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. Last March, a group of students at Stanford Law School shut down a talk being given by federal judge Kyle Duncan 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 (unbelievably, she is still teaching, and to top it off she is teaching “Reading and Research” this coming fall!)

This week, protests have erupted not only at Ivy League schools like Columbia, Harvard and Brown, but at USC, the University of Michigan, the University of Texas (my Alma Mater) and 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 cancelled its public commencement ceremony. Dozens have been arrested on multiple campuses.

Jews are so “afraid” at Columbia University that an Orthodox campus rabbi recently urged students to “return home as soon as possible.” The situation at many purportedly “elite” universities is dire, as jihadist mania has become the vogue, faux-moral cause rotting the minds of impressionable Gen Zers.

To continue the thought line from yesterday; Americans are understandably asking, What’s the problem in academia?

I have a B.S. and 3 master’s degrees. I have now worked at a private University as an administrator since 2012. 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 of the issues that have contributed to the damaged culture in academia.

1. 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 that all students are forced to be exposed to, regardless of their majors. That’s fine, if it’s as they say “diverse” in theory and opinion…but it’s not.

2. Standards for publication contribute to the proliferation of nonsense. Faculty are required to publish significantly more than was the case decades ago. It’s a joke. 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 academia “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.)

3. Research is captured by politics and money. When headlines proclaim that “most researchers agree…” readers may assume that scientists with competing ideas duked it out, and the theory with the most proof prevailed. That isn’t necessarily true, in fact it is now rare. A 2019 article in medical news journal Stat revealed that research into alternative theories about the causes of Alzheimers 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” of the majority are dealt with harshly. I have witnessed several examples of so-called faculty “committees.”  The criteria for being one of the few picked to be in the final pool is totally run by DEI and the final yes or no comes from those offices. And remember, that the social and political views of the faculty on these committees are 90 % of one persuasion to begin with. However, the “diversity” is never of thought, which is the whole point of an education, it is of immutable characteristics. So genetics is the main qualification. I don’t know about you but I had no say in that when born, and I couldn’t change it if I wanted to no matter how much I want to.

4.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 (like say cigarettes), 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?

Tenure also gives arguably undeserved credibility to “theories” that often amount to little more than the authors’ worldviews. Those viewpoints make their way into corporate boardrooms, government regulations and K-12 education policies, foist onto an unsuspecting public that has had little to no opportunity to evaluate their merits.

Even before last year’s congressional hearings or the protests about the war between Israel and Hamas, the constant drumbeat of academic scandals (Varsity Blues, sexual assault at Michigan State, skyrocketing tuition) had already produced calls for more oversight. In Indiana, the governor signed a bill last month designed to promote “intellectual diversity” and “free inquiry,” and changing the criteria for tenure at our public universities, of course this doesn’t effect private universities (unless they are strongly Christian based, then the government wants to totally shut it down).

Faculty are concerned that such oversight could be abused. But the universal lesson here is govern yourself or be governed. Cornell Law School professor William Jacobson opined in an interview earlier this year that higher education is so overrun and posioned “cannot be reformed from within.” Whether or not he’s right, American colleges and universities have for decades hidden behind “academic freedom” when confronted with the socially destructive behavior that seems to be the aftermath of terrible ideologies. The general public has grown weary of it. Especially when it becomes the loudest and most powerful thing taught on campus.

In academia, as elsewhere, a few bad apples create problems for everyone else. Most doctors don’t commit malpractice, most teachers don’t sleep with their students, most business owners don’t commit fraud. Similarly, most faculty are people with deep interest in their subject matter and sincere concern for the education and well-being of the college students they teach, I know many. But, unlike the other professions noted above, ours has not been willing to root out the bad actors – or indeed had any real mechanism for doing so.

If we don’t do it ourselves, it will be done for us. And the “Frankenstein’s monster will kill the creator.”