The Unbearable Lameness of College

It's okay to roll your eyes at institutions that jump the shark

As 2024 gets underway, it’s worth taking a step back to appreciate just how profoundly absurd American higher education is. The past couple of months have been almost comical: two Ivy League presidents, Claudine Gay of Harvard and Liz Magill of Penn, recently resigned in disgrace after biffing congressional hearings on rabid campus antisemitism. (Gay also turned out to have been a serial plagiarizer, which is what finally got her the boot.) Only 36% of Americans say they have confidence in our colleges and universities — a precipitous drop from nearly 60% in 2015. College enrollments have plummeted, thanks in no small part to the pandemic, but also because the $1.75 trillion in aggregate student loan debt has started to go rotten, like a dead fish in a hotel room. Perhaps the smell is traveling, because more than 60% of employers no longer think that colleges and universities produce graduates with useful skills. Forty percent even say a four-year degree makes them less likely to hire someone. And they’re walking the walk: nearly half of employers say they’ve recently eliminated some college degree requirements.

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What we’re seeing is a real-time collapse in the cachet of institutions that once seemed impregnable. The aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attacks may have been the breaking point, the moment when normal people realized that the academy is taking marching orders from the wrong bullhorns. Left-wing professors and students congratulated Hamas, some posting celebratory imagery of the terrorists’ paragliders. Even if you have very justified criticisms of Israel, raping and murdering festival-goers and killing babies is clearly evil. But it was at first strangely difficult for many university leaders to just say this.¹ Influential people responded by downgrading their opinions of higher education. This led to the revelations about Gay’s plagiarism, which ludicrously (but predictably, if you’re familiar with the culture of higher education) inspired many academics to suddenly decide that plagiarism isn’t such a big deal, because right-wingers care about it. At every level, the academic show started to turn into sheer camp.²

This post isn’t about the Israel-Hamas controversies, though. Subscribe to the Free Press for all the campus antisemitism coverage you’ll ever want, plus some.³ Instead, it’s about the collapse in general quality in higher education, and more broadly in institutions of all kinds, to the point of absurdity, and what it means for us on the personal level.

It’s acutely dispiriting when people or institutions you once trusted suddenly start seeming…lame. Cringe, as the kids say. Because of this, we’re experiencing a very unique kind of collective suffering, with strong overtones of bathos. The proper response is probably something like helpless or ironic laughter. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me tell a personal story about a totally lame experience in grad school, one that summarizes in miniature a lot of the absurdity that defines our era and its public crises.

No Sufism for You!

I attended Boston University for my PhD. Technically, my doctoral program was in religious studies, but I ended up doing a sort of weird, interdisciplinary cognitive science/humanities combo thesis (more on the reasons for this below). Like most American doctoral programs, I had to complete two years of coursework before I could start writing.

During those coursework terms, it was normal to drop in on a variety of different courses at the beginning of each semester, shuffling your schedule until you found the classes that fit. At the beginning of one particular year, I was especially enthusiastic about a new class on Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam. My interest in the topic wasn’t purely academic. In my early childhood, my dad, an otherwise pretty normal descendant of Colorado pioneers, had improbably moved across the country to join a Tamil Sufi fellowship in Philadelphia.⁴ Now, as a grown-up grad student, it only made sense that I’d be eager to learn more about the Sufi tradition that had gathered in so many people from around the world, including my dad, and anchored a community that profoundly shaped me.

And boy, shape me it did. Throughout the long years of rootless wandering across the United States with my mom, stepdad, and brothers, the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship house in West Philly was my single oasis of stability, a familiar place I visited every summer to find the same comforting mix of delicious smells — cardamom, cumin, lentils, and tea — and flurry of friendly faces, languages, and clothing. Amidst its homey comforts, the Fellowship house introduced me to an exhilarating cosmopolitanism, a dizzying world far larger than the small towns I lived in during the school year. Aged Tamil aunts tottered past, murmuring indulgently at the children. Gold-lettered Arabic signs hung resplendently in the meeting room; the call to prayer echoed five times a day. I was seemingly the only white kid in the vast American interior who jetted off each summer to spend weeks immersed in Indian smells and the sounds of Tamil and Arabic, set against the muggy wilds of Philadelphia.

