Rolling higher education into the shitbin thread

Descended from Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

Distinct from Help, I'm trapped in an ivory tower! Or "what the fuck am i getting myself into with this academia stuff" because about institutional collapse more generally not so much the lived experience of being inside collapsing institutions

Or to quote amateurist, "this seems too broad..."

as a progressive empathetic person, I know I should think these adjuncts etc. are being exploited, but as someone who has spent the last 20 years doing jobs that the "academic class" wouldn't deign to stoop to, I feel like they have a sense of entitlement based on a glowing past, perhaps when they were students, and aren't really looking at how shitty other people have it economically.

prior art

generation limbo: 20-somethings today, debt, unemployment, the questionable value of a college education

one thing i've been thinking about is that this (the mismatch between phd's generated/jobs available) is generally presented as a humanities problem (and in english / philosophy / history in particular -- or that's what i know most about at least)

otoh i know plenty of people that can attest that this is a problem for "pure" mathematics as well, and i've seen some really amazing people doing work that is pretty clearly important and worthwhile bounce out of academia or to the adjunct grind, and not just in the states.

i do suspect that the "applied" end of STEM certainly is in more of a growth period, and e.g. if you want to make it onto tenure track in computer science that seems not an impossible dream still, but that's really an outlier in terms of growth.

i'd be curious to see a good breakdown between fields/departments that actually takes account of the pure/applied split.

as a progressive empathetic person, I know I should think these adjuncts etc. are being exploited, but as someone who has spent the last 20 years doing jobs that the "academic class" wouldn't deign to stoop to, I feel like they have a sense of entitlement based on a glowing past, perhaps when they were students, and aren't really looking at how shitty other people have it economically.

What sorts of jobs? What is this perception of the 'academic class' based on? When I was a sessional, I did plenty of other jobs as well, as did many of my colleagues. I had actually started growing reasonably comfortable with the gig economy. Still, what would you consider fair and appropriate compensation/conditions?

trailing indicators:

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/05/the-three-highest-paid-people-at-or-by-the-university-of-notre-dame-in-fy2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/nyregion/dreams-stall-as-cuny-citys-engine-of-mobility-sputters.html

otoh i know plenty of people that can attest that this is a problem for "pure" mathematics as well, and i've seen some really amazing people doing work that is pretty clearly important and worthwhile bounce out of academia or to the adjunct grind, and not just in the states.

yes you can find articles on the postdoc crisis as well. an old girlfriend of mine is now a research biologist working at a major u and it's apparently impossible to get ahead / stable in the face of all the performance-metric bullshit, funding dances, professional hierarchies

In Florida adjuncts can now be up to 70% of a school's teaching staff. There is no and can be no meaningful oversight of the quality of a liberal arts education in the post-MBAification of higher ed, and accreditation bodies are in practice virtually indifferent to the idea of quality academics and instruction anyway. Some of the issues relating to the quality of instruction aren't even new. Many states have long allowed instructors to teach anywhere from 15 to 23 credit hours per semester, and this workload has historically been approved by staff because picking up extra hours meant being able to eat or buy their kids clothes.

My old school's most recent academic growth plan included changing the school's name for the third time in 10 years, building a basketball stadium when the school had no league to play in, renting out for a season a pro baseball field several miles away, and chartering greyhound buses for the purpose of taking students to said baseball field as spectators. Meanwhile its library has shrunk in every five year period since I left, and the school's new president, coauthor of the the academic growth plan, is said to be even worse than its previous president, who didn't understand, for his entire interminable tenure up to the moment of his deferred retirement, when he was practically on death's bed, that his quixotic goals for the school flew in the face of what was statutorily allowable in the state of Florida.

The other school in the region was built on graft and straight up illegality. They needed surveys and tests and permits to build over wetlands and the school's reaction was fuck you, fine us. Three out of five members of the board who voted on the location the board ultimately chose worked for the company that owned the site and the land around site.

80% of the people getting a liberal arts education deserve free or cheap occupational/vocational training. The US workforce is heavily over-credentialed.

If I were king, I would socialize 80% of the private schools.

accreditation bodies are in practice virtually indifferent to the idea of quality academics

SACSCOC is responsible for accrediting more degree awarding institutions than all the universities in the UK, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Spain and Australia combined, I believe. idk how they are meant to be able to do it properly.

What is this perception of the 'academic class' based on?

the hundred or so people i know IRL who are university faculty (most adjunct) and what they've mentioned in person or in facebook posts on the subject. Almost all are arts and humanities ppl.

