Let's Play Academic Clue
AI cheaters, student financial struggles, one college closing every week: which higher Ed faculty are responsible for the slow, crumbling death of traditional higher Ed?
First: I’m going to start writing fiction again. Second—the problem with academia …
Which of these unfortunate instructors do you feel most sympathetic to? Which one is the one who has dealt the tottering edifice of US higher education the final blow in our game of Higher Ed Clue?
Front and center: Chester the Molester, PhD, who married his pet student back in 1990 and has cheated on her regularly with an ever-younger set up until … he’s having trouble doing that in recent years, owing to the near-50-year age gap between him and current students.
Front left: Dr. Depression, who hasn’t prepared a new lecture in 30 years.
Front right: Professor Tower, recently returned from receiving another award for his work promoting globalization, hasn’t met personally with a student since prior to the 2020 COVID pandemic, and whose grad assistants return his calls via chatbot.
Rear Center: Wilhelmina Wordy, PhD, who bemoans the fact that none of her students read any assignments and use LLM tools to write their papers.
Rear Left: Dr. Gozer Glabulus, world-renowned expert in ancient Etruscan history.
Who did it? And where did it happen?
Was it Dr. Glabulus in the library with Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?
Did Wilhelmina Wordy put $100K/yr tuition into its grave in the writing center with her 45th assignment of The Scarlet Letter?
Or did Chester the Molester drive the stake through higher education’s heart in the hallway outside his office, shoving his hand up a freshman student’s skirt?
Or was it Professor Tower, ignoring a student request in the faculty office building, or Dr. Depression in the classroom, lulling his students into fatal senescence reading his notes written on a legal pad, now yellow but originally white, in a dull tone only interrupted by the occasional “uh” or “ah”.
Clue: The Higher Ed Edition, out in Fall 2025 from Hasbro.
Those Pesky Students Always Cheating With AI!
US College enrollments declined by 15% between 2015 and 2021 according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, using machine learning, discovered that private colleges and universities began closing at an accelerated rate in 2020, reaching a rate of one per week in 2023, with closures expected to continue to accelerate. The cause?
A lack of funds resulting from a lack of students.
While traditional post-high school matriculation has declined by about 15% since 2008, the number of adult returning college students has fallen by over half during the same period, according to the Philadelphia Fed’s report.
Few reports, even including the Philly Fed’s 2024 analysis, mention the influence of punitive, inescapable high-interest student loans on choices to pursue undergraduate or graduate degrees.
Long before the 2020 COVID pandemic, dozens of financial reports confirmed that millennials and Gen Z were unable to buy homes or save money — at times being unable to even afford rent or car payments — because they were paying off student loans on jobs that aren’t even in their field of study, that often don’t pay anything close to a living wage.
The world is rife with instructor complaints, many even anonymous, about student apathy, lack of engagement, and universal use of AI to “cheat” in class and on papers.
It’s also rich in reports from instructors who either specialize in AI or are using it to enrich their own teaching and interact with students, such as the Wharton School’s Ethan Mollick.
Cultural Bubbles Play a Role
Talking with some guests at our community pool yesterday, I learned that many people are interested in AI, yet know little about it. I also heard reports of various government program malfeasance that they’d heard through conservative media that I largely don’t see: British royalty proudly announcing their charities had received multi-million-dollar grants from USAID (now curtailed), and university researchers bemoaning the cuts of grants from their labs which were studying how shrimp exercise and cockroaches mate.
Rather than arguing about the merits of various government expenditures as most upper-middle-class people are doing these days, I find it worthwhile to focus on core, root problems that our nation— even the wealthiest — have.
Those of us in my age group (“Generation Jones”) and older Boomers such as my husband (born 1953) or my prior partners, born in 1956 and 1959, and to a large extent, Gen X-ers (including the philosophy professor linked above), were brought up in an environment which privileged a lot of things. Our home lives, for the most part, and particularly K-12 school, also encouraged us to believe that our lives were all under a) our individual control — i.e. ‘free will’; and b) our individual responsibility — for example, if problems occurred, these were all “our fault” and could be avoided by individual action and care.
Our generation and close cohorts were all taught, “If you work hard, you will be successful.” Success was generally defined as “financial security, stability, and advancement” as well as socially-assigned success in the form of awards and public recognition, including job titles and salaries.