Decades later, as a graduate student in religious studies,⁵ I now had my first formal opportunity to study Sufism in an academic setting. My hopes were high; it seemed to bode well that a friend of mine had also dropped in to check out the same class that morning. My friend and I exchanged some excited pleasantries before the instructor, a new assistant professor (serendipitously, it might have seemed, of South Asian background herself⁶), walked in, sat down, and introduced herself.

Now, here we were, embarking on an hourlong introductory session to a grad-level religious studies class on mystical Islam. Would the professor open with the historical influence on Sufism of Persian culture, and vice-versa? The unparalleled divine love poetry of Rumi or Hafez? The long tradition of veneration of Sufi saints, which draws pilgrims to elaborate shrines and mausoleums throughout India, West Asia, and North Africa? The periodic outbreaks of anti-Sufi puritanism and iconoclasm by reformist Sunnis, which often leads to the destruction of those very same Sufi shrines? The possibilities were, and are, limitless.

But this was American higher education in the 21st century. Large parts of which are, as I believe I mentioned above, now super cringe.

So of course the professor discussed none of these things.

Instead, she spent the hour diving into an increasingly contorted discussion of how problematic it was that scholarship on Sufism rested mostly on the work of white, Western scholars, who had no business in ever having been interested in Sufism to begin with. By applying their Western tools of inquiry, the original European scholars of Sufism had been committing the sin of orientalism — cherishing a romanticized view of Eastern and Muslim cultures as mysterious, exotic, and appealing, but also as inferior. All subsequent Western scholarship on Sufism was presumed to be tainted accordingly.

White students showing up to learn about Sufism in a grad seminar were also implicitly, or at least potentially, guilty of the same orientalism — even if they themselves happened to have grown up appended to a Sufi fellowship. (In fact, having the temerity to grow up as a white kid in a Sufi fellowship was probably the epitome of orientalism.) This course was going to offer a critical view, not of Sufism, but of Western approaches to Sufism.

My enthusiasm rapidly deflated as two realizations hit me. First, as a white guy, if I took this class, I was going to spend the semester walking as gingerly as an epileptic cat in a house owned by munitions hoarders. More importantly, I wasn’t going to learn anything. Sufism would simply be the vehicle for a political discourse. But I already understood the political discourse of postcolonial guilt, and I didn’t need more of it to round out my PhD coursework. The class had revealed itself as low-value. So I dropped it. My friend was also not impressed. She didn’t take the class, either.

“Area Studies”

In the end, then, I never did get to study Sufism in-depth at the graduate level. It was a topic for the humanities, and by then I was already gravitating away from the humanities and toward the human and social sciences, despite having chosen religious studies for my doctorate. This shift toward science didn’t come about simply because I found the methods of the human sciences interesting (although I did, and do). It was also, and maybe even primarily, because I just didn’t want to be around the humanities anymore.

Almost any class in so-called “area studies” would be taught from the angle of critical and/or postcolonial theory. Postmodernity, the reigning epistemology, assumed that reality was socially constructed by language, rendering all traditions mutually incomprehensible. You had to pretend not to notice that Myth A in Culture 1 was remarkably similar to Myth B in faraway Culture 2, because doing so would be violating the self-contained integrity of both cultures.⁷ Each society inhabited the warm cocoon of its own Wittgensteinian language game, never to be penetrated by outsiders, but only disrupted — especially if the outsiders were greedy Westerners.

I found the highly choreographed dance of the critical-postmodern humanities to be unspeakably boring. I was never able to rid myself of the naïve belief that I was in university to learn. Classes that immediately devolved into political performance didn’t anger me so much as they simply lost my interest.