So the majority of them are MFA's or MM's (or whatever the official U.S. Music Master's degree is called now) who pursued jobs in higher education partially in order to advance their careers as composers, artists, writers, etc.

one thing i've been thinking about is that this (the mismatch between phd's generated/jobs available) is generally presented as a humanities problem (and in english / philosophy / history in particular -- or that's what i know most about at least)

otoh i know plenty of people that can attest that this is a problem for "pure" mathematics as well, and i've seen some really amazing people doing work that is pretty clearly important and worthwhile bounce out of academia or to the adjunct grind, and not just in the states.

That's true of "some really amazing people," but only some -- in general it would be absurd to the point of offensiveness for Ph.D. students in pure math to compare their situation to that of their fellow students in English. The job situation in math is leagues better and has been for at least twenty years. That might change if universities decide calculus should be taught by machine, or not taught at all, but that hasn't happened yet.

english is another mainstay of service-curriculum needs in most institutions, so…?

It seems inevitable that the admin & sports creep pendulum has to swing back the other way at some point. Or else it's not a pendulum and in that case I don't see how in the world higher education survives in any state resembling my college experience from the late nineties, even.

full disclosure i have not yet read this but ppl i trust are sharing it approvingly on fb:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/elephant-seminar-room-phd-saved/

That's true of "some really amazing people," but only some -- in general it would be absurd to the point of offensiveness for Ph.D. students in pure math to compare their situation to that of their fellow students in English. The job situation in math is leagues better and has been for at least twenty years. That might change if universities decide calculus should be taught by machine, or not taught at all, but that hasn't happened yet.

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Sunday, May 29, 2016 9:47 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think j's point pertains here. there are slots to do undergrad adjuncting in remedial math, but seems to be precious little else. not sure how this is functionally different from introductory english courses. degreewise as a whole, the difference being i think that a math degree better suits you (in terms of how you will be judged) for employment prospects _outside_ of academia than many humanities degrees.

the analogy in that article with the AMA isn't quite right---the AMA restricts the # of MDs each year to help keep wages up, it's rent-seeking. I don't see how an organization could come in now and induce that kind of discipline among Ph.D.-granting departments now.

also ime grad student teaching doesn't add up to a lot of hours / "instructional units", relative to faculty. & sure they do some grading / sections but not *that* much. temp / adjunct teaching is a different story, but cutting a doctoral program wouldn't change radically the kinds of undergrad teaching that regular faculty too. losing the occasion grad course would be a drag, I guess, thoughI only got called up to the big leagues four years ago, & I was happy enough before that. the article *doesn't* mention the loss of institutional prestige in cutting a doctoral program, something admins care about since it can lead to $$$ by donations, both by pumping up occasional alums b/c of the subject area, b/c it contributes to staying within associations like the AAU, or b/c it offers the slim hope of having a faculty member win a big prize.

also ime grad student teaching doesn't add up to a lot of hours / "instructional units", relative to faculty. & sure they do some grading / sections but not *that* much.

― droit au butt (Euler), Monday, May 30, 2016 1:22 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think this deeply varies by field. Big intro courses are often taught in ways that are sort of unthinkable without an army of student support. Otoh, I know that often advanced undergrads are given opportunities to TA as well, and so i could imagine institutional shifts towards that as a way to compensate should grad resources be cut.

2 of my math friends who did geo/topo and finished phds in the last year got jack shit. one of them is in nyc trying to get back into banking (which he left to do math), the other spent >a year unemployed and then got a job writing python on another continent :-/

math seems to have a weird job market though. when i asked them about it they didn't apply to that many places and said you needed to have connections so they just applied to places their supervisors told them to. i know in economics there's a central clearing house style job market where every candidate and dept coordinate in one city one weekend and get it over with and you can apply to hundreds of depts and interview for dozens. i can see why that doesn't work in math though, where everything's so specialized and it's hard to quickly get a feel for someone's research

xxp i think the faculty themselves can often care a lot about the prestige, too? from their peers, from having students to boss around, etc.

my graduate alma mater scrapped its upper-level writing requirements for u.g. degrees some time ago, end of the 90s i think, and moved to using a writing-intensive designation on courses across disciplines, rather than just requiring something from a range of junior/senior english/rpc courses. my department's offerings would surely change if there weren't grad students around to grade all those papers (in most undergrad courses below the senior level, often the junior level, the faculty grade exactly zero): the curriculum is overloaded with W-designated courses that are meant to lure as many students as possible into taking them for the writing credit.

