Disrupting Higher Ed Before the Future Does It for Us

Higher ed's vulnerabilities go well beyond polarization and politicization

Photo by Alex Vasey on Unsplash

*As always, the opinions expressed below are mine and mine alone and do not necessarily reflect my employer’s position (or anyone else’s).

A few weeks back, the chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis, Daniel Diermeier and Andrew Martin, penned an op-ed for the Chronicle of Higher Education that laid out a blueprint for a return to the academic principles of excellence, freedom of expression, and accessibility.

The op-ed was a response to growing politicization and the resulting attacks on the academy, including attacks on DEI initiatives, NIH and NSF funding, and the planned dismantling of the Department of Education.

The op-ed was a pretty basic overview of the principles that academia at least ostensibly claims to protect. On its face it’s pretty uncontroversial.

In fact, I argued something similar last fall: universities should focus on being neutral cartographers of truth first and foremost, rather than trying to create ideal maps that don’t match the world humans actually have to navigate.

It’s Not *Just* Politicization

While I agree with their overall point in the op-ed, I’m not going to let Diermeier and Martin off the hook too easily. Academia has a number of deep and systemic weaknesses that will make it increasingly fragile over the coming years, and not just because of our current political climate.

And the problems, in many cases, require much deeper and more complicated solutions than just depoliticizing ourselves and moving on with our lives.

I’m guessing Diermeier and Martin would agree with a lot of what I’ll say below. It’s also true that one benefit of depoliticizing higher ed is that we’ll be better able to do our own internal housekeeping. But they don’t mention any of the broader systemic problems in the op-ed. The overall tone is one of “let’s return to a neutral excellence” as though the status quo before polarization hit was unquestionably solid.

And for those of us who have spent a lot of time in higher ed, we know that’s just not the case.

The claim to return to excellence based purely on merit, for example, is more than a bit utopian in a highly hierarchical space like academia. I’m not the first observer to note that pedigree often matters far more than actual accomplishment. Who you studied under and who you can name drop often matters more for your career than the excellence or innovation of your scholarship. Pedigree in turn makes the job easier in important respects, creating downstream inequities and making moving up the ladder of academic prestige difficult. It’s not enough to do excellent scholarship. You have to have started the process a decade before, by focusing on program prestige over fit, scholarly interest, affordability, or basic life constraints like family. It’s hardly a meritocracy, whatever we claim.

The claim of academic freedom too, is a bit laughable, given the structure and constraints of even non-politicized scholarship. In the first place, we’ve seen a declining quality of scholarship given that faculty at all levels face pressure to publish, even at small liberal arts schools that used to focus on excellence in teaching. The publishing churn means that many institutions are not even vetting the quality of the publications their faculty churn out or whether those publications even exist. This reality came to national prominence with social media provocateurs identifying plagiarism and academic misconduct even among university presidents (predictably politicized for maximum ideological impact).

The “publish or perish” grind follows in part from the fact that we (academics) produce a glut of PhDs who need jobs (you can read a different assessment and disagreement on ultimate causation here). At my own institution, we had over 100 qualified candidates for a recent search in political science. At some point you do give up and look at heuristics like publications and pedigree just to winnow the pool. The glut of PhDs is itself a failure since we should not be training people for jobs that don’t exist or if we do we should be training these folks to pivot and contribute to non-academic fields if a tenure-track job doesn’t materialize.

These are separate issues from the fact that even non-political work is highly biased toward areas that government researchers and other academics will fund and publish, which in turn is influenced by biases within disciplines, within funding agencies, in media attention and in the kind of research that’s hottest at any particular moment. The disparity in research funds for breast cancer versus other kinds of more lethal cancers has gotten a lot of coverage recently, but this only scratches the surface of how competing incentive structure within and outside academia push researchers away from some questions and toward others, without any obvious rationale. There’s certainly no clear alignment between the kind of research most scholars do and its importance or relevance to human problems or even their own scholarly interests.

And that’s before we even get into the ideological bias of faculty broadly, which has a lot of complex causes. What we do know is that the left-leaning bent of faculty makes higher education more susceptible to partisan attacks and also reduces the quality of the research that comes out of it, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. As others have noted though, the demographics of faculty are biased in ways many don’t even realize, biases that affect how we do research on everyone from rural Americans to Trump supporters to the military. After all, you can’t do research on what you don’t even see.

