College presidents, behind closed doors and outside the earshot of the people who supposedly work for them, often are as contemptuous of the academics they shill for as the rest of us.
Many share our contempt for the same reason as we have developed it–academics are, as a class, totally insane and often equally stupid. And many more are just tired of the hassle of dealing with obnoxious, entitled, and insane twits who think they know better than everyone else and who insult and degrade anybody who disagrees with them.
Only 37% of college presidents think “the pros of tenure outweigh the cons”–perhaps related to the fact that fully 27% of presidents think that faculty are “most at fault for escalating tensions around campus speech.” @insidehighered‘s survey of presidents.… pic.twitter.com/rR0IpEM8k1
— Jacqueline Pfeffer Merrill (@JPfefferMerrill) March 19, 2025
College presidents find themselves in a bind–even the ideologically corrupt ones who secretly or not-so-secretly agree politically with their professors.
Activists demand that college administrators hire who they want, fire who they want, offend parents when they want them to, and endure untold numbers of headaches that come from vandalism, violent protests, “occupations,” and all the idiocy attached to campus protests. It makes running an institution difficult, to say the least.
Worse, the general public has grown to hate academic institutions, and that attitude is finally sinking in and affecting campus finances. Prestige is the most important currency in academia because all other currencies, including cold-hard cash, derive from the prestige attached to names like “Harvard” and “Columbia.” People donate, endow chairs, have buildings built in their names, and push for government funding, all based on the prestige attached to a college or university’s name.
Prestige translates into billions of dollars of cash every year. This is why Trump can suspend just a fraction of Columbia’s grants and have it cost them half a billion dollars. If he went whole hog, about $4 billion would evaporate.
That is just ONE school. Multiply that out to all the big colleges and universities and the scale of money involved in paying for prestige–and that is what all these government grants are really based on, not on expected results–is astronomical. Grantors and donors can’t really evaluate the quality of education or any particular research–half of all scientific research is pure bunk right now, or even fraudulent–so the people distributing the money do it based on a reputation for quality.
How’s that working out for Higher Ed these days? Not so well, and much of the problem is the activism of staff or the low-performing hangers-on who got tenure and are now coasting as if they were public school teachers hiding behind the skirts of Randi Weingarten.
No wonder College and University presidents secretly want tenure ditched. It has nothing to do with academic freedom–screaming “Kill the Jews” and “Decolonize America” may be free speech, but it certainly isn’t ACADEMIC discourse–it is a grunt, not a reasoned position open for debate and contributes nothing that a masked, keffiyeh-wearing blue-haired trans activist couldn’t add to the public discourse. Listen to an academic activist, and it’s clear they aren’t scholars researching or teaching but activists adding nothing to the search for truth.
Unfortunately for these academic ‘leaders,” they helped create this cohort of screaming academic nonentities, and getting rid of tenure at prestigious universities is a pipe dream. These presidents are constrained by their own prior choices to please the academic mob, and now their primary job–begging for money–is made impossibly hard because they enabled a mob mentality in academia.
Of course, that it is their own fault doesn’t change the dilemma, both for the presidents and for society as a whole. Society benefits from a healthy college and university system–pumping out well-educated and skilled thinkers and researchers is one of the ways the United States rocketed to the top of the world economy and built a free and prosperous society.
We need great higher education institutions. Badly.
Unfortunately, for the most part, we don’t have them. Instead, we have a Harvard that snapped up David Hogg as a great catch, and a Columbia that coddles terrorists.