"i know in economics there's a central clearing house style job market where every candidate and dept coordinate in one city one weekend and get it over with and you can apply to hundreds of depts and interview for dozens"

no this exists in math in the states, at the big MAA/AMS joint meeting each January

in my job in cornland we had a doctoral program & I got a grader for my early modern course, sophomore level, but not for my junior/senior courses. I wasn't used to that because in wheatland I did all my own grading, but my colleagues in cornland were...pretty used to having that grading.

faculty definitely care a lot about prestige. I did; I didn't want to stay in wheatland for a bunch of (obv) reasons but one was jumping to a dept with a doctoral program, for the sake of vanity and to teach more advanced material occasionally. but yeah vanity for sure.

here in cheeseland first and second year undergrad courses are split between something like lecture and something like sections, and the person doing the lecture does just a little bit of grading on the final; in the sections you give three exams and if you're teaching those you have to grade them yourself. I taught one of those sections this last term, but the others were either grad students or adjunct-like people.

i know in economics there's a central clearing house style job market where every candidate and dept coordinate in one city one weekend and get it over with

some of my housemates from college were discussing this on fb. one is now an econ/applied math professor and the others were bio and pure math people, and the others were envious at the efficiency of the economics faculty job system.

there are slots to do undergrad adjuncting in remedial math, but seems to be precious little else

Just don't think this is really true. To take a good but not top-10 department, University of Illinois, here's their recent job placement info:

http://www.math.illinois.edu/GraduateProgram/doctoral-graduates.html

Lots of these people are going to industry jobs in finance or data science, and lots are going to academic postdocs (which are not adjunct instructorships.) Now you could say maybe the postdoctoral system in math just means these folks are all dumped from the academy three years after Ph.D. instead of right after?

Just googling some of those grads from 2012, who would have been on the TT market this year or last, I see Avsec has a second postdoc at Texas A&M, Butterfield is tenure-track at U Victoria, Choi I can't find, Cummins is TT at West Point, Dixit is TT at IIT-Gandhinagar, Hu is TT at Georgia Southern...

So I just don't think it makes sense to say it's a pipe dream for math Ph.D.s that they're going to get a non-adjunct faculty job; a large proportion still do.

Times Higher Education is launching a new ranking system in September, having decided that the current systems for ranking US schools is 'not fit for purpose'.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/us-college-ranking-launched-by-times-higher-education

Is anyone at NAFSA this week? I'd intended to go this year but it got nixed. Seeing that David Brooks is giving the plenary speech might mean i dodged a bullet.

https://twitter.com/Limerick1914/status/737541019797848066

with leaders like this the future is bright

dear god

Queens has a good anthropology department, iirc. That doesn't necessarily mean that anyone wants to study it there. It looks like a gloss on market forces at work. Not unrelated:

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/tuition-fees-force-students-pick-degrees-salary-prospects

That goes double (or treble) for lucrative international students.

a few theoretical premises / hypotheticals, if i may ~

1. class inequality in the US has been dramatic for some time and continues to slide toward neo-feudalism

2. as in all other prestige professions, those born into privilege are the most "marketable" and thus over-represented in academia

3. to reflect 'the world as it is', why not dispense with the marxist pretenses of our humanities departments altogether, and award college admission and professorships at birth? AP classes and SAT tests would then only be taken by the "smart" comfortable / active / rich kids, to determine where they end up at school (although sooner or later, we might want to consider fine-tuning that, too, to accord with increasing feudalism)

4. the collective sigh of relief among the children of say, the bottom 66%, realizing they're not allowed to take AP classes or SATs like their "smart" comfortable counterparts, could very well release the engines of personal industry, and get this country moving again. first, they might get off their lazy butts and start working earlier. second, instead of taking out student loans upon high school graduation, the bottom two-thirds could take out small business loans. in any event, the money the government would save no longer subsidizing the advanced educations of people not born into comfortable circumstances could then be applied to further tax cuts on the job creators, which can only benefit the less industrious classes who'd be jobhunting at younger and younger ages, a virtuous circle

5. in the short term, this would mean shutting down a ton of schools, but you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. another drawback would be the shrinking of the NCAA, but perhaps it's time to have basketball and football minor leagues, anyways? the college music scene would likewise shrink, but hey, the obscurer the audience the better!

xxxpost
I wonder how much the econ job market system contributes to their culture of assholishness. They gossip and backstab to rival the cast of Mean Girls: http://www.econjobrumors.com/

But that doesn't mean it's not somehow "efficient"...

