Columbia's dismal re-invention of itself - as a Monastery of Groupthink and playground of spoilt-brat-mobstering - is of course a story repeated (in slightly varying degrees) right across the Western academy. The tragedy is that it has taken conservative-minded grown-ups so long to wake up to what's been going on (for decades now).
The Humanities end of academia has long been the natural home of a malcontent pseudo-intelligentsia - one that wanted to see itself as more sophisticated than thou by unpicking our culture's moral compass. And these types made a beeline for the public-funded universities and the rest of our polity was foolish enough to stand by as they have entirely colonised them and sheep dipped the rising generations of the professional/managerial elite with their bogus 'Social Justice' race and gender victimhood cults. Heather Mac Donald's 'The Diversity Delusion' (2018) is a great in-depth dig into this... I reviewed it here: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/how-diversity-narrows-the-mind
On one hand it is hard to be anything but pessimistic about the trajectory of western higher ed, on the other when I launched this Substack in February 2023 the Harvard plagiarism scandal hadn't happened, the riots at Columbia hadn't happened, etc. So many more people than I ever dreamed possible have woken up to the rot of these sorts of prestigious institutions, it's been nothing short of miraculous!
In my experience somewhat, things are a bit less outrageously censorious than in 2020-21 and murmurs of discontent are a little more audible, but all of the institutions and the grantmaking are still fundamentally based on equity fundamentalism and/or postmodern power games. So maybe things have improved a bit but the outlook is still grim and heterodox people are still gradually but systematically getting squeezed out of higher education. I am not optimistic. On the other hand, I attended the Heterodox Academy conference a few months ago and the mood was really very ebullient, it made me slightly more hopeful. Wrote about that at https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/heterodox-and-loving-it
This is a very moving post. It is horrible when you see an institution you love self-immolating as you watch.
So - I applied for Dean of my law school earlier this year. Entirely unsurprisingly to me, my application was rejected swiftly. I hadn’t held any senior administrative positions, so it’s entirely reasonable to reject me. In fact, I am pleased to be rejected, because I applied out of a sense of duty. Teaching and writing are what I love, not administration.
But one of my friends said, upon reading my application letter, “Your first mistake was to mention your courage and honesty.” If that’s how a university is - if courage and honesty are not qualities valued in leadership - then that’s when you get the appointments like Baroness Shafik. Universities don’t want someone who damages their “brand” by being outspoken, pointing out problems and making unpopular decisions - as they themselves trash their brand. Fundamentally, they don’t understand what their brand is.
With all due respect, I'd say you have way too much integrity to be a dean or college president. It is an amoral job at best, where your task is to fundamentally misrepresent the institution to maximize fundraising and clout. From what I've seen it is absolutely soul-killing.
To me, the issue is that employers need to step up and stop hiring from these schools. Take honors students from state schools.
You cannot tell me that the students at Columbia requesting "humanitarian aid" and saying "Zionists don't deserve to live" have some kind of unprecedented work ethic and worldly knowledge that an honors engineering student at Iowa State doesn't have.
In my home state of Missouri, there's a funny ambiguity that when you talk about working in higher ed "at Columbia" people more often think you mean the flagship state school "Mizzou" in Columbia, MO vs. the more famous white elephant in New York City. I've met a bunch of super talented folks who went to Mizzou's honors college far more impressive than many people I've met and interviewed in the northeastern Ivy League context.
That said, for so many kids from unsung places lucking into the Ivy League is something their entire community is proud of. It's not bright young strivers' fault that the prestigious institutions they happened into have largely gone to shit, and not entirely fair to kneecap those bright-eyed students for their fallen elders' sins. There's got to be some ready pathways to incorporate all that sheer talent working to do what they had to do to forge maximally viable career paths.
In the 1960s and 70s, when the states closed the mental institutions, the patients they offloaded had to go somewhere. Higher education was the perfect feeding trough for the unproductive and unconstructive who had to survive but had nothing to offer, other than nonsense.
