They Can't Look in the Mirror
A Free Speech Panel. A Curriculum Committee. Same Disease.
FacultyLeaks.com is an anonymous dispatch from inside higher education. Some identifying details have been changed. The dysfunction has not.
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.
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Last year was my 50th reunion at my small, midwest liberal arts college founded in 1824 that still gets good academic ratings. My grandfather and his two brothers attended, he graduated in 1906, my father and his brother graduated in 1952 and 1953. My father remained friends with fraternity brothers his whole life. When I attended the college had just gone coed and tuition was about $3,200 annually. Dad paid that and I could make $3,000 in a summer to pay for books, transportation and spending money. Today tuition and board is $80,000. It is not worth it. Dad used to say that tuition cost was the cost of a Chevy Impala. In 1974 you could buy one of $3,300. They went up to $15,000 at the time tuition went there. Then the linkage ended. I ended my financial support.
I remember being challenged academically. I also remember being in a labor economics class being guest taught by an instructor that came from U of Wisconsin Madison. Compared to my other economics classes he was a long haired, lazy joke. That type has taken over. Today well over half the student population is female, DEI has multiple administrators and while I do not sit in a classroom, I know it is less academically rigorous than it once was, or at least many parts of it are. One of my sons went to college, is a full time father and does nothing with his math degree, the other became a tradesman with my enthusiastic support that has an educator spouse that runs a mini farm and homeschools their three. College was and should be for the top 10% of a population. NYU for $85K for a gender studies degree is an indication of the decadence of the age and education.
I applaud you beginning this Substack.
Good article by Zimmerman, but a straw man lurks within his piece. The Trump administration isn't going after pure and virtuous science-as-science (like his wife's research project) out of spite, anti-intellectualism, nor for ideological reasons, and we haven't gone from research universities that were "the envy of the world" to some status below that because the boogeyman Trump seeks to destroy "science". The Trump administration is going after massively bloated taxpayer-supported research funding.
At my university, 58% of every research grant is taken by the university as overhead. A researcher gets a $1,000,000 NSF grant, and gets to spend $420,000 on the project. The other $580,000 is used by the university for whatever it wants. Not coincidentally, we have a serious case of administrative bloat around here. The number of administrative positions, as well as the % of the university's operating budget devoted to administrators' salaries and benefits, has increased dramatically since I started working here 31 years ago.
And, of course, tuition has risen at a rate that far exceeds inflation.