The Rot in Our Institutions – Part Two: Fixing the Academy

We explore the influence of 1960s radicals, federal student loans and the administrative bloat on the academy. We then provide seven ways to fix what ails our university system. 

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The Rot in Our Institutions – Part 2

Seven Ways to Fix the Academy 

January 2024

In our last podcast, we focused on the concerns of the university system regarding the proportion of progressive teaching. We concentrated on the Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal as an exemplar of the narrow, dominant, and harmful ideology of DEI that holds sway over our learning institutions.  

For this podcast, we will take a brief view or recent history of the academy, some of the broader issues, and how to fix them.  

“Economists report that a college education adds many thousands of dollars to a man’s lifetime income -- which he then spends sending his child to college.”

Money Manager and Writer Bill Vaughn

“College is a $120,000 hooker, and you’re the idiot that fell in love with her. She is not going to do anything else for you; it’s done.”

Comedian John Mulaney

In the late 1960s, as the Vietnam War dragged on and causalities mounted, a unique form of protest began to dominate college campuses. This practice was the occupation of university buildings, or college sit-ins.  A component of the broader anti-war movement of the 1960s, student organizations such as the Harvard chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) ran anti-war activities on campus. One Harvard example occurred in November 1966. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was prevented from leaving the campus by about 800 students. Forced from his car, he was placed on the hood of a convertible, where he agreed to answer questions on the Vietnam War from the crowd. A letter signed by 2,700 Harvard undergraduates apologizing to McNamara was sent to him a few days after.   

One imagines such letters to not be forthcoming in 2024 for such incidents.  

Other episodes followed, culminating in a riot in 1969. On the night of April 8, a group of about 300 students, led by the SDS, tacked a list of demands on the door of the home of Nathan Pusey, then President of Harvard. Not only did it call for the abolition of ROTC, but also for lower rent and student involvement in designing the curriculum for the Afro-American studies degree. Pusey later rejected the demands. At noon on April 9, about 70 students entered University Hall, ejecting administrative staff and faculty. While most left the building peacefully, some faculty members, like Assistant Dean Archie Epps, were forcefully expelled. At 4:15 pm, the administration closed Harvard Yard, citing safety concerns. The occupiers were threatened with criminal prosecution and disciplinary action if they did not leave. These demands fell on deaf ears. In the interim, the number of University Hall students increased to about 500, with another 3000 pouring into the Harvard Yard, despite its closure.

At 10 pm, Pusey called city and state police for help. At 4:45 am, the mayor of Cambridge, Walter Sullivan, warned the occupiers to leave before sending in 400 police officers to break up the protests.  The number of people arrested were around 200. Amongst them were several press people, who got released immediately. But at least 75 people were injured, and another 50 requiring hospitalization. Then as now, mostly peaceful protests is similar to mostly pregnant.  Either there is violence, or there is not.  In 1969 at Harvard, sit ins led to violence.  

of the first leaders was Tom Hayden, a social and political activist, author, and politician. Hayden was white, I hasten to add. The 1960s saw the permanent inception of one of my most despised roles in American society, the activist. This is a creature who exists to foment political disorder as a living, and traffics primarily in anger, angst, and fear in order to drive donations. Again, without donations, the activist does not eat. But are there no ills in America that we must address as a free society? Of course. The problem with the professional activist is that when said ill is fixed, they go on to the next thing. With the modern activist, it is not the cause; it is any cause. And though activists emanated from the left, we increasingly see a variation of this form on the right. 

Think about the movement for same-sex marriage. From 2008, when, of all people, Barack Obama rejected this, to 2014, when Oberfell made it the law of the land, the consensus dramatically changed. So did gay activists say, “Yeah! We did it, high fives all around,” and go find jobs that actually produce something? Nope, they became trans rights activists or looked for additional letters to add to LGBTQI ZVRE and whatever X is. And because of our relative wealth, activists are increasing like barnacles on a hulk left in the water too long.  

Hayden was best known for his role as an anti-war, civil rights, and intellectual activist in the 1960s, authoring the Port Huron Statement and standing trial in the Chicago Seven case. Hayden’s personal life was riven with strife, but as a white male in the 1960s, it was not as if he was one of the downtrodden peasants of France, Russia, or China or suffered from Jim Crow policies. He was a guy who liked activism as a point of identity, of feeling. And I am emphasizing Hayden because he captures the movement’s ethos. It was not as if a particular style of activism was not prevalent in the United States. 

Everything from religious awakenings to the suffragettes to the temperance movement had a certain activist mentality. 

However, the innovation wrought by the 1960s style exemplified by Hayden was centered on the academy. Here is some of his thinking, 

“I think people are entitled to march without a permit. You have permission when you have a few hundred thousand people on the street.” That is great. Essentially, Hayden believed that if only a mob is large enough, they can act illegally. I wonder if he feels the same about pro-life protests.  