What could sociology, anthropology, and history possibly have to do with the analysis of society?

i love EJMR but i think the ass-holishness on display there is just typical conservative message board trolls and doesn't reflect irl. the fact that the polisci and sociology equivalents are just as toxic kinda proves that. all the econ grad students i know are nice people who are disturbed by the stuff written there anonymously by peers

the hundred or so people i know IRL who are university faculty (most adjunct) and what they've mentioned in person or in facebook posts on the subject. Almost all are arts and humanities ppl.

So the majority of them are MFA's or MM's (or whatever the official U.S. Music Master's degree is called now) who pursued jobs in higher education partially in order to advance their careers as composers, artists, writers, etc.

I dunno, the music sessionals I've known have generally either taught a tonne of courses or done other jobs as well (mostly music lessons or some kind of performance/conducting gig but I know people who have done manual labour). I did quite a bit of temping for a while until I was in a place where I could do well enough with other teaching work. I don't necessarily think there should be a really easy ride to tenure and a six-figure salary or anything but I think the labour situation could fairly be described as exploitative in a number of places. The fact that other people are also facing exploitative conditions does not change this.

i'm not quite sure how to work it so that 'area studies' get to be saved but lately i've been feelin the crazy idea that academics should start pushing back hard against usefulness in schools, anything that's not a traditional academic subject is to be axed, banished to the vocational schools

i guess this would solve nothing tho, since aside from STEM-related fields needed to get the engineers out the door it would mean universities' revenue streams would vanish

I worry that we'd end up with a lot of musicologists who can't play.

The jump in the number of students between 1980 and now, and particularly over the last ten years, has been extraordinary and I'd guess mostly driven by people who were the first in their families to go to college or the children of first generation immigrants. Usefulness isn't just built into the political agenda, it's in the agenda of millions of families where the risk of fronting up college fees needs to be tied to demonstrable increases in conventional employment prospects. Obviously there are questions over how demonstrable those prospects remain but I can't really see much of a way back from here. Business / marketing / finance are also absolutely crucial to the international student demographic, who'll be increasingly important in the the U.S. in the future.

actually i was partly thinking of uselessness as a proxy for (the freedom for) rigorousness and student motivation (perhaps again in the freedom from certain occluding motivations). in my adjuncting adventures i've kicked around to a pretty representative range of the levels of institution in my region, had traditionally/untraditionally good/bad students at all of them, but it seems like the most poisonous combination, pedagogically, has been the ones who are only at college because they (economically) have to be, pursuing a practical major (in that mid range of the ones housed in universities, never traditionally in vocational schools) which has no real or even speculative need for anything like scientific/systematic knowledge, and are fundamentally incurious. it seems as if the traditional disciplines, trying to play the administrative numbers games, just cannot win with those students, thus just cannot win with the administrators.

this is a serious question, but, like, what do marketing majors even study

Every marketing course I've ever seen has been a combination of business fundamentals (intro to business statistics, management theory, finance, business ethics, etc), psych modules and more specific content (retail marketing, digital marketing, etc). As an undergraduate course it does often look like it has been cobbled together but there is also a fairly serious academic discipline behind it that gets fleshed out more at post-grad level and does cross over with the more traditional ideas of applied social science research.

There clearly needs to be viable, respected alternative routes for people who fundamentally don't want to be at university but feel they have no other options though. Whether that is vocational study, apprenticeships or something else, I don't know. Germany is an interesting example of a country that is arguably more 'over credentialed' than even the U.S. but still retains a strong alternative path for less academic students.

it's mean the way vocational schools and the like are under-emphasized in secondary schools. kids who aren't great at school are made to feel like society has no use for them.

even though i agree about incurious marketing students i feel like explicitly railing against 'usefulness' backfires in practice

I dunno, the music sessionals I've known have generally either taught a tonne of courses or done other jobs as well (mostly music lessons or some kind of performance/conducting gig

uh, those are all perfectly respectable. Those aren't at all the types of "wouldn't stoop to x" jobs.