Eventually, I did my dissertation based on a lab psychology experiment, publishing my first paper on the relationship between ritual and self-regulation and becoming a cognitive and evolutionary scientist of religion. I’d found a corner of academia that was, in my view, still high-value, that still had nutrition in it even after the humanities had all turned into empty (and often tasteless) calories. Lucky me.

Cringe in the Sciences

But by the time I was nearing the end of my foreshortened academic career, the postmodern virus was coming for the sciences, too. In 2018, at a conference on human behavior and evolution — about as far away from poststructural literary theory as you can get — publishers were exhibiting fresh new books on “queering” evolutionary theory and deconstructing gender in the sciences. Standing there in the exhibition hall, alone, gazing at the rainbow flags on a publisher’s table, I realized (not for the first time) that I wasn’t going to be able to hang on in this profession. It was becoming way too cringe.

Remember that ending of Invasion of the Body Snatchers where the heroine stumbles upon Donald Sutherland, one of the only remaining normal humans in California, and laughs with relief — only to watch in horror as Donald, who has been replaced by an alien, screams the eerie shriek of the pod people? It felt like I was living about three scenes behind that. If I stayed full-time in academia, even in the human sciences, soon I’d be Nancy, alone in a world of activist pod people and their pronoun tags. It’s now a cliché for former liberals to describe their professional lives over the past few years as Body Snatchers in real life. But it’s a cliché for a reason.

The point is this: everywhere radical politics captured the institutions and fields I once cared about, those institutions and fields not only became unwelcoming but, more importantly, lost a lot of their appeal. With gender activist books on prominent display, the conference suddenly seemed about as hip as an alternative prom-night dry party hosted by your mom’s church ladies.⁸ My brain’s dopaminergic reward-learning system simply downgraded the conference from the “really cool, might meet great people and form useful connections” bucket to the “maybe if they pay me an honorarium to speak someday” bucket.⁹

It’s like a favorite television show that’s jumped the shark. Something you used to respect, but which now seems uncool and, if current trends continue, possibly soon to become actually contemptible. Contempt, unlike fear, marks unpleasant encounters with people and ideas we perceive as low-status. You have contempt for someone or something you think lacks the power to harm you, or with which you don’t fear losing a relationship.

In academia, as many classes transformed into exercises in self-reflexive irony and drearily predictable hipster-activist posturing, and as prestigious journals instituted restrictions on language so absurd that they would have made Orwell snort milk out his nose, such as disallowing the use of gendered pronouns (really), I long ago started to feel the sucking sensation of value and prestige rushing away from the premises. But I still didn’t feel contempt. I had spent my adult life in or near universities, and I still felt that they had significant power over me. It mattered to me whether I retained some kind of relationship with them.

Then came the past few months.

BU Jumps the Shark

I’m not only talking about the reawakened Israel/Palestine conflict, which led to the realization that many college students and young professors would cheerfully dismantle the United States just as they’re calling for Palestinians to do to Israel. I mean, that probably would have been reason enough, but there was more.

There were also the enormous resources and PR that my graduate alma mater, Boston University, poured into activist writer Ibrim X. Kendi’s brand-new Center for Antiracist Research when they poached Kendi from American University in 2020. Kendi, famous for such heartwarming cris du coeur as “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” quickly raised tens of millions of dollars from donors eager to support social change in the wake of George Floyd’s tragic death. It looked like a major coup for the university. But last fall, a scandal swept Kendi’s center at BU when it was revealed it had done virtually no research over the previous three years. Suffering financial difficulties, the center fired a significant portion of its staff and was obliged to scale back operations. Kendi was investigated by the university, which absolved him of any wrongdoing but suffered a blow to its prestige.