He also said, 

“Communism is one of the options that can improve people’s lives.”

And finally, 

“The issue of civil rights was too much for the establishment to handle. One of the chapters of history that is least studied by historians is the 300 to 500 riots in the U.S. between 1965 and 1970.”

Is it any wonder that after the horrific events of October 12, 2023, in which 1,200 Israelis were murdered with hundreds more raped and taken hostage, including children, the pro-Hamas movements emanated from the campus? The other aspect that permeates the concept of the 1960s movements was one of the oppressors vs. oppressed narratives we explored in the previous podcast.  

Elizabeth Cady Stanton indeed would have claimed inequality in lacking the rights for women to vote in the 1800s, but she was no victim. Instead, it was because women are equal to men that she felt they deserved equal rights. 

That is different from what happens today. It is the perpetual victimology that has infected our institutions of higher learning.  

For the millennia of the formal university dating back to the 900s Morocco or 1st millennia Bologna, or even further back to Plato or Hypatia, one of the pillars of Education was for the young to learn from the experienced, the ignorant to learn from the wise. Certainly, some students were brilliant, and professors were complete idiots, but there was a systemic underpinning to our university system. That ended in the 1960s. And those radicals who staged the sit-ins and protests? They stayed, becoming professors or administrators, and thus began the great conservative exodus (or expulsion) from the academy. Being a professor in post-1960s America beats working or doing hard scholarship, as was seen in the case of Claudine Gay.  

There is a natural progression to life in which the 20-something works for an older person, learns from their mistakes, encounters good and bad supervisors, and becomes one themselves. Those 1960s radicals short-circuited this natural system. It was not just weed they got high on. I, too, have been part of movements and protest events. I marched in support of Chinese revolutionaries in the late 1980s and was in Madison, WI, in 2010 to fight against the teachers’ unions. There is a surge of adrenaline to these events.  

But that is just it, a momentary hit of dopamine. Real change takes time, pressure, and dedication. But for the 1960s, radical protesters, grievance, and an all-consuming embrace of progressive ideology prevented a natural maturation process. The baby boomers became the establishment and institutionalists they so decried but still acted, and act even today, like those teenagers and 22-year-olds from the 1960s. And this is the culture they have established for subsequent generations. The boomers may be retiring, but their ideation spawn is still dominant. Instead of bringing wisdom and circumspection to the university, they got the angry passion of the 1960s, and our universities have been warped ever since. So when that same ethos visited the campus through gender studies and DEI, the new establishment was ill-equipped to question it because it was so in their wheelhouse. When campus microaggressions, safe spaces, trigger warnings, speech codes, and censorship were imposed, the types of things that the radicals would have decried coming from a Nathan Pusey. These concepts are the logical endgame of the illiberalism they exhibited in their protest days. 

As Victor Davis Hanson wrote back in 2016, 

“Few sociological courses today celebrate the uniquely American assimilationist melting pot. Race, class, and gender agenda courses - along with thousands of “studies” courses - have been invented. A generation of politicized professors has made the strange argument that they alone have discovered all sorts of critical new disciplines of knowledge - apparently unknown for 2,500 years - to ensure that graduates would be better educated than ever before. Universities have lost their commitment to the inductive method. Preconceived anti-Enlightenment theories are established as settled facts and part of career promotion. Evidence is made to fit these unquestioned assumptions. Two unfortunate results have predictably followed. Students now leave campus largely prepped by their professors to embrace a predictable menu: the glories of larger government, income redistribution, greater entitlements, radical environmentalism, abortion, multiculturalism, suspicion of traditional religion, and antipathy to the international role of the United States in the past and present.”

And it is here where Davis Hanson gets to the actual harm wrought by abandoning traditional learning curricula: “Careerism often drives campus politics. If poor, minority, or first-generation college students could obtain the traditional tools of success - English and mathematic literacy, acquaintance with American history and protocols, oral and written language mastery - they would succeed as individuals without the need for the college industry of collective victimology that assumes a permanent lack of parity.

And in a more recent piece, written just a few months ago, Davis Hanson notes, “At some universities “blacklists” circulate warning “marginalized” students which professors they should avoid who still cling to supposedly outdated standards regarding exam-taking, deadlines, and absences. All these radical changes explain the current spectacle of angry students citing grievances and poorly educated graduates who have had little course work in traditional history, literature, philosophy, logic, or the traditional sciences.”

And onto this burning ash heap of anti-American values, Barack Obama added a violent accelerant in the form of heaps of money. It was Obama who crafted a drastic federal takeover of the student loan program. In 2010, according to the Obama White House Press release, 

“The student lending overhaul ends the program that subsidizes banks and other financial institutions for issuing loans, instead allowing students to borrow directly from the federal government. Interest rates for some borrowers will also be lowered. Instead of banks using government money to loan tuition, the government will lend the funds directly. Starting July 1, all new federal student loans will be delivered and collected by private companies under performance-based contracts with the Department of Education, according to officials.

