Steelworkers once believed there was no limit to what they could grab from corporations, even autoworkers made that error. Twinkies went bankrupt to get out of union control and start over. Yet no one on the floor believe that would happen.
In the 1980s, academia achieved its goal of convincing Congress that because people with college degrees made more money, college education should be 'a right' available to all. Since young people would make more money, student loans would easily pay for themselves. Republican President Ronald Reagan agreed smarter people would be better and assured by Democrats about cost increases(1)
Student loans which had once been capped at around $2,500 per year became unlimited. Yet Reagan had bought into a closed system and the system was not actually closed.
Universities spent billions advertising the new degrees they could offer, new buildings went up, they recruited scientists experienced at getting grant money with promises of big salaries, and elite surgeons for university hospitals.(2)
Yet Democrats lost the election and just as breezily as a president said he was going to waive away the debt of college students who weren't smart enough to understand how loans and debt interest were - and make plumbers and electricians pay for it - a new president said that would not happen. Not a problem, presidents change and this one is termed out, so maybe the next one would want to make money free again.
But something bigger was creeping up. And that something is called a Large Language Model, deemed "AI" by marketing types selling it.
Academics were so gleefully protesting for students to have free money that they never saw AI was rushing up on their flank. Why pay quirky humans if AI can educated cheaper.
Why pay hatemongers - and worse, give them tenure for life, as creative writing professors - if AI can do the job?
In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Université Paris Cité humanities professor Justin Smith-Ruiu says the signs were there and academics refused to see them. He recounts a story of a student who didn't want to be bothered with some aside a teacher provided about an Italian artist. It could be a just-so story, it certainly reads like one, but it has an air of truthiness because of the cultural milieu that humanities academics created.
Why respect teachers if teachers don't respect anyone they didn't vote for? Or anyone living in an entire religion? And brag their behavior has no consequences.
Especially if you are just an overpaid meat puppet doing a worse job than AI can?
He laments that the humanities were once about "helping their students wake up to the wonder of the human mind as manifest in its most enduring monuments" and that is true, when students could afford to go to college for an education rather than a job that would pay for their student loans to get a humanities degree, but humanities academics were out in front at the unlimited student loan trough. Columbia University sold an $80,000 Environmental Journalism specialty, on top of their regular degree.
That's not about students, it's about non-profit corporate greed.
Now humanities scholars are paying the price for being complicit. Two generations of university administrators have been brought up treating students as customers to exploit, so Smith-Ruiu invoking a course in Medieval Cosmology being replaced in popularity by classes in “video-game ethics” sounds funny - especially when you realize the latter is actually more useful.
Humanities academics with tenure overwhelmingly got their jobs 'myth busting', not enlightening. How many history books that professors forced students to buy for the class were just claiming some other historian was wrong and this new one is right? Nearly all of them.
Adjuncts can do that just as well for a lot less money. If they can be fired for incompetence of being a Nazi yelling at Jewish students during protests, even better. Finland does not have union members in their public schools and their education is the best in the world, according to standardized tests.
Tenure is an archaic mechanism that was once necessary, but once it became an ideological land grab and a way to engage in social justice, it became an anchor that weighs down academia and takes students who want to learn rather than be indoctrinated with it.
NOTES:
(1) The same way he was duped by claims that California would stop letting in illegal immigrants from Mexico if he gave the current ones amnesty in the 1980s. It turns out that politicians lie, especially when the census only counts people for Congressional representation, not whether they are in the country legally or not.
(2) Actor Patrick Ball of the cable TV medical drama "The Pitt" said getting his big break helped him pay off the $80,000 student loan he had.
He took out debt to go to the Yale School of Drama, which is as ridiculous as a rock musician taking on student loan debt to practice playing guitar. The degree helps no one get a job acting, it opens no doors because every casting agent knows you just paid for an endurance contest. He simply wanted to say he went to Yale. Yet cultural pundits in the same political party who duped a president into giving illegal immigrants amnesty now promise that if young people who don't understand what a loan is get theirs waived, it will never happen again. No one should be dumb enough to fall for that twice.
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