Even though my undergraduate education was marred by the criminal behavior of a protected faculty member, for decades, I never saw the way I was treated not just by my tenured faculty rapist, but also my tenured faculty sexual groomer (I have not written about him — he, like my rapist, is deceased) as an institutional or systemic problem. For decades, I thought these negative incidents that cost me a Rhodes Scholarship, Watson Fellowship, and admission and scholarships to the nation’s most prestigious graduate writing programs as well as to Claremont Graduate University in Art, were not just rare and unusual, I believed them to be my fault.
Higher Ed: Rushing Headlong Toward Disaster
It is now nearly ten years ago when I wrote to warn parents (article linked above) that Scripps College, my undergraduate school, where I served as a recent graduate trustee and a Distinguished Alumna in Residence, was not going to put their child’s physical safety as a top priority — I wrote this after a series of events proved to me beyond a reasonable doubt that the school did not care if any student was sexually abused or exploited, nor did they care more about student emotional and mental health than they did about tuition payments and endowment growth. I contacted school administration and members of the Board of Trustees prior to writing this; upon hearing no response, I disowned this school to which I had devoted many volunteer hours and financial contributions. The school remains among the nation’s most expensive, with tuition alone exceeding $65,000 a year, and total annual costs approaching $100,000 according to U.S. News and World Report.
When I served as Alumna in Residence in 2013, the Academic Dean so little gave a shit they didn’t bother to meet with me and students when the Dean at the nearby larger, more academically rigorous Pomona College did. When I told Scripps’ President at the time that upon reviewing student publications as part of my visit, I was reading student accounts of being raped or sexually exploited by Scripps faculty members or those at other Claremont consortia colleges — and I was stunned as there appeared to be no change or improvement in the intervening 30 years — nothing happened. No actions for student safety and any change in policy were made. By 2017, a Resident Advisor took her own life after being preyed upon by a staff member. Here we are nearly ten years later and … nothing has improved, but the price has certainly increased.
An Isolated Instance, Just Like All of the Other …
Now, survivors like me — and those who’ve survived predation in churches, scouting organizations, K-12 schools, or the workplace — know that there’s “one or more on every campus.” Even when we disclose how we’ve been harmed by criminals, minor-league thugs often appear to say “women rape men more often than men rape women” or garden variety denials of the appalling real statistics on sexual assault of young women and girls, as well as young men and boys. There are $multi-billion lawsuits underway against the Boy Scouts, the Catholic Church, and many other religious denominations.
I learned after talking with Prof. Amos Guiora of the University of Utah School of Law and reading his book, Armies of Enablers, that there is a notable pattern that is evident in cases of multiple sexual assault conducted by multiple offenders on campuses or similar organizations (churches, hospitals, schools, athletic associations). The offenders would never be able to continue to harm multiple victims for decades if they weren’t protected by others at the school: Bystanders and Enablers. The Bystander Initiative seeks to criminalize those who make it possible for such crimes to continue.
What do these Bystanders and Enablers do? They prioritize their own jobs and financial well-being, and the financial security and “reputation” of their organization over the well-being of the student — and also the written law.
The Story of Lou Anna Simon
As one example, Lou Anna Simon, the former President of Michigan State University (MSU), received a number of complaints from female gymnasts that Larry Nassar, the former team doctor for U.S. Gymnastics and MSU staff member, was putting his hands inside their vaginas during medical exams. Nassar’s serving a very long sentence for his assaults of top gymnasts including Olympic, National, and world champions. Upon hearing the stories, Lou Anna Simon called the FBI. Was she reporting Nassar? No. She was asking for help to silence the complainants. She was never charged and a judge released her, but information continues to be released about where her priorities were during the controversial period that Larry Nassar was allowed to stick his hands inside MSU gymnasts under her authority.
If you’re reading this and saying “isolated incident,” the answer is “sorry — this could happen to your child any time and anywhere there are people in authority whose decisions are to privilege offenders and their own well-being and paycheck over the law, decency, common sense, and normal responsibility.”
What Does This Have to Do With Academia’s Failure?
It has to do with not just academia, but our culture’s failure to live up to any principle espoused in our nation’s laws, public discourse, or accurate perceptions of history.
When young women were allowed to attend college in the US, starting primarily in the 1940s, the problem of sexual exploitation and abuse under color of faculty or coach/administrator authority grew.
The more young women or diverse students from poor or nonwhite backgrounds began to attend college and pursue graduate degrees, the greater the general issue of “what academia really is” has grown.