Every year for at least 50 years, the Ivy League Gangsters who rose to positions of authority in DC redistributed 2/3 of the federal budget which we were forced to pay under threat as taxation, a great deal of which was passed off to their cronies in corporate "education."
Now it is clear what a racket they have been running all along.
Within a generation, and probably less -- mark my words -- those college buildings will be another Rust Belt. Empty buildings, broken windows, overgrown flower beds.
Ha, I've never made that connection before. I am less optimistic than you that these fancy places will get the comprehensive comeuppance they deserve, even after all the scandals this past year Harvard for instance remains probably the most prestigious brand on the planet and I suspect there will always be more than enough ambitious go-getters who want a piece of that. But I do think this past year has been very hopeful in terms of knocking the Ivy League off its pedestal, or at least chopping that pedestal down to a less lofty level. Millions more people than I ever dreamed possible have woken up to the emperor having no clothes.
I am unusual in that I saw, or, at least, sensed that something was not quite right in academia when I was there for my degrees 40+ years ago. But when my father first entered academia, 80 years ago, it was a superior place for a thinking man. This was, of course, before the detritus of the German and French schools of nihilism washed ashore here to poison the youth under their charge. Whereas I had seen the ravaging animus behind De(con)struction and the mindless stupidity of those who called themselves by the contradiction, Marxist Historian, my father had no idea that any academic could be intentionally and willfully destructive to the subject of his professional focus. And, of course, they are not academics, not in the old sense. They are not even intellectuals. It's all very simple: they are the insane.
My Dad was a social worker who ran a center where people with mental illness but stabilized on medication could hang out and socialize in a stable, subsidized environment. For some reason (he was a very cheap man) he decided that it was an appropriate place for my brother and I to hang out, so I spent a ton of time surrounded by mentally ill people for several years as I grew up. Most of the time it was playing Nintendo, cards, or board games with friendly if somewhat arrested adults, but I did witness a number of psychotic breaks when people would go off their meds. That ended up being really excellent training for navigating higher education: mental illness is a serious problem in the academy, and especially in advocacy/grievance fields where obsessive paranoia is a competitive advantage. I can think of several professors at Columbia I suspect are literally certifiable, and wrote more about that at https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/the-ivy-league-has-gone-mad .
I will say that despite all the grief baby boomers get, some of it justifiable, many of them inherited the sort of high standards your father expected and kept at least some of that sensibility alive. Brown was a disappointing and underwhelming intellectual environment by the time I arrived in the early 2000s, but still had pockets of greatness like Glenn Loury's classes and was far less far gone than Columbia by the time I started working there in 2011, and that intellectual environment deteriorated rapidly from there as the boomers increasingly retired, particularly from department leadership.
Enjoyed reading the description of the professor "quaking with rage." Yes, you saw it, too. It was there in the 60s. I recall dinner table conversations and my father when he was the Dean of the college, telling my mother, also a teacher, of what sounded to me as a boy like outrageous faculty behavior. He said, "Rich, it's like coralling cats."
His work with the Peace Corps took him around the world, but he never forgot the very hardscrabble place he came from! On a number of occasions I sat in on some men's support groups that he ran, and he was like a masterful conductor of subtly and diplomatically helping people process their emotions and constructively analyze their behavior. Truly, and not just because he was my Dad, he was one of the most talented people I've ever met. I miss him everyday.
The thing is, the entire university business model is an anachronism premised on a privileged access to information that no longer exists in the world of the Internet. Basically everything people learn in undergrad (at least academically) can be learned for free on the internet now, so it is hard to imagine that in the long or even medium term people will keep going into massive debt to learn those things. Really the only thing keeping the model afloat is the credentialing aspect, and even that is rapidly crumbling as more and more employers are waiving college degree requirements as they realize that (a) a college degree no longer denotes any particularly outstanding intellect or achievement and (b) they are better off hiring people out of high school and training them up than hiring people who are massively in debt and thus need to be paid more. I predict that in 20 years universities as we know them will cease to exist, or at a minimum that a college education will revert to being a luxury good indulged in by children of privilege who can afford to spend four years having fun on campus as it was prior to the ‘80s or so.