It's a supply and demand problem, as has been mentioned by others in the past dozen posts. Should "we" create more economic opportunities for all the MFAs etc or should there just be less of them? And what hasn't been discussed is education for education's sake. If someone wants a Master's in Music Composition or an MFA in visual art, because it will make them a more emotionally/intellectually fulfilled person, then why shouldn't they? Why should they have to reproduce the means of production by becoming a professor or a professional artist or musician?

This is definitely tied to socioeconomic class, but, this pressure to have a career in what you studied in college feels more pronounced now than when I was in college.

given the cost of college in america, degrees are either 'investments' or luxury goods and if you get a job in your field then you avoid feeling like you bought a luxury good.

Otm

what's wrong with luxury goods?

and "cost" is relative.

nothing's wrong with them, but unlike buying a sportscar a lot of people only find that their degrees were luxury goods after they made the purchase

yeah, it's as if they told everyone that a sports car was the ticket to a well paying job and a comfortable lifestyle and then when you got home they were just lol now you can pay this off for the next 20 years except w/ the sports car you resell it but no one will buy yr diploma even from a fancy college

anything that's not a traditional academic subject is to be axed, banished to the vocational schools

Coming back to this for a moment, i do think it's at least plausible that a substantial cohort of students might, in the future, decide that a traditional academic university environment isn't the best place to learn business skills. Given the option of studying a degree-level course at a mid-to-low level college / university with little to no 'brand recognition' or studying a vocationally-orientated degree course with a theoretical path to direct employment at IBM College or the Chevron School of Management, i think a lot of people would probably lean towards the latter.

Sumsung does this reasonably successfully in Germany, Canada and the UK, typically at a lower level and in partnership with traditional colleges, but it has the potential to take a much larger segment of the market. One FTSE 100 company in the UK has launched its own stand-alone degrees rubber stamped by a trad university and aims, in the future, to have degree-awarding powers of its own.

This inevitably means the "corporatisation of higher education" and has been resisted on those grounds, and also poses a potential revenue threat to traditional universities, but it could lead to refocusing of attention.

ASTROPHYSICS. Statistics! I mean Public Policy I get because it churns out people who go on to become directors of non-profits and on one wants that. But astrophysics?!

I am a member of our union, which is under the umbrella of AFT. I no longer harbor negative feelings toward the union, as they finally stood up and got significant raises for adjuncts— I went from $1650 per credit hour to $2350, for example— as well as assurances of year-long appointments, which means I already have my classes for fall and next spring.

(Next spring, I am teaching an honors section of Dissent in America. Let me tell you I am going to go *hard* in that class).

Good shit table

as soon as I open my big mouth about being proud to organize with my colleagues and AFT, the leadership goes and does this:

https://www.aft.org/press-release/aft-launch-national-academy-ai-instruction-microsoft-openai-anthropic-and-united

unfuckingbelievable. the only reason I have not cancelled my membership this morning is to organize to vote these fuckers out

yeah, truly incomprehensible

love 2 invite the wolf at the door inside for tea

my alma mater, Indiana University, has just been gutted

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/07/07/editorial-indiana-university-academic-programs-eliminated-mike-braun/

I opened up a ProQuest ebook the other day and the screen was half covered up by a window asking if I wanted to have the chapter summarized for me by AI. Contacted our IT/digital learning team and they determined it was a beta rollout that shouldn't have been on by default, and got it turned off, but... Criminy.

Not really what this thread is for I guess (years ago I thought about starting a "free speech and creeping fascism" thread as the creepy liberalism one started to look like a particularly embarrassing artifact of the 00s, but I feel like the horse is so far out of the barn now), but this is insane:

https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/columns/debatable-ideas/2026/04/17/tyranny-texas-tech

https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/texas-tech-issues-ban-on-students?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=994764&post_id=195286227&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=9s792&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

(leaving all that tracker guff in there because you might need it to get access, I got this from a bsky post)

A new memo at Texas Tech University establishes a sweeping and draconian censorship policy toward LGBTQ+ people, creating a campus equivalent of "Don't Say Gay" in one of the most extreme anti-speech policies ever imposed at a public university. The memo bars professors from discussing LGBTQ+ topics in core and lower-level courses and eliminates entire fields of study across the five-university system. It even requires that if an industry-standard textbook includes content on sexual orientation or gender identity, instructors must skip over it and avoid discussion around it. Most troubling, however, is that the censorship regime extends beyond professors to students themselves: the memo states that "no degree-culminating student research within the TTU System will be permitted to center on SOGI topics,” a total ban on LGBTQ+ mentions in dissertations or graduate thesis work.