This was unpleasant and sad for everyone concerned, including Kendi, I’m sure. But it’s hard not to conclude that BU was (ironically) only using Ibrim X. Kendi to advance what had become its raison d’être: boosting its prestige and rankings. When I first arrived at BU, its acceptance rate was somewhere around 50%, nowhere near as exclusive as schools like Harvard or MIT. But after years of encouraging vast numbers of applicants to apply, many of whom were unlikely to ever get in, BU managed to drop its acceptance rate to 14%. This helped its national ranking to leap upward about 20 spots.

Glomming onto trendy social causes and gaming admissions statistics weren’t the only tool in its belt, either. BU’s single-minded pursuit of status was accompanied by a creeping transformation from a multidimensional research university into a glassy tech and data sciences hub cum office park. While decrepit student dorms went without repairs, BU erected a $300 million data sciences center that may be the tackiest skyscraper on the East Coast, yet which leadership calls the new heart of campus.

This designation means a noteworthy demotion for BU’s traditional geographic center, the gothic Marsh Chapel, where Martin Luther King, Jr., once preached as a theology student. BU started as a Methodist seminary, one that was open to men and women, people of all races and backgrounds. Up until the 1960s, the majority of black Americans with PhDs in religion had received them at Boston University. That’s a past to be proud of. But data sciences are super-duper trendy currently, in case you haven’t noticed, and BU has bit hard for the trend. And the tech world is relentlessly presentist, opposed to the organic loops of tradition that make a real human culture, and generally hostile to religion, even progressive Methodism. Chasing the latest tech trends, BU is now seeking to bury its own past under walls of starchitect glass. Cringe.

I was once proud of having gone to BU; it was a slightly under-the-radar but still hip and well-positioned research university where you could do offbeat things like study religious studies and cognitive science in the same program. This was unlike, say, Harvard, where the sheer pressure of established status and prestige often encourages a risk-avoidant approach, putting clamps on creativity at the graduate level. Interdisciplinary research was one of BU’s strengths precisely because it wasn’t Harvard.

Marsh Plaza, the former heart of Boston University. The patterns and organic repetition of forms, the inviting open spaces and arcades for spontaneous gathering, the human scaling, the skillful combination of neo-gothic with Art Deco styling…ugh. Who’s gonna invent the next AI app here?

Now I’ve stopped donating as an alumnus. By following the trends rather than making them, BU set the stage for its own ultimate fall from grace. When Kendi’s trendy but toxic brand of antiracism burst onto the scene as the pet cause for wealthy white people and the foundations that launder channel their money, BU jumped at the chance to hitch its horse to that wagon, simply because its primary institutional skill had become ferreting out slick new trends. Now we know the the wagon was low-quality all along.

The new heart of Boston University’s Charles River campus. Notice how your eyes keep crossing as they unsuccessfully strain to get a bead on what they’re looking at? That’s a feature, not a bug. At least it’s LEED certified!

The whole debacle was a fitting capstone to a wild decade and a half in which BU managed to gussy itself up like a top-tier global university, despite really being a quirky commuter school at heart. Now, although the major emotion I feel when I think of BU is bittersweet chagrin, I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t just a bit of contempt in there. I’m not proud of this. It’s something I pray I’ll get over. I underwent an invaluable intellectual awakening at BU, and I’m still proud of the institution that it once was. But there it is.

Laugh at the Absurd

Quality in higher education comes from focus on the fundamentals: attracting and keeping talent, doing cutting-edge research, prioritizing skill and curiosity and dedication, and — perhaps most intangibly — nurturing a sheer love of the academy, a passion for learning, for the discovery and transmission of knowledge. Quality, when achieved, often then leads to prestige, which can become its own derivative economy. In a global imperial hegemon like the United States, where wealthy and elite families worldwide send their children to be educated, the derivative prestige game grew red-hot over the past couple of decades. Everybody wanted to be Harvard. Focus on the primary product — quality — got lost along the way.

