The Lie at the Center of Higher Education

What Thirty Years Inside the Academy Forced Me to Admit

I came to the United States from West Africa. I was the first in my immediate family to earn a degree beyond high school. Where I grew up, higher education was not a system to critique. It was a privilege most people never touched. I arrived at the University of Maine at Fort Kent in 1995, a first generation American with little more than my own intuition, and an acceptance letter changed the trajectory of my entire life.

I did not enter higher education through a faculty lounge or a dean’s search. I entered it as the exact kind of student the sector now invokes in every mission statement and protects in none of its decisions. I was the demographic. I am still the demographic. That is why what I am about to write costs me something to say.

I started working in higher education in 1995. I have spent the last fourteen of those years at Unity. Before that, I held nearly every operational and academic role a person can hold inside a university, at multiple institutions, across multiple decades, in service of something I believed without question. I believed in the mission. I believed in the language. I believed in the people. I believed that if I worked hard enough, rose far enough, and earned enough trust, I would find myself inside a sector that did what it said it did. I dedicated my entire adult life to this belief.

I was wrong.

I am writing this knowing it may end my career in higher education. I am writing it because if I do not write it, the next thirty years of my life will be spent participating in something I can no longer pretend not to see. And because the people who could write it before me, the elders I once admired, chose not to. They retired into emeritus titles and consulting contracts and board seats, and they took the truth with them. Someone has to break the chain. I would rather be the one who broke it than the one who passed it forward.

What follows will sound harsh. It is harsh. It is also true, and I spent three decades not saying it out loud, including to myself.

The Inversion

Every other sector in modern economic life understands, at least nominally, that the institution exists for the people it serves. Hospitals exist for patients. Restaurants exist for diners. Law firms exist for clients. Manufacturers exist for customers. The arrangement is imperfect everywhere, and abused often, but the organizing principle is at least admitted out loud.

Higher education inverted this. The institution exists for the workforce. The professoriate is the purpose. The administration is the apparatus that sustains the professoriate. The students are the funding mechanism that pays for the apparatus that sustains the professoriate. The mission language was bolted on later to obscure the arithmetic. Service to students is the cover story for an enterprise whose actual organizing principle is service to the people who work there.

I did not see this for most of my career. I did not see it because I did not want to see it, and because the people training me did not want me to see it, and because the language available to describe the work I was doing was the same language the inversion uses to defend itself. I gave keynotes I now wish I could take back. I defended structures I now know were indefensible.

I told students things I believed at the time and would not say today. I was not lying to them. I was repeating what I had been taught, in good faith, by people who had been repeating what they had been taught, in good faith, going back generations. That is how the inversion survives. Not through conspiracy. Through inheritance.

And the inversion has been moralized. That is the part that makes it invisible. It has been wrapped in the vocabulary of academic freedom, shared governance, intellectual integrity, vocation, and mission, so that any attempt to name it gets pre-categorized as an attack on values rather than what it actually is, which is the naming of a structural lie. The workforce does not just defend the inversion.

It defends the inversion using the vocabulary of the very people the inversion harms. Students become the rhetorical shield held up in front of the system that exploits them. Faculty interests are defended in the language of student welfare. Administrative interests are defended in the language of institutional sustainability. Everyone uses the student as the human sandbag in front of their own position.

That is the atrocity. Not that the system is broken. Systems break. The atrocity is that the sector has constructed a moral language that makes the brokenness invisible to the people inside it and untouchable to the people outside it. The lie is not operational. The lie is epistemic.

The workforce cannot see what it has become because the language available to describe it has been captured by the people whose interest is in not seeing it. I could not see it. I was one of those people. I am still, in ways I am only beginning to understand, one of those people.

What follows is what the inversion looks like when you stop letting it hide. I am writing it as someone who participated in every section. Not as an accuser. As a witness who can no longer claim he did not know.

Caring As Performance

Higher education has perfected a particular kind of theater. The language is always about students. The mission statements are always about transformation. The convocation speeches are always about lives changed. Then the meeting ends and the actual work begins, and the actual work is almost never about students. It is about schedules. It is about course release. It is about who has to teach the eight a.m. section. It is about whether a new program threatens an existing department’s headcount. It is about which committee a decision has to pass through before it can be considered, which is usually the committee designed to ensure it cannot be considered.

I have sat in those meetings for thirty years. Early in my career I took notes and did not question what was being optimized for. Later I led the meetings and optimized for the same things, because that was the job, and the job was defined by people who had defined it before me. I have watched faculty meetings where the agenda item was a student retention crisis and the discussion was a forty-minute negotiation about whether responding to student emails on weekends constituted unpaid labor.