Higher ed is entering a very difficult period where low fertility rates are starting to make it harder and harder to fill seats. Part of the quiet logic of bringing in so many millions of illegal immigrants is to use them to kick the demographic can down the road in the education sector, but children of impoverished migrants are not necessarily oriented to attend college. I do think we're going to see dozens and dozens of campus closures in the coming years but it will tend to be local and regionally known places that lack a powerful brand name
I don't think that mass college enrollment will go away, though, not only because higher education is a key part of the Democratic Party coalition but because humans are fundamentally wired to establish hierarchy and pecking order. There remains an unfortunate social and class gulf between people who've gone to college and those who have not, and even very successful affluent people who didn't go to college are often insecure about that. And then there are social and class gulfs between some college or college grad, graduate school or no, more famous school or more obscure, etc. I expect the eternal desire to "keep up with the Joneses" will keep higher ed shuffling along.
Exile, the college admissions scandal of a few years back illustrates your comment. The parents who bribed their children's way into prestigious colleges weren't trying to buy education, they were trying to buy prestige. That they were prepared not just to buy it but to commit crimes to buy it shows you how badly they wanted it.
It was not a matter of privilege, but rather of merit. At least, from the 1930s through the 1960s, when my father and other men and women of that generation were active: very capable, serious about scholarship and teaching, and they disdained and criticized hacks. Scholars must identify hack work. That is impossible if one posits that there is no truth and anything goes. (Contemporary academics don't even touch the ideal of truth. This is why their work always fails.)
They were the kind of scholar/teacher you may never have encountered. One can not learn by oneself as well as when guided by a truly gifted professional scholar/teacher. In conception and execution, their pedagogical technique was finely honed. I still read truly magnificent scholarship being published today -- but back then, that was de rigeur. Now it is exceptional.
Richard, there seems to have been a glitch and your comment posted several times. I'm going to go ahead and delete the duplicates, no offense intended!
Re: your point, I reviewed Glenn Loury's excellent new memoir a few months ago, and one of the most moving passages was him talking about the sheer intoxication of intellectual adventure he found with colleagues at the U of Chicago in the late 70s. By the time I was at Brown, Loury was one of very very few faculty there operating on that level, and his sort of ilk only got fewer and farther between in my experience. I was pleased to meet some very substantive people at the Heterodox Academy conference a few months back, though, which left me more hopeful about the future of higher ed than I'd been in a long time.
What is just as galling, and has helped these universities shelter from real scrutiny over this same period is their simultaneous commitment and uncritical adoption of the STEM concept. In airtight corners of these universities massive amounts of money have been poured in to science faculties which have been ‘educating’ the brightest and best in science and entrepreneurship. Much of this has been concomitant with a buy-in to climate change dogma.
In short, this has not been an era for independent minds or creative spirits.
Yeah, having gone to Brown the ways that the humanities and social sciences could so easily get twisted and hijacked was already a familiar conceptual category, but at Columbia the shameless distortion of law, engineering, medicine and broader "hard fields" was much more difficult to wrap my mind around.
Hopefully the tough times mean more opportunities for independent creatives!
There is one crucial variable that is always missed in these conversations. Professors are not teachers. They have no training in how to teach. They are literally just doing what was done to them, or what they think is a good idea. I would know, and this is the crux of Fake Professor.
Look, I'm an idiot. I'm a duck, and I ride a bike. I got my bullshit degree in "Leisure Studies and Services" from the University of Oregon in 1990. So, take everything I say with copious amounts of salt.