revoke accreditation immediately

They'll hunt for a friendlier conservative accreditation board like Florida did.

it's so bleak. I have to say IHE framing this as a matter of academic freedom...I mean okay I know who their audience is so fair enough, but it feels point-missing to a degree, especially when AF isn't really all that well defined

I did wonder if the censorship is so complete that it means you can't talk about the order itself

The Erin Reed link you posted (thanks!) has gamed out the implications.

yeah that piece is piece is very good, much wiser than the IHE one

Just read this one, and let me tell you: yep.

https://archive.ph/2026.04.23-194612/https://www.chronicle.com/article/professors-are-too-old

Especially this:

it all proved true as tweed-jacketed 70-somethings refused to give up their grip on a future they were loath to leave to others.

Their choices have had especially outrageous effects on younger scholars. As older professors stayed around and enjoyed the benefits of guaranteed employment, younger academics were subjected to the casualization of faculty positions and the shrinking of major fields, especially in the humanities.

This generationally toxic combo means that younger academics today regard those elders much as serfs on the brink of the French Revolution saw the noble lords. If tenure, ostensibly for the sake of protecting fearless speech, is being eroded today, the main culprit isn’t the conformist pressure of either centrist donors or woke students. Rather, it’s the conversion of tenure into a gerontocratic class alibi among those with little new (let alone disturbing or scary) to say. No wonder administrators across the land are eliminating it by hiring young people without its protections, if they are hired at all.

If anyone wonders why I throw such shade toward tenured academics, this is why: so many of them in my field are stuck in the past, haven’t written anything worth a damn in 20+ years, and are amassing some amount of wealth while people like me get by on literal crumbs.

some useful stats in there for sure - but i don't buy the conclusion that these power-hoarding fogeys are the reason why administrators and politicians seek to eliminate tenure or hire up on precarious adjunct labor:

If tenure, ostensibly for the sake of protecting fearless speech, is being eroded today, the main culprit isn’t the conformist pressure of either centrist donors or woke students. Rather, it’s the conversion of tenure into a gerontocratic class alibi among those with little new (let alone disturbing or scary) to say. No wonder administrators across the land are eliminating it by hiring young people without its protections, if they are hired at all.

a convenient excuse for some, perhaps, but it's dollars and power stuff, and they'd be doing it even if the typical tenured prof in their 60s was banging out crackerjack scholarship on an annual basis. feels weird

yeah the dynamic table describes is real, but for me the problem with that class was being complicit in the neoliberalization of their institutions (which doesn't really figure on the individual level but as a class they should have been organizing against this), which has hurt them as well though of course not nearly to the extent it does underpaid and precarious adjunct labour. And even if the gerontocrats aren't suffering financially themselves they've presided over the degradation of their jobs, guaranteeing their tenured successors much harder, less rewarding or fulfilling, burnout-prone careers in what feels like a profession in severe decline.

This article won't shock anyone reading the thread, but there are some good stats and a really strong articulation of the many failures here: https://hyperallergic.com/the-death-of-the-art-school/

Then there is “administrification.” A study by the American Association of University Professors has shown that between 1976 and 2011, non-faculty professional positions, especially in student services and administration, grew by roughly 369%, while full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty grew by only 23%. In recent years, that pattern has only intensified. Universities have added more administrative layers while shifting teaching onto cheaper, less secure, and more precarious labor.

...

In the meantime, between 2016 and 2024, average top salaries for administrators at Purchase College rose by more than 45%, while average assistant professor salaries rose by just around 14%. Cumulative inflation over the same period was 31%. In real terms, the people doing the intellectual work lost ground while the managerial and policing apparatus grew. Among the 25 highest-paid positions at the college, only one is held by a professor. Fifteen are held by administrators and nine by police officers. The Purchase numbers are not a local anomaly. According to a recent CUPA-HR study, which tracks compensation across more than 1,000 institutions, administrator salaries have outpaced inflation nationally for three consecutive years while tenure-track faculty have seen no real salary increase in over a decade.

The new administrative order sets the terms and decides what counts. What this produces, beneath the numbers, is steady deintellectualization. And it is students who ultimately bear the cost of this transformation, even if they are the last to see it. Learning does not happen under bureaucratic control. It happens in a free community where the people responsible for producing knowledge are encouraged, respected, and not silenced by administrative pressure.