The result? Rising college costs, declining return on investment, and ballooning student loan debt cost taxpayers hundreds of dollars. 

Adds Davis Hanson, “Universities and students have plenty of money to continue the weaponization of the university, given their enormous tax-free endowment income. Nearly $2-trillion in government-subsidized student loans are issued without accountability or reasonable demands that they be repaid in timely fashion.”

Here are a few stats. Severely delinquent student loans have soared since 2012 and are now 35% of “severe derogatories”—more than credit cards (23%), auto loans (21%) and mortgages (11%).

About 10% of the $1.5 trillion federal student loan portfolio is 30 days or more past due.

When I borrow from the bank, I sit on one side of the table and the bank on the other. But when we borrow directly from the government, I sit on both sides of the table as a voter. The bank is incentivized to do two things: lend their money to make interest, and the money works for the bank and the bank’s owner and to get paid back. By coveting votes, the federal government will wish to lend the money at a level that I want, and interest be damned. As we have seen with the Biden administration’s debt cancellation scheme, the government does not need to get paid back.  

But nothing is free. Someone always pays. But in the case of the Biden administration, with a solid college-educated voting bloc, vs the GOP’s increasingly solid noncollege attendee bloc, the latter pays for the former—smart politics, very bad for the nation and even worse for colleges.  

Commentator George Leef, writing for Capitalism Magazine, notes,

 “I have argued many times that the federal government should not be in the business of lending money for college (nor for any other reason), but as long as we have student loans, we should limit the losses by requiring that someone other than the students be responsible for their debts. That party should be the college itself.”

In his press release, Obama argued that eliminating the middleman in student loans would “save $68 billion.”  

The reality, as Leef notes, 

“In one of the nation’s greatest blunders, we (that is, our representatives in Congress) decided to subsidize higher Education with easy-to-get loans for anyone who wanted to give college a try. The total student loan debt is $1.7 trillion; some debtors can’t pay back what they owe, and our “compassionate” political leaders are doing all they can to ensure that most will never have to. The cost of higher Education has become a huge drain on the taxpayers and a huge waste of resources since much of what passes for Education in college these days is of minimal or even negative value. Have you heard about the course at Johns Hopkins, “Climate Fiction and Capitalist Accumulation”? Many Americans go to college, learn little, and graduate (or sometimes not), only to work at jobs requiring basic trainability, not advanced study in any field. And in doing so, they accumulate much debt – debt that now spills over onto the taxpayer.” 

One of my favorite rule of thumb is to understand most truths or the underlying motivation of people and follow the money. The horrific decision of the Obama administration to federalize student loans did not make the university progressive and DEI adherent overnight. That process had been in place for decades. But it did put that process on greased rails because it sloshed money all over the campus and provided a buffer for the student (and their parents) from the outcomes of their financial decisions. Now a student could pursue that queer studies master’s degree with abandon. It is their decision, but you and I pay.  

It also accelerated the process of administrative bloat. Paul Weinstein Jr, writing for Forbes, notes,

“Between 1976 and 2018, full-time administrators and other professionals employed by those institutions increased by 164% and 452%. Meanwhile, the number of full-time faculty employed at colleges and universities in the U.S. increased by only 92%, marginally outpacing student enrollment, which grew by 78%.”

The reason is that most institutions of higher learning depend on tuition revenue for survival. While a handful of elite universities (think Harvard, Stanford, Princeton) have endowments large enough to cover the cost of attendance for any student in need, the rest require undergrads to borrow, on average, over $30,000 to earn a bachelor’s. And a brief segue. Harvard’s endowment is $50 billion or roughly $2 million per ALL Harvard students. My Alma Mater, Lawerence University, with an enrollment of 1,200 students and an endowment of $500 million, is $400,000 per student. But my college once had a President named Rick Warch, a rainmaker. 

Ripon College, similar to Harvard, has $120,000 per student.  

In the past, when faced with funding shortfalls, colleges and universities attempted to “grow their way” out of the problem by opening up new sources of revenue. Many launched new graduate programs, including terminal master’s degrees (no doctoral option) and certificates. Others increased their online offerings to expand their access to part-time students beyond the gates of their campuses. Almost all opened their doors to international students who could afford the total price.