Nearly 100 years ago, the most respected and important universities were in Germany. All the important scientists were at Gottingen, Heidelberg, Munich and Berlin. The Ivy's, in America? They cared more about college football. They were the Alabama and Clemson of their day.
Eventually, these German schools were captured ideologically. They have not recovered. That's what's happening now in the Ivy's, and there is no turning back.
Ha, give yourself some more credit! Certainly "The Ivy League" as coined basically just referred to an old money sports league at a handful of fancy old colleges at the beginning, but also had covered probably most of the sons of the leading northeastern establishment for a long time. They were peripheral to the German universities, for sure, but not unrightfully prestigious for what they were. It was mainly the World Wars, and the U.S. eastern seaboard becoming the new center of power, that dethroned the continental schools in favor of places like Columbia. Of course, the same imperial rot has set in over the decades!
Greetings from Lawrence, KS, at least sometimes. Border war and all that. Also, you do not appear to have chat turned on. My professorship is in law, but I'm active in quite a number of domains, including cultural anthropology of the contemporary. That led to a strange collection of projects, and a widening discontent with the academy along lines you know well. For the last few years I've been struggling with a book trying to tie these things together: what remains open for the university, and for intellectual life more generally, and what does this have to do with how we confront the contemporary? Quixote's Dinner Party is under review; when it eventually appears I think you'd find it interesting.
Hi David! I entirely relate as a displaced Missourian which is part of why the overture to the whole enterprise and The Ivy Exile: The Playlist relates to "The Impossible Dream" and torturous implications thereof! https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/the-ivy-exile-the-playlist
Not currently on paid mode chat but feel free to PM!
Although I am sure there are compensations, and while I am sympathetic to many of the arguments, to leave ten years behind, badly, must have been hard. Even the most appropriate divorce is still . . . Thanks for the essay.
Shafik could have negotiated with the protesters for a peaceful salution. Other universities did. Instead she set the pattern for the criminalization of dissent on campuses across the nation. Local "big donors"--super wealthy individuals--demanded Mayor Adams send in the police.
I did find it disappointing that the first instinct of a lot of people who were offended was to expand the administrative censorship and punishment apparatus rather than to recognize that it was a big part of what made the conversation so deeply stupid in the first place. That said, I don't really think the protesters had a coherent enough set of demands or motivations that any negotiation was particularly going to go anywhere, it was primarily about "the vibes." I am not a Columbia alumnus, but feel like I spent enough time on campus to be grandfathered in!
For the protesters, outraged at what they consider to be genocide in Gaza, the issue is a moral, not a political one. There will be more demonstrations in the Fall.
I guess when I think back to my own student activism days, and the various protests, we were goofy kids looking for kicks and significant others and to shore up our identities, the substantive policy issues were not especially high on the list of anyone's priorities. So I agree the demonstrations will continue but I'm not sure what if any concessions would scratch the actual itch, or if that itch is scratchable.
It's very interesting how technocratic conventional wisdom perceives itself as so perfectly empirical and non-ideologically data-based, but then fills in its cracks with postmodern language plays and power games. I wrote about that at https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/vulgar-displays-of-power
Columbia's dismal re-invention of itself - as a Monastery of Groupthink and playground of spoilt-brat-mobstering - is of course a story repeated (in slightly varying degrees) right across the Western academy. The tragedy is that it has taken conservative-minded grown-ups so long to wake up to what's been going on (for decades now).
The Humanities end of academia has long been the natural home of a malcontent pseudo-intelligentsia - one that wanted to see itself as more sophisticated than thou by unpicking our culture's moral compass. And these types made a beeline for the public-funded universities and the rest of our polity was foolish enough to stand by as they have entirely colonised them and sheep dipped the rising generations of the professional/managerial elite with their bogus 'Social Justice' race and gender victimhood cults. Heather Mac Donald's 'The Diversity Delusion' (2018) is a great in-depth dig into this... I reviewed it here: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/how-diversity-narrows-the-mind
On one hand it is hard to be anything but pessimistic about the trajectory of western higher ed, on the other when I launched this Substack in February 2023 the Harvard plagiarism scandal hadn't happened, the riots at Columbia hadn't happened, etc. So many more people than I ever dreamed possible have woken up to the rot of these sorts of prestigious institutions, it's been nothing short of miraculous!