Some schools, like Boston University, were so good at the prestige game that they gave away important parts of their very souls, their unique identities and gifts within the ecosystem of American higher education, in order to become just a little bit more like Harvard (or MIT). But even Harvard couldn’t be that Harvard: as Andrew Sullivan (a Harvard alum) recently observed, “the Gay episode proves beyond doubt…that a Harvard degree is no longer a reliable mark of excellence.”

It’s always dispiriting when institutions, people, or products you once respected jump the shark. And in many ways, living in America in the 2020s means watching virtually every institution we once looked up to — universities, media outlets, the UN, the CDC — jumping the shark, everywhere, all at once. It’s disorienting, even a little nerve-wracking.

But it’s also cringe-inducing, and I think that’s where the opportunity lies. Every day, seemingly, another poll reveals a further loss of trust in American authorities and institutions. What we don’t read about in those news articles is that, behind every one of these impersonal polls, there are countless real, personal, and perfectly disgusting experiences of the Great Inward Wince, that low-grade chagrin and, yes, exasperated contempt that actual humans are suddenly feeling toward people and institutions and brands that used to be pillars of our social world.

The collapse of the prestige economy isn’t just destabilizing and dangerous. It’s super lame.

Acknowledging that lameness won’t fix our problems. It certainly won’t fix American universities; I’m pretty sure they need a deus ex machina or, in a more Christian idiom, a Tolkeinian eucatastrophe. Really, my hope is that BU will go back to being a quirky commuter school with an independent streak and an acceptance rate of 50%. Boston as a city would derive far more civic benefit from this — a high-quality school designed to serve upwardly mobile proles from the neighborhoods — than from BU trying to be yet another not-quite-Harvard eating up vast tracts of urban real estate with architectural monstrosities. But meanwhile, we, as humans, might be better able to let the water flow off our backs if we admit that everything is not just dangerously unbalanced, but that this is all incredibly cringe, to the point of farce.

It stinks to lose things you once respected. But a farce is different than a tragedy. At least you can, and indeed should, laugh at a farce. Laughing, even while rolling one’s eyes, dissolves the power of those who would wield prestige to cling onto positions they no longer deserve. There’s no better weapon against absurdity than to show that you no longer take it seriously. You’ve got better parties to go to.

1. A personal example: when George Floyd was killed in 2020, every academic institution I’ve ever been affiliated with managed to send out multiple breathless emails denouncing police violence, often within 47 milliseconds. I don’t even know how some of them still had my email address. But after Hamas’s attacks on Israeli civilians, it was crickets. I wasn’t the only one to notice the difference.

2. None of this is to argue that pro-Palestinian protestors are automatically wrong, or to ignore the reality of anti-Muslim attacks since October 7. The situation is extremely complicated, not to mention tragic. It’s only to point out that university leadership and culture clearly treated the Hamas massacres very differently than they treated other recent public tragedies, and this unexpectedly blew up in their faces.

3. It is, however, worth pointing out that the mainstreaming of antisemitism on college campuses was inevitable as soon as universities started transforming themselves into low-quality environments. It’s not wild stereotyping to point out that Jewish Americans have traditionally been quite bound up with, even significant contributors to and reliable indices of, the intellectual quality of American universities. What would Columbia University’s famed midcentury humanities program have been without Lionel Trilling? What would American physics have been without Richard Feynman? Lose the quality, lose the Jewish intellectuals — and vice-versa.

4. Like you do.

5. I would have gone full cliché and written that I was a “fresh-faced grad student,” except that I wasn’t fresh-faced at all. I schlepped around with a permanently mangy grad-student beard. But “mangy-faced” doesn’t have quite the same hopeful ring.

6. Bonus reader points for getting the pun. Hint: three princes

7. You would also be committing the cardinal sin of appearing to appreciate Mircea Eliade, or — God forbid — Joseph Campbell, which, in terms of sophistication in the eyes of religious studies professors, puts you in the same category as aficionados of daytime television.

8. I assume. My mom did not have church ladies.

9. Which, let me be clear, they are not going to do.