I have watched staff resist a system upgrade that would have shortened student wait times because it would have shortened their workday in a way they had not been consulted on. I have watched leaders deliver passionate keynotes about access and then quietly approve policies that priced out the exact students the keynote described. I have been the leader giving the keynote. More than once. Earlier than I would like to admit.

None of the people in those meetings, including me, would have described themselves as cynical. We described ourselves as advocates. That is the inversion in action. The performance of caring is sincere because the speaker has internalized the cover story so completely that the cover story has become the self-image. The student is still the protagonist of the story everyone tells themselves. The student is just not the protagonist of the calendar, the budget, the contract, the policy manual, or the meeting agenda. The story is for the speaker. The arithmetic is for the institution.

The Contract As Catechism

Walk into any institution and ask what cannot be changed. The list is long and remarkably consistent. The academic calendar cannot be changed. The credit hour cannot be changed. The faculty governance structure cannot be changed. The tenure timeline cannot be changed. The sabbatical entitlement cannot be changed. The summer schedule cannot be changed. The committee structure cannot be changed. The course load cannot be changed. The reporting line cannot be changed.

Ask why, and the answer is always the same. It is in the contract. It is in the handbook. It is in the bylaws. It is in the collective bargaining agreement. It is in the accreditation standards, which is usually a lie, but a useful one. The contract has replaced the mission as the operating document of the institution. The handbook has become scripture. The bylaws have become a moat.

I spent most of my career inside that scripture. I cited those handbooks. I drafted some of them. I used them to explain to students why something they needed could not be done. I believed the explanations when I gave them. The contract was not a document to me. It was a worldview.

To question it was to question the legitimacy of the work itself, which meant questioning the legitimacy of my own career, which meant questioning a thirty year investment in a vocation I had built my identity around. So I did not question it. I enforced it. For longer than I am proud of.

This is the quiet truth of the sector. The mission is what gets quoted. The contract is what gets enforced. When those two things conflict, which is constantly, the contract wins. Always. The student loses. Always. And everyone involved goes home convinced they had no choice, because the contract said so, and the contract is what we agreed to, and agreements must be honored, even when the agreement was signed twenty years ago by people who are no longer here to defend a world that no longer exists.

The Pulpit And The Exit Ramp

These are patterns, not individuals. I have seen all of them, many times, at many institutions, including in versions of myself.

The most fluent speakers of the mission language are often the people most actively planning their escape from the institutions they claim to serve. Watch any conference circuit and you will see the pattern. The president who delivers the keynote about access and transformation is on a call the next morning with an executive search firm, exploring the move to a wealthier school where the work will be easier and the headline will be better.

The provost who writes the op-ed about reimagining the academy is quietly building a consulting practice on the side, monetizing the very change they refuse to lead inside their own institution. The dean who chairs the equity task force is networking for the foundation job that will let them talk about higher education without having to operate inside it anymore.

The sermon is performed for the audience that matters, which is rarely the students and almost always the next employer. The bolder the speech, the safer the speaker, because the speech is not a commitment. It is a portfolio piece. It is evidence of thought leadership that travels well to the next role. The institution funds the platform. The leader builds the brand. The students fund the institution. The arithmetic is elegant and grotesque.

I watched the people I admired most do exactly this. The mentors who shaped my thinking, the leaders I modeled myself on, the elders who taught me what excellence in this field looked like. Most of them eventually left for the wealthier school, the consulting firm, the foundation, the board seat, the retirement that arrived with honors and a portrait in the hallway.

The institutions they left behind were no different than when they arrived. The speeches they gave on the way in were the speeches they gave on the way out. Nothing structural had changed. Their careers had advanced. The students they had spoken about had graduated, or had not, and had gone on to whatever lives the institution had or had not prepared them for. The leaders did not look back. The system did not require them to.

I came close to that path myself. More than once. I know how the offer sounds. I know how easy it is to tell yourself the next institution will be where you can really do the work, when the truth is the next institution is where the work will be easier and the brand will be better and the questions will be fewer. The pulpit and the exit ramp are the same architecture. I have stood on the pulpit. I know exactly where the ramp is.

The Accreditor’s Mirror

The same dynamic explains why the accreditation system functions as a preservation mechanism rather than an accountability one. The peer reviewer is, by definition, a peer. The provost who flies into your campus to evaluate your standards is the same provost protecting an identical handbook at their own institution. The faculty reviewer scrutinizing your curriculum is the same faculty member who would resist every one of these changes at home. The site visit is not an audit. It is a mutual non-aggression pact, conducted in the language of quality assurance.

And the people who staff these reviews, the reviewers and the agency professionals who manage the process, are themselves at the mercy of the commissioners who sit above them. Those commissioners are overwhelmingly drawn from the accredited institutions themselves. Federal rule requires a single public member for every seven seats, which means the outside voice is capped, by design, at a minority that can never outvote the peers.

