There are times in a life where your faith in a particular enterprise can be shaken and you wonder to yourself, “what am I even doing here?"
Once this question arises, you may be in the midst of a full-blown crisis of confidence in the direction you are heading. This is the question I confronted as I approached 50 years old and confronted the fact that the work I spent most of my time on—teaching college—was only paying me $36,000 per year with little to no opportunity for advancement on the horizon.
Confronting that question led me to quit teaching and do other education-related work. The key to this work becoming fulfilling and (at the moment) remunerative enough to keep going was getting in touch with my values, the deep-seated reasons for doing the work.
Over the past several weeks of perusing the news out of higher ed, I’ve had a number of “what are we even doing here?” moments as I read of some of the decisions that institutions are making around all kinds of issues. The actions appear to be significantly at odds with what I perceive to be the value proposition of higher education, essentially the work of improving the capacities of individuals as citizens and workers in a free and shared democratic society through the work of education and research, while also providing a broader benefit to society by the institution’s very existence.
For example, whenever another institution strikes a “deal” with the Trump administration, I experience one of these head-scratching moments. Northwestern University’s recent capitulation was more head scratching than most in that it came in the face of significant faculty and student resistance and during a time when Trump appears increasingly weak and vulnerable. They’ve given away things that should be nonstarters. As Jonathan Zimmerman remarked at The Chronicle, “In striking a deal with the White House, Northwestern forsook its academic freedom and autonomy. Anyone with two eyes can see that.”
What are we even doing here?
Another, much less publicized story is perhaps even more baffling. At the University of Alabama, two university-funded, student-produced magazines were “permanently suspended” by the university in order to comply with “non-binding” recommendations from Attorney General Pam Bondi’s office the reflect the Trump administration’s bizarro-world stances on race and diversity.
[Alice] magazine, founded in 2015, targets women with stories on health and wellness. Nineteen Fifty-Six, founded in 2020, is about “Black student life and culture.” The vice president of student life at the University of Alabama said that because the magazines have specific audiences, they run afoul of Bondi’s guidance. This decision had been made despite, as reported by the student paper, The Crimson and White, no complaints about either magazine ever being made.
The university has silenced these two student media organs that give students invaluable hands-on experience while declaring that students’ First Amendment rights “remain fully intact.”
Here is a university that is ostensibly oriented around a mission of preparing students for the real-world demands of their professions—like journalism—pre-emptively eliminating programs that give students the exact kinds of experiences they need in order to avoid a threat that is a phantom of their own invention.
What are we doing here?
A memo out of Texas Tech that circulated on social media detailing new procedures for approving course content that may deal with issues of race, gender or sexual orientation outlines a byzantine and onerous process for getting course material approved that ultimately terminates with the provost in nearly every case.
A system where course content—readings, assignments, lectures, what have you—must be approved by the office of the provost is a system where academic freedom is not at threat: It doesn’t exist at all!
What are we doing here?
Michigan State University wants to raise $1 billion for its FOR SPARTA campaign, which is designed to create opportunities for every MSU students and graduate to receive small group or even personal counseling on academic and employment opportunities.
Nah. It’s for athletics.
I have written frequently here about the disconnect and tension between purported institutional mission and the inertia of “operations.” In the immortal words of Carol Christ, current chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, when she was vice chancellor, “Colleges and universities are fundamentally in the business of enrolling students for tuition dollars.”
The schools caving to Trump are doing so because they believe they cannot live without the federal money that he is using as an instrument of extortion. They are willing to throw the rights of their faculty and students away in the process. In the case of Northwestern, they are reneging on previously negotiated deals with student protestors to appease Trump.
The universities in Texas that are essentially censoring course content that may run afoul of the ideological litmus tests of federal or state-level politicians are sacrificing the First Amendment and academic freedom rights of their faculty and the rights of students to learn unfettered from state interference.
Do you have a university under these conditions?
I honestly don’t know what the student life office at the University of Alabama is thinking with the cessation of publication for those two magazines. Maybe they’re short on funds and using this as a pretense rather than pre-emptively caving to bad-faith arguments. Either way, it’s egregious.
Michigan State is chasing money wherever they can find it, apparently. This is not a new thing for them. In 2022 they struck an affiliate deal tied to student use of online gambling apps with Caesars Sportsbook. Stoking gambling addictions for students barely old enough to do it legally or launching a fundraising initiative that seeks to raise an amount nearly a quarter of the entire university endowment and earmarking that money for sports facilities hardly seems consistent with university values.
The privileging of operations and money over values and mission is nothing new. The entire system of adjunctification is an example. On a somewhat smaller scale, early-decision policies that lock students into schools without being able to access a full scope of options for funding and aid are another example. We cannot argue that the mission is furthered by these policies, and yet they are now so common as to pass without remark or additional consideration.
I suppose this is one of the reasons I am writing this column—to remark, to establish a record that these kinds of moves can and should be considered before they’re taken or even reversed upon additional consideration. I wonder why more leaders of these institutions aren’t pausing and asking, “What are we doing here?"
At some point, we’re going to have to admit that these entities that call themselves universities and cloak themselves in a tradition of high-minded ideals around values and mission have simply become something else entirely.
