in retirement. This is also the behavior of junior faculty just starting the tenure track process. The rot is there from the beginning the culture of the institution inadvertently supports it.
Institutions that went big for online degree programs are now reaping what they sowed.
Having ~20 more years in the academe than you, this is how I envision most Zoom meeting participants:
I'm looking for a rule to address a problem I heard described by an Ivy trustee some years ago. That year, the school graduated one German major and had three tenured faculty in German. So my rule goes something like "Your tenure expires when your services are no longer needed."
Wirklich!
I think your accountability rule is good but maybe needs another rule or extension- there needs to be not just individual accountability but also Institutional accountability related to quality of research. If a department does nothing but produce political propaganda, the state has 0 obligation to support it or its faculty. If a professor produces consistently low-quality biased research, accountability. If a University supports crappy 'research' in the guise of 'academic freedom', there should be accountability. It is amazing to me the extent to which humanities/social science departments have gotten away with ideological laundering on the taxpayer dime.
Hello, way up there! Can you hear me? Good.
You, Kevin Bryan, Alex Tabbarok, and the Yale Report somehow overlooked the Zeroth Rule:
Rule 0. Teach only those capable of learning. Exclude all others so they may discover more personally productive, morally upright, and socially useful and satisfying pursuits.
To fully understand the problem, I suggest reading, thinking about, and discussing an 18 year-old book written by a modern-day soothsayer you and yours have chosen to banish from academia specifically and polite society in general. A lifetime producing brilliant social science: meticulously researched, beautifully organized, and clearly explained to lay, professional, and academic audiences. All for naught as far as the leading lights in your profession are concerned.
I am, of course, speaking of Charles Murray and his 2008 book "Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality." While the entire (short) book is well worth reading, I especially recommend Chapter 2 on the failure of the highly intelligent to understand the practical limitations of lower-IQ people to navigate our complex society (I term the phenomenon "Inverse Dunning-Kruger"). The book is freely available online, and Charles Murray generously invited all who so desire to feel free to access it and test its ideas against their own experience.
With that preamble, the relevant recommendation of Mr. Murray (for associational reasons, he eschews 'Dr.') is that no more than 15% of college entrants (in 2008) were intellectually capable of handling true college-level material. As I recall, Murray was willing to extend the overall "catch" of the admissions departments all the way up to the top 25% of the applicant pool just to make things go a bit easier during the transition back toward rigor and serious instruction (a goodly number of substandard profs and admins would necessarily have to look elsewhere for employment). Surely you folks know you're at better than double Murray's most generous cull, and only your rising tuitions and tighter student loan provisions limit that figure.
In my opinion, you and everyone else participating in this national suicide pact are engaged in an all-but-criminal con job, literally stealing the wealth and destroying the futures of countless millions of young people, men and women. Surely those incapable of succeeding at or even escaping from your tenured shakedown are the most obvious victims. They are not, however, the only ones. Trading futures as productive laborers and tradespeople for the push to get a degree costs much more than lost years, bad credit, and cratered self-esteem. With your growing loss of male matriculants and consequent desperate drafting of ever more females to replace them in this grand scam, you are now directly responsible for the massive increase of young females of prime marriage and childbearing age pouring into the corporate drone workforce to occupy do-nothing, go-nowhere jobs, until they age out of the dating market and, alas, out of ever marrying and producing the next generation of home-grown Americans.
So, food for thought, huh?
I have been trying to get people to read that Murray book since it came out. It is ever more true today. In particular, he points out that we cannot admit what is demonstrably the case: cognitive/intellectual talent is just as real a thing as athletic talent. And so modern academia's mission is, at its core, incoherent: trying to train many people who do not have scholarly gifts or habits in ... scholarship!
This incoherence also produces the hucksterism and shallowness of a significant part of the faculty at any institution: Those who somehow say they are able to square that impossible circle. In any list of rules, I agree that the Zeroth is non negotiable.
"The book is freely available online, and Charles Murray generously invited all who so desire to feel free to access it" I just looked for Murray's book and it was on sale for $13.99. I was able to find a copy from my library for free, though.
I hope you find the book as thought-provoking and solidly reasoned as I did. When, some years back, I happened on a PDF copy of the book posted online from a foreign domain, I wrote Mr. Murray and let him know of my discovery. He responded that the book was probably doing more good for him being freely available to all on the internet than it ever did when it was current and selling only a limited number of copies for those brave enough (certainly NOT book reviewers) to read such a controversial author. Enjoy.
P.S. Please let me know what you think of my "Inverse Dunning-Kruger" moniker applied to Murray's Chapter 2 explanation of just how limiting low intelligence can be in the modern world.