Adding to all this is the (what some are calling “existential”) replication crisis facing the sciences and social sciences. In addition to the incentives above that prioritize any research over good research, some of our deep failure in this area is that scholars from different perspectives almost never engage with each other directly and even more rarely collaborate to get to the truth. We end up with research siloes where data and results are insufficiently fact-checked and where entire fields of study cannot be replicated and may in fact, have no actual relation to reality at all (while consuming large percentages of university salary and resource pools).

Finally, and related to all of the above, is the deep resistance to change and innovation in institutions that claim to be at the forefront of knowledge creation. Brian Rosenberg’s wonderfully titled “Whatever It Is I’m Against It”: Resistance to Change in Higher Education tells the story without even needing to buy the book (but you should).

One obvious example of this resistance to change is tenure: it was created to promote exactly the excellence, freedom of expression and risk-taking that Diermeier and Martin argue is so central to the academic project. Unfortunately, in some (maybe many?) cases tenure becomes a lifelong protection for people doing minimal scholarship, minimal service, and minimal teaching, while safely pulling in relatively large salaries and preventing new PhDs from finding jobs. I don’t think these people are the majority (or rather, I hope they are not), but it’s enough of a problem that it makes tenure an easy target for politicization.

We could - as academics trained in research and problem-solving - easily align incentives to better adjust workload post-tenure. Universities and (many) faculty would benefit, it would eliminate tenure as a target for bad faith political actors, and it would increase public trust in high ed institutions. But most universities refuse because the very same faculty hired for their analytic skills would throw a fit and send a barrage of “reply all” emails to the entire campus for two months straight. No one wants to deal with it, so nothing gets better.

In my own college, a reorganization of small departments into larger schools with minimal-to-no impacts on faculty service, teaching or research has eaten up three years of our collective lives. That resistance to even mild change has convinced me that academia has deeper vulnerabilities than politicization and polarization.

Part of the problem is that scholars are trained in very narrow disciplines and are very rarely asked to think about how their work connects to any larger whole. This creates a self-centered and sometimes even entitled myopia where faculty are busily protecting “faculty governance” while the entire academic project collapses around them. To be meaningful at all, faculty governance has to move past resistance to any kind of change and move toward actual acknowledgement and ownership of the problems facing the academic project. Unless and until that happens, it’s a deeply hollow kind of governance and one that will hobble higher ed’s ability to adapt to what’s coming.

I’m not letting administrators off the hook either. Eroding faculty governance to make faculty more contingent, dependent, and disposable isn’t going to make academia stronger, solve the replication crisis, increase trust in public education, or create research that actually contributes to the public good. Too many administrators are so focused on capitulating to the needs of the shrinking pool of 18 years olds that they entirely miss the gaping holes in the hull of the academy, holes that will be made worse - not better - by undermining faculty expertise.

The short and medium term reality, as any honest scholar should admit, is that institutions that are incapable of curiously and honestly engaging with their weaknesses and preparing for the future are not going to navigate the disruption of Trump + generative AI + rapidly shifting workforce needs well. To say the least.

And that’s a loss not just for universities and the people they employ but for everyone else too. We need universities to be truth-finders now more than ever.

Universities Need to Disrupt Themselves

None of these vulnerabilities undermine the importance of higher education for our futures. I’ve spent more than half of my life in institutions of higher education. While I’m very aware of their weaknesses, I’m also aware of and deeply grateful for their strengths. American higher education continues to be the envy of the world and our research output makes the world a better place in every field, from philosophy to engineering to astrophysics. The study of knowledge for knowledge’s sake and the ability - still existent in some fields - to take a problem that no one else cares about and noodle over it just because it’s there is absolutely crucial for the accidental discoveries that increase human flourishing and help us make the world a better place to live in.

This post is *not* a call to reorient higher education around career skills or further erode faculty governance. It’s a call to all academics to take our analytic skills and problem-solving and apply them - honestly - to the problems that ail us as scholars, educators, and members of centuries old institutions.

Perhaps the starting point is, as Diermeier and Martin argue, to depoliticize and depolarize research, teaching, and administration. The bludgeon of the Trump era may loosen up space for important reforms (while still causing deep and immeasurable damage - I’m not claiming it will be worth it). And removing the political target from our backs could then free us up to turn inward.

But until higher education confronts the many deep(er) cracks in its edifice that have nothing to do with polarization, we may just survive the Trump era to be struck down by something else entirely.

As always, let me know what you think!

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