Not being involved in academia myself, do you see more colleagues/former colleagues standing up (or at least waking up) to the tide of illiberality?
In my experience somewhat, things are a bit less outrageously censorious than in 2020-21 and murmurs of discontent are a little more audible, but all of the institutions and the grantmaking are still fundamentally based on equity fundamentalism and/or postmodern power games. So maybe things have improved a bit but the outlook is still grim and heterodox people are still gradually but systematically getting squeezed out of higher education. I am not optimistic. On the other hand, I attended the Heterodox Academy conference a few months ago and the mood was really very ebullient, it made me slightly more hopeful. Wrote about that at https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/heterodox-and-loving-it
This is a very moving post. It is horrible when you see an institution you love self-immolating as you watch.
So - I applied for Dean of my law school earlier this year. Entirely unsurprisingly to me, my application was rejected swiftly. I hadn’t held any senior administrative positions, so it’s entirely reasonable to reject me. In fact, I am pleased to be rejected, because I applied out of a sense of duty. Teaching and writing are what I love, not administration.
But one of my friends said, upon reading my application letter, “Your first mistake was to mention your courage and honesty.” If that’s how a university is - if courage and honesty are not qualities valued in leadership - then that’s when you get the appointments like Baroness Shafik. Universities don’t want someone who damages their “brand” by being outspoken, pointing out problems and making unpopular decisions - as they themselves trash their brand. Fundamentally, they don’t understand what their brand is.
With all due respect, I'd say you have way too much integrity to be a dean or college president. It is an amoral job at best, where your task is to fundamentally misrepresent the institution to maximize fundraising and clout. From what I've seen it is absolutely soul-killing.
To me, the issue is that employers need to step up and stop hiring from these schools. Take honors students from state schools.
You cannot tell me that the students at Columbia requesting "humanitarian aid" and saying "Zionists don't deserve to live" have some kind of unprecedented work ethic and worldly knowledge that an honors engineering student at Iowa State doesn't have.
In my home state of Missouri, there's a funny ambiguity that when you talk about working in higher ed "at Columbia" people more often think you mean the flagship state school "Mizzou" in Columbia, MO vs. the more famous white elephant in New York City. I've met a bunch of super talented folks who went to Mizzou's honors college far more impressive than many people I've met and interviewed in the northeastern Ivy League context.
That said, for so many kids from unsung places lucking into the Ivy League is something their entire community is proud of. It's not bright young strivers' fault that the prestigious institutions they happened into have largely gone to shit, and not entirely fair to kneecap those bright-eyed students for their fallen elders' sins. There's got to be some ready pathways to incorporate all that sheer talent working to do what they had to do to forge maximally viable career paths.
Columbia has not been quite the White Knight you seem to believe.
Not only has it a long-term history with anti-Semitism, my mother who graduated at 16 applied there and was turned down for being a woman.
It's really nothing new with Columbia. It's just that you started there during a historically unusual period when it was being noble.
Nice piece
Thanks!
In the 1960s and 70s, when the states closed the mental institutions, the patients they offloaded had to go somewhere. Higher education was the perfect feeding trough for the unproductive and unconstructive who had to survive but had nothing to offer, other than nonsense.
Every year for at least 50 years, the Ivy League Gangsters who rose to positions of authority in DC redistributed 2/3 of the federal budget which we were forced to pay under threat as taxation, a great deal of which was passed off to their cronies in corporate "education."
Now it is clear what a racket they have been running all along.
Within a generation, and probably less -- mark my words -- those college buildings will be another Rust Belt. Empty buildings, broken windows, overgrown flower beds.
