“it depends entirely on the nature of the student. Is the student there to really learn or just get the degree to get a job.”

This seems exactly right to me. It appears to me that students who want to, or are willing to, learn are decreasing while students who are in college to check boxes in order to get a degree are growing, clearly a problem if true.

A former colleague referred to it as an unsettling mix of deep cynicism (about college) and utter naiveté (about adult life) in many students. Lack of good faith engagement from an increasing number of students in GE humanities courses, even if good faith only used to get you through week two or so, effectively guts the project of the lower division humanities curricula.

How we got here is a long and complex story involving large-scale economic issues dating back to the Reagan years, long-term political issues dating back to the Nixon era, austerity, missteps within fields, and administrative bloat.

Most—if not all—of these factors were and are more or less out of the hands of actual faculty in the humanities. But I’m struck by a line in David C.K. Curry’s recent piece in The Chronicle. Curry writes of the disaster at SUNY Potsdam:

While faculty members in programs awaiting “realignment” dealt with sleepless nights, many of my colleagues who escaped the cuts reacted by keeping their heads down. Department chairs, understandably, have tried to shelter their programs and staff from the coming storm, which, unfortunately, places programs in direct competition with one another for students. This bunker mentality plays right into the hands of the administration.

I want to talk about the tendency of faculty to keep their heads down, focus on their own departments, and enter a bunker mentality because it’s exactly what’s been happening since at least the 2008 financial crisis. Maybe this is just the way people are, or maybe it’s specific to profs, maybe it’s specific to humanities profs, but in my view there has been a complete failure to engage in any kind of collective work for disciplines with declining majors, funding, hiring, and so forth.

The only thing faculty could have (and I do think it’s too late, at least in the short term) would’ve been to put themselves at risk as the crises occurred by taking vocal and collective action. While I admire and agree with the sentiment of faculty being arrested for, i.e., protesting in favor of Palestinian liberation, I’m not convinced that the impact of doing so is going to change a lot.

I’m left to ask where this passion and exercise of political speech was when higher ed became a degree mill digesting smart, promising people and turning them into PTSD-affected adjuncts, or community college teachers with PhDs, or “alt-ac” refugees? Where was the organized resistance to accepting paltry little bones of completely exploited adjunct labor in order to support a shriveling department? Where were profession/field-wide initiatives to get grad students properly employed? Where was the realization that hiring new faculty based in large part on the elite status of their alma mater causes a recursive death spiral?

These things didn’t have to happen, or even if they did have to happen, they didn’t have to happen with a whimper rather with a fight. The problem as I see it is that for many faculty the “system” more or less works to provide them with a good job and a good life. What they don’t want to do is rock the boat, and as a result we get the bunker mentality, the head in the sand, the ultimately vain attempts to rescue one department out of half a dozen. But the thing is that the system flatly doesn’t work for anyone else in many cases.

You don’t have to be a Marxist to see that departments that make regular use of adjunct labor are supporting themselves on pretty execrable exploitation of others. That bargain should never have been made morally or even practically. Entire fields have given up any claim to moral rectitude (which matters when you’re in the humanities!), supposedly “critical” paper Marxists collect their salaries and awards while their former students grind for a pittance without health insurance or retirement, and nepotism and status reign supreme over all.

The academic humanities had multiple chances over the past two and a half decades to take up a fight for survival and for moral and intellectual standing. I can’t think of a single time they did so.

All sorts of external factors caused these problems, but cowed faculty and disciplines simply failed to address any of them substantively. It’s awfully difficult to maintain your moral standing when you fail to stand up for the most vulnerable, when you appear cravenly self-interested to those who see the writing on the wall, when you clearly aren’t willing to stand up for the principles you espouse.