I’ve just started reading it and I agree, it’s very thought-provoking. I previously leaned towards what Murray calls the “educational romanticist” view, that all kids can reach the same level of academic achievement if we just provide enough resources. But after reading through Murray’s examples and reasoning, I am changing my view. I don’t know that I’d have thought of “inverse Dunning Kruger” as a moniker for the argument in chapter 2, but it is indeed easy to overlook how growing up in a bubble of similar people and keeps us from getting a clear perspective on the diversity of abilities and skills across the population. Thank you for the recommendation, because I probably wouldn’t have come across this book otherwise.
One thing I've always been curious about: ideological diversity is always brought up as a fix and it makes sense, but...are the scholars actually there? That is, after decades in which the humanities in particular have been hostile towards conservative thought are there actually conservative or even moderate history, sociology, political science, etc PhDs who could fill these roles? And if there are but they're far, far fewer than liberal/progressive PhDs do you seriously compromise the quality of your department by effectively scraping the bottom of the academic barrel as a form of affirmative action for right wing humanities profs? Serious question, because I am not in academia and have no idea as to the actual prevalence of conservative grad students/post docs.
And furthermore, some of the liberals who have more heterodox views STFU because they are cowards and fear retaliation from their colleagues. I think having an environment where there is more diversity of opinion would mitigate the fear of retaliation for wrong-think.
I think there are plenty of them in specific (religious) universities would be happy to go secular if the jobs were available
Conservatives don't seem to be interested in academics in the humanities. But in many other areas of the sciences, agriculture, engineering, business , I don't see what holding them back and could be well represented. On the other hand, most higher educated folks would be 'liberal' in voting as they care about helping others, social safety net, and are not for controlling other people's lives like Conservatives seem to be.
there’s no fixing academia as long is a credentials factory for the ambitious, not a refuge for the curious.
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!
I totally hear you on this: "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." Although I love being in a classroom discussing meaningful ideas with serious students (which I did for 25 years), I chose to walk away from academia in 2020.
What informed your choice, Carrie-Ann? Mine was forced. SOCCCD's union had finally passed a rule that part-time instructors would get guaranteed assignments based on seniority and guess who was the most senior? The good instructors who'd hired me years before had all retired leaving a really sad, incompetent department of lazy, entitled fulltimers, dozens of adjuncts, and other departments, even worse. This all turned out great for me and my husband. But I look at how my students have struggled, my daughter and all her friends - I feel it is all interconnected. It is a malaise, a cultural disease, a failure of the imagination.
I chose to walk away from a tenured position as an associate professor of philosophy and department chair. There were many factors brewing for years. Without writing a book about it, I would summarize the core reasons as:
(1) The pernicious politicization of higher ed where some vocal professors and their students wanted to substitute indoctrination and activism for education and scholarship. This was extremely toxic in creating chilling effects in classroom discussions and faculty meetings alike.
(2) Increasing unpreparedness of incoming students, with increasing numbers of them not being able to write a coherent sentence or paragraph and barely able to read a short essay. They were being set up for (expensive) failure by a K-12 system that told them they were qualified to graduate from high school.
(3) Massive grade inflation. I was one of the few faculty at our small private liberal arts college who insisted on fighting grade inflation, which I got chastised for laterally and from above.
(3) Administrative bloat, with every new position and office trying to justify their existence and high salaries by coming up with some puffed-up initiative. That translated to more meaningless paperwork for faculty to document everything numerically in relation to "Bloom's taxonomy." I had a 4/3 course load (as department chair, mind you), and the amount of admin work was creeping up to 50% of my time, which would have been far better spent on meeting with students during office hours to go over their rough drafts (and actually getting more than five hours of sleep per night).
(4) Connected to all of the above, but especially (3) is my health. I was mentally and physically exhausted.
"Increasing unpreparedness of incoming students, with increasing numbers of them not being able to write a coherent sentence or paragraph and barely able to read a short essay." I could get them up to paragraph to essay level and reading Oliver Sacks in 16 weeks. That took 20 years of solid work and figuring out how to teach actual work and critical thinking. I'm glad to know you, Carrie-Ann, and I can recognize real character when I see it. Only a tiny number of people would be able to make your choice, for your good reasons. It is a true tragedy, what has happened. I'm sure you're familiar with the work of Iain McGilchrist (and it's heavy in its own way - exemplified by the very problems it identifies!). A relentless focus on unimportant details and minutiae to the expense of real work. The weight of administrative nonsense combined with horrible K-12 problems ... and then we add the criminal/subversive behavior. Those are not things worth "saving" at all. Not in any way. I am urged by present circumstances to write about ways to move forward - and health and well-being for each of us is a solid start. I'm sorry you missed so much sleep and became so exhausted. I very much hope you're better now.
Impossible to read.
As someone working outside academia (in communications and infrastructure for a research NGO) I'll take the liberty of suggesting one more rule:
Knowledge dissemination and public engagement should be a structural obligation of academic institutions.
Not a personal choice, not a bonus activity, not something that happens when a researcher has spare energy and goodwill.