But unlike Purdue University—who used this new source of revenue to hold undergraduate tuition flat for a decade—most schools went on a hiring spree, one that massively expanded the ranks of all types of employees, with one notable exception—full-time faculty Between 1976 and 2018, full-time administrators and other professionals employed by those institutions increased by 164% and 452%, respectively. Meanwhile, the number of full-time faculty employed at colleges and universities in the 

Weinstein adds, 

When we look at individual schools, the numbers are just as striking. A recent report I authored found that, on average, the top 50 schools have one faculty per 11 students, whereas the same institutions have one non-faculty employee per 4 students. Put another way, there are now three times as many administrators and other professionals (not including university hospital staff) as there are faculty (on a per-student basis) at the leading schools in the country.

And now, as a valued listener, I will do something I rarely do in my podcasts, written pieces, or tweets: I will be profane. In a paper entitled, What’s that smell? Bullshit Jobs in Higher Education by Michael Delucchi, the author notes: 

Nearly a century after the publication of this appraisal, universities’ bureaucracies were described as occupied with an extraordinary number of vice presidents, provosts, vice provosts, associate provosts, deans, vice deans, associate deans, and assistant deans, along with armies of ‘other professionals’ serving as the administration’s ‘arms, legs, eyes, ears, and mouthpieces.” 

What do today’s college administrators and professional staffers do? Most days, they attend several meetings, usually with other senior academic managers. They also spend time planning professional conferences and staff retreats, engaging in strategic planning processes, and fund-raising. While time-consuming, the contribution of these activities to the institution’s mission is debatable. According to Ginsberg, ‘little would be lost if all pending administrative retreats and conferences, as well as four of every five staff meetings, were canceled.’

The reason? “Administrators ‘have a strong incentive to maximize the power and prestige of whatever office they hold by working to increase their staff and budget. As a means of justification, they often invent new functions to perform or seek to capture functions performed by others’

Okay, this would be true of any organization, whether a college, a business, or an association. However, the latter two must exist within certain budget constraints not applied to universities. Colleges raise tuition so that, let’s say, a candy company cannot raise prices on their chocolate offerings. Because a college degree is considered so important, people pay.  

One of the standards of activism is that it is always better to be against something than for something. It was why many activists and influencers on the right today seemingly want to be in the minority.  

But I am going to give a five-point prescription. 

1. Get the government out of the student loan business. A simple rule of economics is that when you spend more and more money, you get inflation and less for your spending. Ultimately, the average cost of tuition has increased nearly 180% over the past 20 years, even after accounting for inflation. This will have the effect of better tying a supply and demand curve on universities, arresting inflation, and forcing colleges to cut administrative bloat. Sorry, DEI departments, it’s time to tighten the belt or produce something of genuine value. 

1. End professor tenure – and begin auditing classes to ascertain the curriculum and publish these syllabi, giving prospective parents, especially conservative ones, a sense of what is being taught.  

1. Reorient parent expectations of the classes. When parents and their kids tour campuses, they see the union hall and the dorms, and at Texas A&M, they can even see a lazy river. So, are our parents paying for an extended 4-year vacation for little Johnny and Susie? They should be exploring the classes’ content and the curriculum’s quality.   

1. Demand that universities’ endowments back their student loans. The government should tax endowment income and end lifelong tenure. Universities must expel and deport international students who violate campus laws as they violently act out their various hatreds.

1. Reinstate the SAT for admissions. And require a national SAT-like exit exam to reassure the public that graduates at least know more when they leave college than when they enrolled—an increasingly dubious assumption.

1. Discourage the public from stop giving money to elite institutions. To continue such philanthropy is akin to supplying heroin to an addict, gas to a fire, or fireworks to children. Remember that Harvard endowment. Why would anyone give money to a university sitting on a cash pile of that magnitude? Harvard has 22,000 students. One percent of Harvard’s endowment is $500m million, enough to have every student attend for free. They do not need any more money. And for that matter, let’s stop the gifting grift. In a hilarious rant, the aforementioned comedian John Mulaney noted, after paying his tuition of $120,000, that the university wanted more of his money. “You dare to want more? What kind of a coke-head relative is my college? You spent it already!”  

1. Take the halo effect from our elite universities. Gay is a clear example that if one has the correct identity and the right political views, mediocrity can reign. Shelby Steele, for instance, attended Coe College, The University of Utah, and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and I would put his intellect up against any elite matriculator. Let’s not consider our prestigious schools any longer necessarily prestigious. Many are not. Do not hire a graduate simply because she graduated from Yale or attended Stanford—unless one prefers to risk dealing with an employee poorly schooled but likely to act out a pampered victim status and to disrupt a workplace.

I have left so many things out of this piece, but I am already two podcasts long on this one.  For my next podcast on our institutions, I will discuss my time with the American Medical Association.  But before I end this, a few words from Nelson Mandela, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. The power of Education extends beyond the development of skills we need for economic success. It can contribute to nation-building and reconciliation.” If we do not fix our educational institutions, we will soon see the opposite of what Mandela is discussing.