I particularly liked this part:

For many young people, art school (or university) is the first place where life opens up beyond what they have inherited. It is where they become adults, where local cultural bubbles begin to crack, and where repressive structures can be named and challenged. Students encounter differences, unfamiliar cultures, histories, and ways of living and being. They test the most provocative ideas. They imagine futures that did not seem available before.

Today’s students have come of age under conditions that liberal institutions have consistently failed to address. They face job insecurity, debt, isolation, and a world visibly coming apart. Many are lonelier than previous generations, and more skeptical of institutions that speak the language of care while delivering precarity. What they are searching for is not a service. It is a society that takes them seriously as participants rather than customers.

Very resonant with my own experience as a late-in-life grad student and my partner's experiences as an art prof

yeah, that's all really otm.

The administrative bloat is a head-scratcher to me, though I don’t work in higher ed, it baffles me in the arts non-profit sector where I work. I would love to read something that explains and defends it.

The SF Bay Area in the past few years has gone from having 5 private universities with significant arts programs… to 2: one being Stanford, and the other, the for-profit Academy of Art. RIP SFAI, CCAC & Mills.

The Capital expenditures thing is rampant ime. Both CCAC and Mills did the large capital projects in the years prior to their demise.

Mills built this very impressive business school building where I would do an annual guest lecture as part of a course a friend on faculty developed. Compared to the music department buildings where I would see concerts and open rehearsals…the business building was deluxe.

CCAC built a bunch of shiny new buildings in San Francisco and moved all of its facilities from Oakland… which makes very little sense to me as someone whose work involves real estate financing. They were literally having “inspiring” hard hat photos on social media while they were considering bankruptcy and then selling to Vanderbilt.

I'm in the A&D department at my uni (regional state school) and all of that is completely otm.

At one point I know something like 28% of our outlays was going to administration, which was 2x as high as any other school in the system. We consolidated into a single college and axed some deans so I assume that number came down, but still, upper admin is taking it in while everyone not in the business dept is losing money to inflation.

haven't read past the first 1000 words or so, but this articles seems right on from where i stand. looking forward to finishing it.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n10/stefan-collini/squadrons-of-pigs?

Seems like a companion to this one I read today

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10596011261431423

Money quote:

Cause-of-death analysis indicates five interacting pathologies. First, consumerism: once students became clients, education became a satisfaction metric, and the institution learned to fear disappointment more than ignorance. Second, administrative bloat: support structures multiplied until they began to supervise the very work they were meant to enable, diverting resources from classrooms and laboratories into compliance rituals and managerial theatre. Third, labor extraction: the system normalized unpaid advising, unpaid reviewing, unpaid mentoring, and endless “service,” treating vocation as a renewable resource until burnout became the default staffing model. Fourth, mission drift: the institution stopped defending truth-seeking as a primary aim and instead optimized for reputational management, risk avoidance, and revenue protection—conditions under which originality becomes liability and debate becomes inconvenience. Fifth, a lack of humanity: expecting everyone to be the same rather than appreciating, valuing, and embracing differences that lead to real acceptance, learning, and creative and unique advances in knowledge acquisition.

that money quote says a mouthful and rings pretty true.

it's a good thing that a higher education remains available to those who thirst for it, regardless of the current state of _Institutions of Higher Education_. or at least it will remain available so long as the best books stay around to guide people to a deeper understanding and the world exists for them to observe and contemplate.

no, I would say education and learning are different; the former has to do with a society and its institutional priorities: sure, you can read Dante by yourself! I don't think we need to celebrate that such remains the case....

I would say education and learning are different

Yes. But learning is paramount. This can be easily discerned by imagining a hypothetical choice between education without learning and learning without education.

I don't think we need to celebrate that such remains the case....

It depends. There are numerous avenues that lead to far worse places than today's relatively easy access to self-actuated learning. There are no guarantees we shall not go down those paths, but so long as that access remains it is a constructive counterforce to the loss of learning.

is it weird to think that religious orders are probably a better option for a real humanities education at this point than literally any higher ed institution grift?

institution

MIT is closing three of its four libraries, apparently? https://fnl.mit.edu/may-june-2026/lament-for-the-mit-libraries/

for me the distinction between "learning" and "education" doesn't have to do with institutions as much as it has to do with the rigor of the curriculum and the seriousness of the pupil. institutions can do a great deal to facilitate education, but i still think you'd have to concede that what Marx did at the British Library was essentially a self-directed education. it's a bit different than you or me with the duo lingo. to say nothing of the fact that so many of the great lights of world literature were taught privately by tutors or family members

but maybe this is just semantics

closing libraries is fucking stupid

the cost of running a library has to be marginal at best compared to everything else a major research university does. Figure out how to cook the books a little better, you bean counting ass clowns

learning is the process, education is the result

imo anyway

First, consumerism: once students became clients, education became a satisfaction metric, and the institution learned to fear disappointment more than ignorance.