What a blasphemy to the ideals of scholarship!
Ha, I've never made that connection before. I am less optimistic than you that these fancy places will get the comprehensive comeuppance they deserve, even after all the scandals this past year Harvard for instance remains probably the most prestigious brand on the planet and I suspect there will always be more than enough ambitious go-getters who want a piece of that. But I do think this past year has been very hopeful in terms of knocking the Ivy League off its pedestal, or at least chopping that pedestal down to a less lofty level. Millions more people than I ever dreamed possible have woken up to the emperor having no clothes.
I am unusual in that I saw, or, at least, sensed that something was not quite right in academia when I was there for my degrees 40+ years ago. But when my father first entered academia, 80 years ago, it was a superior place for a thinking man. This was, of course, before the detritus of the German and French schools of nihilism washed ashore here to poison the youth under their charge. Whereas I had seen the ravaging animus behind De(con)struction and the mindless stupidity of those who called themselves by the contradiction, Marxist Historian, my father had no idea that any academic could be intentionally and willfully destructive to the subject of his professional focus. And, of course, they are not academics, not in the old sense. They are not even intellectuals. It's all very simple: they are the insane.
My Dad was a social worker who ran a center where people with mental illness but stabilized on medication could hang out and socialize in a stable, subsidized environment. For some reason (he was a very cheap man) he decided that it was an appropriate place for my brother and I to hang out, so I spent a ton of time surrounded by mentally ill people for several years as I grew up. Most of the time it was playing Nintendo, cards, or board games with friendly if somewhat arrested adults, but I did witness a number of psychotic breaks when people would go off their meds. That ended up being really excellent training for navigating higher education: mental illness is a serious problem in the academy, and especially in advocacy/grievance fields where obsessive paranoia is a competitive advantage. I can think of several professors at Columbia I suspect are literally certifiable, and wrote more about that at https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/the-ivy-league-has-gone-mad .
I will say that despite all the grief baby boomers get, some of it justifiable, many of them inherited the sort of high standards your father expected and kept at least some of that sensibility alive. Brown was a disappointing and underwhelming intellectual environment by the time I arrived in the early 2000s, but still had pockets of greatness like Glenn Loury's classes and was far less far gone than Columbia by the time I started working there in 2011, and that intellectual environment deteriorated rapidly from there as the boomers increasingly retired, particularly from department leadership.
Enjoyed reading the description of the professor "quaking with rage." Yes, you saw it, too. It was there in the 60s. I recall dinner table conversations and my father when he was the Dean of the college, telling my mother, also a teacher, of what sounded to me as a boy like outrageous faculty behavior. He said, "Rich, it's like coralling cats."
Your dad sounds like a remarkable man. He gave his life to help the most destitute and marginalized among us. I am sure you are very proud of him.
His work with the Peace Corps took him around the world, but he never forgot the very hardscrabble place he came from! On a number of occasions I sat in on some men's support groups that he ran, and he was like a masterful conductor of subtly and diplomatically helping people process their emotions and constructively analyze their behavior. Truly, and not just because he was my Dad, he was one of the most talented people I've ever met. I miss him everyday.
The thing is, the entire university business model is an anachronism premised on a privileged access to information that no longer exists in the world of the Internet. Basically everything people learn in undergrad (at least academically) can be learned for free on the internet now, so it is hard to imagine that in the long or even medium term people will keep going into massive debt to learn those things. Really the only thing keeping the model afloat is the credentialing aspect, and even that is rapidly crumbling as more and more employers are waiving college degree requirements as they realize that (a) a college degree no longer denotes any particularly outstanding intellect or achievement and (b) they are better off hiring people out of high school and training them up than hiring people who are massively in debt and thus need to be paid more. I predict that in 20 years universities as we know them will cease to exist, or at a minimum that a college education will revert to being a luxury good indulged in by children of privilege who can afford to spend four years having fun on campus as it was prior to the ‘80s or so.
