The Problem Is Academia

The explosion of violent and shockingly antisemitic protests on college campuses is just the latest in a series of self-inflicted black eyes for higher education in the United States. In March last year, a group of students at Stanford Law School shut down a talk by federal Judge Kyle Duncan, screaming vulgar epithets and refusing to allow him to speak. In October, the presidents of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania embarrassed themselves in congressional hearings convened to ask about combating antisemitism on their campuses. Penn President Liz Magill resigned immediately thereafter. Harvard's President Claudine Gay survived that controversy but resigned a few weeks later when multiple instances of plagiarism in her research were exposed.

This week, protests have erupted not only at Ivy League schools like Columbia, Harvard and Brown but the University of Southern California, the University of Michigan, the University of Texas, Emory University and elsewhere, causing enormous disruption. Jewish students at Columbia left campus, after which the administration announced that classes will be hybrid (in-person and virtual) for the remainder of the semester. USC has canceled its public commencement ceremony. Dozens have been arrested on multiple campuses.

Americans are understandably asking, what's the problem in academia?

I've worked as a professor and administrator at multiple institutions since 1991. Despite its historic strengths (and there are many), there is a great deal wrong with our system of higher education. A comprehensive list is impossible given space constraints, but here are some issues that have contributed to the damaged culture in academia.

-- Academia is dominated by one political perspective. A 2017 article from Inside Higher Ed cited a study showing that just over 9% of faculty surveyed identified as "conservative." A more recent article from the American Institute for Economic Research points out that this trend has worsened in the past few years, with the number of faculty who identify as "far left" more than doubling. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the disciplines where leftist ideology is most monolithic -- up to 80% -- are the humanities and social sciences; subjects all students are exposed to, regardless of their majors.

-- Standards for publication contribute to the proliferation of nonsense. Faculty are required to publish significantly more than was the case decades ago. Candidates for tenure are evaluated not only for publishing in "A" journals but for the number of times their work is cited by other scholars. While this can demonstrate serious and groundbreaking work, it also incentivizes taking radical or inflammatory positions for the sake of getting attention. (On the internet, this is called "clickbait." We'll call this practice "citebait.")

In 2018, scholars Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay revealed another consequence of the "publish -- a lot -- or perish" culture. The three crafted multiple papers with deliberately absurd theses -- calling for "feminist astrology" or arguing for the existence of "rape culture" in dog parks -- and several were accepted for publication. (In a disturbing display of defensive embarrassment, Boghossian's employer, Portland State, accused him of "academic fraud" and commenced a disciplinary investigation. He resigned in protest.)

-- Research is captured by politics and money. When headlines proclaim that "most researchers agree," readers may assume scientists with competing ideas duked it out, and the theory with the most proof prevailed. That isn't necessarily true. A 2019 article in medical news journal Stat revealed that research into alternative theories about the causes of Alzheimer's was thwarted by "experts" who didn't want their theories challenged: Scholars' papers weren't published, their grant applications were rejected, speaking engagements were denied, faculty candidates were denied tenure. This has happened in other disciplines as well, including nutrition, climate change and gender dysphoria. Dissenters from the orthodoxy are dealt with harshly.

-- Tenure is a big part of the problem. The "third rail" in any discussion about academic policies, tenure is supposed to promote diversity of viewpoints, encourage scholarly exploration and protect faculty from retaliation. In practice, however, as noted above, it has contributed to publishing "churn" and been used as a weapon against scholars whose work challenges or repudiates prevailing viewpoints.

It has also insulated faculty who espouse societally destructive ideologies from any accountability. It's one thing to posit a controversial theory of particle physics and be proven wrong. It's altogether different to defend a political philosophy like Marxism -- as many professors continue to do. By way of comparison, if a company or industry produced a product that killed 100 million people, it's safe to say there would be some blowback. Why should faculty be able to preach doctrines like collectivism, moral relativism or the nonexistence of truth without being called to account for the consequences?

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