I don't know if this is known outside of academic circles, but most universities are desperate for enrollments these days. Over the past 10ish years, unis changed tactics from attracting students with perks (some of them admittedly dumb) to slashing everything in sight--support staff, new faculty, majors, equipment, software, facilities, retirement plans, landscaping, even PR and marketing. Radical top-down decisions like "Who cares about foreign languages?" made whole divisions disappear. 1/
That is, universities used to be (well or badly) competing for students by offering something unique, promising extra career support or honors courses, competing in rare Div I sports, building a climbing wall, hosting ice cream or puppy therapy on the quad. But when the pivot to evisceration happened, it turned out there's nothing you can identify that is foundational enough to a liberal arts education that it can't be ruined and trashed tomorrow to save tens of thousands of $$. 2/
Meanwhile, all that axing has required unis to pay out absolutely shocking amounts, millions upon millions of $$, to forcibly retired admins who might have stood in the way of strangling the humanities or the lab sciences in the bathtub. (We all think it's just our discipline until the remaining handful of faculty get together and find out not even math or chemistry has a pot to piss in.) Students are paying more and more in tuition (and debt) for a product that is stunningly substandard. 3/
But at least the students can hang on to the community and vision of the university, its commitment to diversity and social justice, the boldly framed photos of students from all religions and races, giggling on the quad over books that no one is around to assign anymore? And that's where this protest season is different from the one in 2014 when Michael Brown's murderer was not indicted. Universities no longer promise free discourse, or community, or justice. They don't care if you go there. 4/
There are a lot of universities that are a few pesky undergrads away from becoming a hedge fund. Students endure hours of classes taught by local community members with no degree who like making $1000 to do improv stand-up at captive young people for four months. They create clubs for people who like to read novels or learn about history or discuss philosophy or learn languages. Students mentor each other in programming, finance, and grad school exams, as well as justice. 5/
That also means that they get most of their information and direction from the internet--this crumbling, shitty, corrupted internet full of misinformation, scams, conspiracy theories, and some desperately earnest people--rather than from the mentors they have gone into nightmarish debt to learn from. Remember that they are every single bit as smart and capable as any other young people who have ever existed. They just haven't been taught much, and some have taught themselves well. 6/
They have paid more and received less than any other college students in history. Faculty have been complaining for 20 years and longer about universities being run "like a business" because universities don't work like businesses. But for the past 10 years, it's admins that haven't run the uni "like a business." They're not interested in providing a service for a consumer, or marketing that service effectively. They are making purely financial decisions regardless of consumer experience. 7/
@carrideen I won't disagree that many #universities are badly run: the exploding tuition costs, the lack of emphasis on teaching by faculty, the growth of administration and bureaucracy, the number of PhDs awarded in excess of professorship jobs, etc. Still, the current crisis is driven not just by management but also by demographics: the number of high school graduates is declining in many countries, e.g. https://source.cognia.org/issue-article/high-school-graduation-trends-in-the-years-ahead/ .
@carrideen I disagree. Administrators are running their universities exactly "like a business." This includes top management taking as much as they can steal and suffering no adverse consequences for doing so.
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