It took me 20 years of experience at 5 different schools to become a good college English teacher. I was motivated to teach well because of who I, innately, am. I wasn’t motivated for a paycheck, and as a part-time teacher, I knew I had no seniority or tenure. My motivation for teaching was enjoyment and the desire to achieve actual results in the classroom. My reward for teaching was always measurable and specific: seeing students advance their skills in reading, writing, critical thinking, and ability to learn.
I always hated faculty meetings that weren’t skill-oriented, a feeling that I’m confident will be shared by other competent and committed instructors, of which there are many thousands.
When I see current faculty complaining about low or no student skills in reading and writing, as I frequently heard from low-interest, low-skill, and low-motivation instructors prior to my last semester of college teaching in 2019, I think about the 54 to 52% of college graduates who are not working in the field in which they studied, or the up-to-50% who are working in jobs that don’t require a college degree at all.
Sometime in 2016, I recall arriving at Saddleback College to teach my 7:00 a.m. English 1A class and seeing someone sleeping in their car with sheets covering the windows. I could tell by parking stickers that it was a faculty member.
I made the fatal error of reporting this experience to both my Dean, whom I mistakenly had identified as a “friend,” and at a Department meeting. Ever after that time, I found that my experiences on campus deteriorated — not with the other good teachers who participated in training and professional development along with me, and not with the staff at the technology lab where we prepared lessons and learned how to best-use the learning management system on campus — but more powerful full-time faculty who didn’t participate in professional development, or administrators who didn’t care what happened on campus or in the classroom at all. I began to be treated like all the other “low-level” faculty. I didn’t stop teaching Fall 2019 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, I stopped teaching because full-time faculty chose to take my assigned classes because they planned to retire the subsequent year and they would receive higher retirement pensions because of the overload.
Back in late 2019, I sat in one of the last faculty meetings I’d ever attend listening to a boring Power Point slide presentation by a fulltime faculty member who not only has never published anything professionally, but who also referred to academic literature “about” working with “diverse students” instead of actual work with real students, and then I got to eat lunch with a disengaged, low-skilled British woman with a PhD who demanded to know — chewing loudly with food spraying from her mouth — why would any instructor or student be homeless? What needs could they possibly have?
Academia treated me poorly because it has treated and continues to treat all but a privileged few poorly.
US academia’s disregard for anything of real value — metrics, achievement, jobs, real research, real excellence — is exactly why student enrollments are down, students are performing poorly in many classes, and instructors are seeing disengaged, low-motivation students who don’t even bother to stay in class for 50 minutes, as documented by Hilarius Bookbinder, the “anonymous” philosophy professor (possibly, Steven Hales from Bloomsburg University).
I was never thought to be a “mean” instructor even though my grading grew simultaneously stricter and more lenient over two decades; if a student wandered off in the middle of my class back in 2019, I’d discuss the matter with them outside of the classroom and if they were that poorly committed to class, I’d advise them to drop the class or I’d drop them myself. How is this concept so difficult for Bookbinder, the PhD tenured professor from a second-tier Pennsylvania school I’ve never heard of? I see that there are nursing, forensic accounting, digital forensics, and ASL degrees offered at the school: I doubt students are leaving those classes early and I bet students are also engaged in active learning in these — by the judgment of GenX philosophy PhDs with tenure — sub-academic “technical” disciplines.
My job as a community college English instructor with an MFA, not a PhD, was to engage students with reading, writing, learning and critical thinking at a college level. Few to no students came into my classrooms reading or writing at the level Bookbinder states he wants to see, and this dates back to before 9–11, a date I noticed caused a huge change in student morale and commitment that lasted for another 4–5 years. Students didn’t want to read Kierkegaard or Dostoevsky back in the 80s, either.
A lack of critical thinking ability isn’t just a problem with incoming freshmen at four-year colleges like Bloomsburg University. It’s a problem in the faculty lounges. It’s a problem with the writing acquaintances I have who are terrified and terrorized of changes they believe to be happening in US society: changes which have been real life for independent orphan students such as me, for students who aren’t wealthy, for students who are not “white” and for students with cognitive differences regardless of their ethnicity or socio-economic background.