This means: developing practice and infrastructure for communication, building capacity, and supporting researchers and scientists on this path (which is hard, often undervalued, and treated as a distraction from "real" work).
Because an academy that has isolated itself from society - from civil society, practitioners, and general public audiences, not just stakeholders and funders - is an academy without genetal trust.
And that vacuum in society doesn't stay empty. It gets filled first with pseudoscientific TikToks, and then with pseudoscientific decisions in real policy and real lives.
We're already living in that world.
American colleges and universities, once idyllic communities of civil discourse, free inquiry, and ultimate frisbee, were the envy of the world. Now they are home to hatred, violence, and ignorance, aimed squarely at Western Civilization. And they're proud of it. Just look at the recent graffiti at Swarthmore and the guest speakers at NYU who refer to college students fellow members of Islam's struggle to take over the West. Leftist professors and administrators got rich, fat, and drunk at the trough of bottomless student loans, which are backed by the full faith and credit of the very government they say they want to dismantle.
I have a few:
Require instructors to have worked a job for 5 to 10 years that is not paid by taxes or charity and that they depend on as their source of income. A job where the business has no right of existence.
Require instructors to serve in the miliary. You need to inculcate into your bones the country of citizenship and who you are fighting for and why.
Do not allow instructors to hire additional staff. They just hire a copy of themselves and engage in ideological genocide. Hire by a third party and step up to quotas of 50/50 left versus right. Diversity is our strength right?
Mandatory retirement at 65 versus hanging around with half efforts and keeping younger people with more energy and commitment from the position.
They won't do one even of these suggestions. They don't want to change.
In many places, the tenure protections are not as robust as you imagine. I have seen tenured faculty lose their positions due to not showing up. And in places like Florida, tenure exists in name only at public institutions now that the legislature has instituted mandatory "post-tenure review." Perhaps things are different at the elite private schools.
Unfortunately, personnel is policy. I don’t see anything short of thoroughly cleaning house or starting up new institutions reducing the rot eating away at academia.
The progressives who have captured the universities are constitutionally incapable of meaningful reform. “Diversity hiring” and using academic positions to pursue “social justice” activism instead of truth are non-negotiable for these people. It is who they are down to the core.
Review must include the participation of non-academics, preferably leaders in business who could and would apply business principles to review and retention. Review must begin early (first year teaching) and often (twice a year) to address problems before they become, well, problems. This does not mean outsourcing the review process to consultants. Nope! Actual business persons are what is needed.
From my perspective, the root of the problem is that the incentives are broken or missing and so is the value proposition.
The incentive problem had always been the case, but in 1978 when I graduated high school, 16% of the population had achieved a four year degree. In 2025 40% of women and 37% of men had attained a four year degree.
This explosion in the student population, along with a drastic increase in foreign student attendance, combined with a shrinking supply of jobs supported by domestic industry as those markets were being offshored to Mexico and China and other countries, transformed the education industry into a money and wealth making opportunity for many more people that would work in that industry.
Suddenly all people needed a college degree to have any chance of achieving and economically self-sufficient.
This and the easy student debt access provided no need for the education industry to demonstrate value. Parents and students were not questioning the value... they were just committed to get the student to attend the most prestigious college they would be accept to.
But this lead us to the current situation of administrative bloat and it causing hyper inflation of education costs... while at the same time the quality of that education has significantly declined.
We need to change the incentives so that the industry focuses on value. It never has before, but fewer people sought a higher learning degree and they were less of a requirement for achieving a good life.
The way we do that is to re-industrialize and fund private sector job training programs that become a good career path alternative to any that otherwise require a traditional higher learning degree. We also cut back on student loans. We prevent the colleges and universities from recruiting foreign students for the higher tuition they pay (American colleges and universities should reserve primary space for American students). We stop subsidizing colleges and universities with federal and state money. We require large endowments to be spent on student cost reduction and education value improvements. We require all higher learning to report on student job placement as part of their performance report card (if they have access to government-backed student loans, government education grants, etc.). We have the IRS remove their non-profit status if not using their funds for educations only (for example, no political action or ego shrine building).
All these rules being proposed are band-aides to the gaping wound of broken incentives and crashing value.
My rule would be no one can come directly from college into academia. They need to have a job for at least 5 years in a real business.
The People Who Who Never Leave School are worth shining a spotlight on. I think there is a link between this growing phenomenon and that of the Feminization (emphasis on feminine, which can refer to both women and men) discourse. School is safe and generally favors conscientious rule following and adherence to bureaucratic principles. There is nothing wrong with being feminine, and there is nothing wrong with some schools being organized around these principles, but I'm inclined to believe that much of the societal discontent with higher Ed is that the People Who Never Leave School have organized most/nearly all these institutions around their own proclivities / predispositions.
While it would be unfair to say that graduates and the public don't benefit from these institutions, it is fair to question whether these institutions are now benefiting the People Who Never Leave School far more than the former. And why the monopolization / homogeny?