Higher ed is entering a very difficult period where low fertility rates are starting to make it harder and harder to fill seats. Part of the quiet logic of bringing in so many millions of illegal immigrants is to use them to kick the demographic can down the road in the education sector, but children of impoverished migrants are not necessarily oriented to attend college. I do think we're going to see dozens and dozens of campus closures in the coming years but it will tend to be local and regionally known places that lack a powerful brand name
I don't think that mass college enrollment will go away, though, not only because higher education is a key part of the Democratic Party coalition but because humans are fundamentally wired to establish hierarchy and pecking order. There remains an unfortunate social and class gulf between people who've gone to college and those who have not, and even very successful affluent people who didn't go to college are often insecure about that. And then there are social and class gulfs between some college or college grad, graduate school or no, more famous school or more obscure, etc. I expect the eternal desire to "keep up with the Joneses" will keep higher ed shuffling along.
Exile, the college admissions scandal of a few years back illustrates your comment. The parents who bribed their children's way into prestigious colleges weren't trying to buy education, they were trying to buy prestige. That they were prepared not just to buy it but to commit crimes to buy it shows you how badly they wanted it.
It was not a matter of privilege, but rather of merit. At least, from the 1930s through the 1960s, when my father and other men and women of that generation were active: very capable, serious about scholarship and teaching, and they disdained and criticized hacks. Scholars must identify hack work. That is impossible if one posits that there is no truth and anything goes. (Contemporary academics don't even touch the ideal of truth. This is why their work always fails.)
They were the kind of scholar/teacher you may never have encountered. One can not learn by oneself as well as when guided by a truly gifted professional scholar/teacher. In conception and execution, their pedagogical technique was finely honed. I still read truly magnificent scholarship being published today -- but back then, that was de rigeur. Now it is exceptional.
Richard, there seems to have been a glitch and your comment posted several times. I'm going to go ahead and delete the duplicates, no offense intended!
Re: your point, I reviewed Glenn Loury's excellent new memoir a few months ago, and one of the most moving passages was him talking about the sheer intoxication of intellectual adventure he found with colleagues at the U of Chicago in the late 70s. By the time I was at Brown, Loury was one of very very few faculty there operating on that level, and his sort of ilk only got fewer and farther between in my experience. I was pleased to meet some very substantive people at the Heterodox Academy conference a few months back, though, which left me more hopeful about the future of higher ed than I'd been in a long time.
Strange! If there was more than one, keep the last one please.
OK, will keep in mind. I read carefully and they were all identical, it must have been a strange technical glitch.
Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, I'm telling ya. Great piece. Salute.
What is just as galling, and has helped these universities shelter from real scrutiny over this same period is their simultaneous commitment and uncritical adoption of the STEM concept. In airtight corners of these universities massive amounts of money have been poured in to science faculties which have been ‘educating’ the brightest and best in science and entrepreneurship. Much of this has been concomitant with a buy-in to climate change dogma.
In short, this has not been an era for independent minds or creative spirits.
Yeah, having gone to Brown the ways that the humanities and social sciences could so easily get twisted and hijacked was already a familiar conceptual category, but at Columbia the shameless distortion of law, engineering, medicine and broader "hard fields" was much more difficult to wrap my mind around.
Hopefully the tough times mean more opportunities for independent creatives!
There is one crucial variable that is always missed in these conversations. Professors are not teachers. They have no training in how to teach. They are literally just doing what was done to them, or what they think is a good idea. I would know, and this is the crux of Fake Professor.
Look, I'm an idiot. I'm a duck, and I ride a bike. I got my bullshit degree in "Leisure Studies and Services" from the University of Oregon in 1990. So, take everything I say with copious amounts of salt.
Nearly 100 years ago, the most respected and important universities were in Germany. All the important scientists were at Gottingen, Heidelberg, Munich and Berlin. The Ivy's, in America? They cared more about college football. They were the Alabama and Clemson of their day.