This is true but downstream of credentialism in the workplace. There is no particular reason most non-specialist roles require degrees at the point of entry but having this as a hard requirement makes the consequences of failing catastrophic. Change that, either through an employer culture shift or, more negatively, reducing the perceived value of ‘general HE in the age of AI’ to marginal, and the rest has a chance of reshaping into something more positive.

is it weird to think that religious orders are probably a better option for a real humanities education at this point than literally any higher ed _institution_ grift?

Yes, it is, and it’s deeply insulting to a number of us on here who teach humanities in the university.

liberal arts colleges hanging in there too

Table otm — it is both weird and insulting

It’s a fraught discussion because a significant number of ilxors work in higher ed, and have committed themselves for many years to that profession. While I am not one of them, I agree with LL that is insulting.

Yes, it is, and it’s deeply insulting to a number of us on here who teach humanities in the university.

― a tv star not a dirty computer man (the table is the table), Thursday, May 28, 2026 12:34 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Table otm — it is both weird and insulting

― Piggy Lepton (La Lechera), Thursday, May 28, 2026 3:15 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

you are both very often deeply insulted by people expressing opinions you don't agree with and posting things that rub you the wrong way. i don't like that you direct your own feelings outward and put them on other people with your constant stance of harsh judgment. frankly i don't care that you're insulted. i was inviting discussion. if you don't want to participate in that leave me alone. both of you - your quickness to castigate other people - are a very strong reason in support of my argument tbh. i wouldn't want someone whose education i cared about to be around that kind of bullshit. there's already enough of it in the world.

if you can't handle someone having a negative opinion about your job or your profession, if you're insulted by it, quite frankly you need to get a grip.

Wow

wow!

polite request not to address me on here from here on out. i would really appreciate it.

You are losing it!

You said religious institutions would perform better than traditional universities as schools of the humanities and asked if it was weird.
Yes, that is weird and, I agree, insulting to members of the community. You’re not simply expressing your opinion, you’re doing so groundlessly and needlessly cruelly to people/members of the community you know are doing their best. That doesn’t make me a softie it makes you a meanie. IMO.

ok fair enough. i didn't really clock that this was the "fellow teachers commiserate" before i posted that, and i should have.

"fellow teachers commiserate" thread

I, too, teach in the humanities. It was definitely a weird ask and this escalation is even moreso weird.

I'm curious which religious orders map's talking about here that would surpass even my small directional state university in providing a humanist education. Like, the Jesuits? They run their own schools, so is that it?

Since I made the distinction upthread, I'll cite a source

https://thi.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Arendt-Crisis_In_Education-1954.pdf

TLDR version is: I meant education in the sense of policy, institutions: one might seek to destroy public education in a particular nation for political reasons, and such destruction might, hypothetically of course, have effects not easily remedied through individual learning

so.. i understand now. i really wasn't trying to be cruel to or denigrate anyone. i know both you and table are good at your jobs and impact students' lives for the better all the time. that applies to all of the teachers here.

i should have phrased what i said differently. part of it is that it feels like a loony thing to say. it was way too general, too pointed. i'm no fan of the horrible environments of abuse that can be found in many religious organizations. i've seen it first hand. i made the post because i keep seeing quotes from the new pope and really agreeing with them.

idk. it just feels like capitalism has turned higher ed into a nightmare. i don't think there's anything inherently wrong with some kind of religious group doing education instead. i get that 95% of them are horribly reactionary in unjustifiable ways, but there have got to be some out there that are a little more enlightened, no? seeing all the garbage in higher ed - and yes having some firsthand experience with it having worked in an academic library - i am left wondering if it's really a worse option to be in a religious organization for education purposes, if the organization has it right, or right enough, for the most part. maybe that's more a fantasy in my head and doesn't actually exist.

anyway, i see how what i was posted was actually pointed, since this thread is largely about teachers supporting each other, and i'm sorry. i do still think ya'll could stand to ease up on the judgment. ok i'm probably going to take an ilx break today. genuinely hope you guys have a good day.