The instructors who screwed me over at Saddleback College in 2019, after two decades of faithful, hard work and continuous learning that retained students not just to the school, but which helped them matriculate and transfer successfully to four-year schools or graduate education knew they were doing wrong. They knew they were doing wrong every time they blew off professional development that could have helped them to engage with their students and do a better job in the classroom. They knew they were doing wrong when they designed semesters abroad that suited their personal interests, not important learning outcomes for students. They knew they were doing wrong every time they recycled a book, a test, an assignment, a syllabus.
Did my Dean of Students at Scripps College know she was doing wrong when I told her what my rapist had done to me and she said, “Write it down and put it in a safe deposit box?” Did the school know it was doing wrong when it gave her a free house and a raise? How about Lou Anna Simon at MSU? Did she really think she was “doing right” by calling the FBI and asking them to help — by silencing gymnasts that Nassar had molested and enabling Nassar to continue? How many hundreds of these stories must be heard for the realization to sink in: these people deserve their jobs less than the countless graduates of their schools who are working at WalMart or Target, or who are struggling to pay onerous student loans which are currently topping out at nearly 20% interest rates.
People in “regular jobs” like, say, landscaping, auto repair, and HVAC, lose their jobs and can even lose their ability to continue to work in their fields at all if they make these types of decisions.
Imagine the plumber who thinks, “I’m done today, I won’t replace that pipe under the sink, that’s tough if the owner comes in and turns on the faucet.”
How about a Honda technician who says, “aw, I don’t need to replace that gasket at the bottom of the oil pan.”
I get asked by people at the pool, “How can these people go on like this?” with such a long string of failures. My young co-workers wonder, “Is everyone in established publishing poorly-mannered, corrupt, and incurious?
No: not all. But those who aren’t have suffered for a very long time as have the majority of students, with fewer than half working in their fields of study, and a large plurality of college grads either unemployed or working in fields that don’t require a college degree at all.
I didn’t make up these facts, but those who refuse to face them are presently facing, and will continue to face, the consequences of many decades of abandonment of mission, lack of preparation and ethics, and failure to educate and motivate.
MSU’s Lou Anna Simon might still be getting off scot-free after calling the FBI to silence Nassar’s victims, but her school and all of higher ed isn’t going to survive without radical change, either.
What a great piece! You've encapsulated 35 years of my repressed grumbling about what college actually was, versus the inescapable wide-eyed hype I endured beginning in middle school.
For stupid reasons, I went to a bottom-tier school. My primary reasons for attending were 1) they allowed early admission, thus enabling skipping senior year high school, and 2) a full scholarship. My time there featured all the professors in your lounge, although mine were lazy know-it-alls from other bottom-tier schools who taught like it was 1950. I only had one English prof that offered anything significant, and who herself had gone to a real school. Two of the male profs had married students, and oozed ick.
The late 80s/early 90s began the push for everybody to go to college, and the denigration of trades and other non-4-year-degree education. People we really need to keep things running were pushed to 4-year schools they didn't want to be in. (There was an active destruction of nursing schools beginning in the early 90s as well, to engineer the shortage we've had since.)
The preponderance of students at my bottom-teir school wanted the easiest tracks possible, and had no interest in anything intellectual, scientific or artistic. Maybe you're seeing the inevitable conclusion of that now, 40 years later. The grift could've kept on going if it hadn't gotten so expensive.
I knew before going it was a dumpy school, but reasoned that a year or two here with good grades (the scholarship required I maintain a 3.3 GPA or so) , I could transfer to somewhere better. I had no idea that transfer students were seen as second class citizens at best, and that no scholarships were available. I spent one semester at my chosen transfer school, which was what I thought a well-respected Boston creative arts and writing school. I did read a lot, and learned a lot from one prof, but otherwise it was people in the lounge. I asked the part-time instructor of the one writing class for advice on pursuing writing. "Keep writing," she said. Enough money for a really nice new car for that?
Sorry for the venting, but it's introduction for my echoing your conclusions. Higher ed has always been a big club that you're not in (RIP Uncle Carlin), but it's moreso all the time. Your open-mouth-chewer is common in their lazy thinking, because they've made it, so why make any effort? Tenure turned upside down from its intended purpose.
All this to say, I hear you, and I was there as a student. And don't forget this is all by design: the guy in Nixon's cabinet who realized an educated and awake youth imperiled their cushy excess. Making higher education a mandatory mortgage was the greatest evil idea the fascists ever had.
(Edited to be clear I don't begrudge community college or similar students at all. If anything, they're far more honest about who they are and what they want.)