Eventually, these German schools were captured ideologically. They have not recovered. That's what's happening now in the Ivy's, and there is no turning back.
Ha, give yourself some more credit! Certainly "The Ivy League" as coined basically just referred to an old money sports league at a handful of fancy old colleges at the beginning, but also had covered probably most of the sons of the leading northeastern establishment for a long time. They were peripheral to the German universities, for sure, but not unrightfully prestigious for what they were. It was mainly the World Wars, and the U.S. eastern seaboard becoming the new center of power, that dethroned the continental schools in favor of places like Columbia. Of course, the same imperial rot has set in over the decades!
Wrote about that history a little more at https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/cracking-the-prestige-cartel ...
Greetings from Lawrence, KS, at least sometimes. Border war and all that. Also, you do not appear to have chat turned on. My professorship is in law, but I'm active in quite a number of domains, including cultural anthropology of the contemporary. That led to a strange collection of projects, and a widening discontent with the academy along lines you know well. For the last few years I've been struggling with a book trying to tie these things together: what remains open for the university, and for intellectual life more generally, and what does this have to do with how we confront the contemporary? Quixote's Dinner Party is under review; when it eventually appears I think you'd find it interesting.
Hi David! I entirely relate as a displaced Missourian which is part of why the overture to the whole enterprise and The Ivy Exile: The Playlist relates to "The Impossible Dream" and torturous implications thereof! https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/the-ivy-exile-the-playlist
Not currently on paid mode chat but feel free to PM!
I just read the piece on St. Louis. I will check this out!
Ok, that's very clever.
Speaking of torture, you might enjoy (?): Democratic Rock or Republican Whirlpool?
https://open.substack.com/pub/davidawestbrook/p/the-democratic-rock-or-the-republican?r=13evep&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Although I am sure there are compensations, and while I am sympathetic to many of the arguments, to leave ten years behind, badly, must have been hard. Even the most appropriate divorce is still . . . Thanks for the essay.
Shafik could have negotiated with the protesters for a peaceful salution. Other universities did. Instead she set the pattern for the criminalization of dissent on campuses across the nation. Local "big donors"--super wealthy individuals--demanded Mayor Adams send in the police.
(I am a Columbia alumnus.)
I did find it disappointing that the first instinct of a lot of people who were offended was to expand the administrative censorship and punishment apparatus rather than to recognize that it was a big part of what made the conversation so deeply stupid in the first place. That said, I don't really think the protesters had a coherent enough set of demands or motivations that any negotiation was particularly going to go anywhere, it was primarily about "the vibes." I am not a Columbia alumnus, but feel like I spent enough time on campus to be grandfathered in!
For the protesters, outraged at what they consider to be genocide in Gaza, the issue is a moral, not a political one. There will be more demonstrations in the Fall.
I guess when I think back to my own student activism days, and the various protests, we were goofy kids looking for kicks and significant others and to shore up our identities, the substantive policy issues were not especially high on the list of anyone's priorities. So I agree the demonstrations will continue but I'm not sure what if any concessions would scratch the actual itch, or if that itch is scratchable.
I love your essay--you describe the Ivies' addiction perfectly, and the best thing to do it put the Ivies in rehab. Thank you for writing this essay!
Thank you for reading and weighing in!
Still another glaring example of postmodernism writ large.
It's very interesting how technocratic conventional wisdom perceives itself as so perfectly empirical and non-ideologically data-based, but then fills in its cracks with postmodern language plays and power games. I wrote about that at https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/vulgar-displays-of-power
Terrific column, thanks. I'm a Columbia alum and wrote this piece recently: "Columbia Delenda Est: Destroy one university to salvage the rest" https://graboyes.substack.com/p/columbia-delenda-est
I recall reading your own terrific column when it came out! Magnificent jeremiad and the conclusion is a real kicker.