The Craven College Administrators

This article notes, quite correctly, that it’s going to be real easy to blame all the problems with higher ed on Trump, but in fact they go back long, long before this. Given that the University of Chicago just this week shut down graduate training in nearly every language program for reasons such as “you get promoted by cutting programs” and also “what if we gave more money to professional schools to turn out drones whose job training will be made irrelevant by AI in 5 years” and “Yes Mr. Billionaire Donor, whatever you say,” it’s fitting that it focuses on Chicago.

The University of Chicago is in crisis. Under extraordinary financial strain, it has diminished its faculty-student ratio and hired hundreds of “lecturers”: teachers whom it pays little and whom it does not expect to do research. It has deliberately driven down the percentage of undergraduate tuition that it devotes to actually teaching undergraduates. This summer it proposed to “merge” (read: “close”) departments; send some students online—or perhaps put them on buses—to study at other institutions; and teach some languages via ChatGPT. It is freezing budgets, closing academic units, slashing doctoral education, and contemplating the use of restricted endowment payouts to support functions not covered in the gift agreements.

The effects of these changes—and a further expansion of the undergraduate population already in the works, with no expansion of faculty—will be dire. Fewer subjects will be taught; classes will be larger; students will have less contact with faculty; more teaching will be done by people with no formal contact with research.

It is tempting to ascribe this betrayal of implied contract—with students, parents, and donors—to the pressure that the Trump administration is placing on higher education. If this were in fact what is happening, the university’s actions would be lamentable but necessary.

But that would be false. The effect of the administration’s moves on university operations—in Chicago’s case—is likely to be small. The true problem is the debased ideals of the university’s leadership and the extraordinary debt it has taken on in pursuit of them. The university’s trustees and leaders view it preeminently as a tax-free technology incubator, and its debt load is so great that it is abandoning ideals it once held dear in order to sustain that goal. We are simply choosing not to be a university.

The story of the University of Chicago is in one sense unique. No peer institution has borrowed so much in relation to its assets; none spends remotely as large a percentage of tuition on servicing debt. Despite gifts and the surge in the stock market, the University’s endowment has actually shrunk under its current president from 2021 to 2024 because it has been liquidating assets to mask the size of its deficits.

But its story also distills forces and trends in American higher education that are corroding ideals, and wasting money, throughout the land.

A couple of tidbits from deeper in the article:

The reason today’s Dean of Humanities wants to send students to other universities to learn subjects that she would like to cancel, or use ChatGPT to teach subjects tomorrow that humans teach today, is to drive the “marginal cost” of teaching students from 20 percent of their tuition down to 10 percent. Future applicants should know that the University plans a further expansion from around 7,400 students to 9,000 … and has simultaneously announced an intent to hold the number of research faculty constant. Perhaps we can drive the cost of educating students below 10 percent? Perhaps that is what the president and provost and dean of humanities mean when they say that we need to position ourselves as leaders in the field.

the University of Chicago does not commence with Donald Trump, when does it begin? What are its causes? I focus on the two most important ones, the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 and the stunning change, which commenced largely in the same era, in which America began to conceive of education as a private, personal good, to be measured solely in terms of increase in lifetime earnings.

The Bayh-Dole act provided for the private licensing of discoveries made during federally funded research. It was motivated by a concern that discoveries made in the preceding decades had not been fully exploited because the lack of opportunity for private gain deprived the system of incentive for development. In short, it granted intellectual property in discoveries made during federally funded research to the universities that hosted the projects and the people who did the research—not, as before, to the people of the United States, who funded that research.

In all fairness, it should probably be said that the Bayh-Dole Act achieved in some narrow sense what it intended. In 1979, on the eve of Bayh-Dole, American universities received only 264 patents. Within a quarter of a century, applications for patents by universities had increased to more than 7,500, thousands of which were licensed to private corporations for commercial application.

But the Bayh-Dole act has also fundamentally corroded policymaking at universities. Within perhaps a decade of the act, universities had begun all to pursue each latest fashion in applied science, hoping to score a windfall via licensing that would pay for all: from biomedicine, to imaging, to molecular engineering, to quantum computing, to AI. What could go wrong?

For one thing, building facilities and competing to hire the same experts in order to do the same projects at the same time as one’s peers is incredibly expensive. The University of Chicago has now borrowed $6.3 billion, more than 70 percent of the value of its endowment. The cost of servicing its debt is now 85 percent of the value of all undergraduate tuition. (This is not normal. No peer institution has a debt-to-asset ratio greater than 26 percent. Perhaps that is one reason why Chicago’s tuition is so high and yet it wants to spend so little on education?)

But universities as non-profits are fundamentally not suited to competition of this kind. If one plots the trajectory of spending on computer science at the University of Chicago in the decade leading up to 2011, and then counts up the additional spending on buildings, materiel, and operational costs through 2024, the total comes to hundreds of millions of dollars. During that time, despite that additional investment, the ranking of the university in computer science has declined from 40th to 56th. 

But it’s worse than that. For one thing, the employment model of the research university requires that the best researchers receive contracts effectively for life. So as the university’s leadership flits from fashion to fashion, for its own glory and the university’s never-realized profit, universities can rarely shed the costs of the last misadventure.

Honestly, it’s terrible at the universities. I am so incredibly lucky to have landed a tenure-track job at a decent state school and one with a strong union as well (I am now union VP). But it is absolutely awful to have everything I love being destroyed during my lifetime. This includes the university and the study of the humanities, but also includes the ecosystem, American democracy, the idea that things could possibly get better in my lifetime, and the competitive nature of the Portland Trail Blazers. Honestly, while my personal and professional life have worked out to be pretty good, I am in a state on constant despair. It’s just so awful. One damn thing after another. And so few of them are necessary. In the case of higher ed, it’s sheer greed and placing the stupidest people in the world (craven administrators + billionaire donors) in charge of it. Why? Because America was too good at one point, I guess.

Once again, Trump is symptom, not disease.