The commission that sets the standards, hears the cases, and renders the verdicts is, in its decisive majority, composed of the very class of people the standards are meant to hold accountable. The staff administer a process whose direction is set by an insular body governing its own. It is not corruption. It is something harder to fix than corruption. It is a closed loop that has been told, by federal design, that it is the proper steward of its own accountability.

I have been on both sides of that visit. I have hosted the team and prepared the binders and walked them through the carefully staged narrative. I have served on review teams and accepted the binders of other institutions and signed off on findings I now understand were findings of conformity, not findings of quality. The cycle runs every seven or ten years. Areas of strength. Areas for improvement.

A recommendation to formalize what was already informal and document what was already done. The reviewer cannot demand of the host what the reviewer would not tolerate as the host. The standards drift toward the lowest common denominator of what the sector is already doing, and the agencies enforce conformity to that average and call it quality.

The reformers learn this fast. The institutions doing genuinely different work get flagged for being different. Their calendars get questioned. Their faculty models get questioned. Their credit structures get questioned. Their student support models get questioned. Not because the outcomes are worse, but because the outcomes are produced by a structure the peer reviewer does not recognize from their own campus.

The unfamiliar is treated as the unproven. The familiar is treated as the standard. The accreditor becomes the enforcement arm of the status quo, dressed in the vestments of quality, paid for by the institutions it polices, staffed by the very people whose habits define what counts as acceptable.

And the same leaders who preach transformation from the conference stage volunteer for these review teams. They list it on their CVs as service to the field. I listed it on mine. It is service to the field, but the field being served is the workforce, not the student. The reviewer travels home with another credential, another network connection, another line on the resume.

The institution under review files the report and changes nothing. Everyone is paid. Nothing improves. The cycle resets. And every one of us who served on those teams knew, at some level, what we were participating in. We just had no incentive to say it out loud, and a great many incentives not to.

The Villain Problem

Try to change any of this and watch what happens. You will not be debated. You will be diagnosed. You will be described as someone who does not understand the academy. You will be described as a corporate mind in a sacred space. You will be described as a threat to faculty governance, to academic freedom, to the soul of the institution. You will be described in faculty senate minutes, in anonymous letters to the board, in op-eds in the local paper, in coordinated social media posts, in accreditation complaints, in lawsuits, in whisper networks that move faster than any communication you control.

You will not be attacked for being wrong. You will be attacked for being effective. Wrong is easy to absorb. Wrong validates the existing system. Effective is the threat, because effective demonstrates that the things everyone said were impossible were never impossible. They were just inconvenient.

I have lived this. I am living it. I have watched colleagues across the sector live it. I have watched presidents driven out for moving too fast, which usually meant moving at all. I have watched trustees lose the stomach for the fight in year three of a five year transformation.

I have watched boards quietly tell new presidents to slow down, to build consensus, to bring people along, which is the polite way of saying do not actually change anything that would upset the people currently in the room. The reformer becomes the villain. The status quo becomes the victim. The student, again, is not in the conversation.

The hardest part is not the attack. The hardest part is that the attack comes from people you spent your career believing were your allies, using language you spent your career believing meant what it said. When you finally start to act on the mission, the people who taught you the mission turn on you. That is the moment you understand the mission was never the point. The vocabulary was the point. And the vocabulary belongs to the people who use it to keep the inversion intact.

The OPM Confession

And then there is the OPM disaster. I want to be precise here, because I am not clean on this and I will not pretend to be. We use an Online Program Manager relationship for recruitment at Unity but not the rest of the lifecycle or product/curriculum creation. I made that choice and I stand by it, because recruitment at scale is genuinely hard, and I would rather be honest about using a partner than sanctimonious about a purity I do not practice.

But recruitment is where it stops for us. We did not outsource the teaching. We did not outsource the course design. We did not outsource the student support. We did not hand over the academic core and keep the logo. That distinction is the entire argument - and a clear rationalization on my end.

Because the OPM industry, in its dominant form, exists because the academy refused to do its own work. That is the origin story of the model I am criticizing, not the narrow recruitment function. Institutions wanted online revenue without doing online operations.

They wanted digital scale without building digital capability. They wanted the money without the change. So they signed away fifty and sixty and seventy percent of tuition revenue to vendors who would do the work the institution was unwilling to do internally, which is to say, the actual work of educating students in the modality students were asking for.

This was not a strategy. It was an abdication dressed in a contract. The OPM model is what happens when an institution decides that protecting the comfort of its current workforce is more important than serving the students it claims to exist for. The vendor builds the courses the faculty refused to redesign.

The vendor handles the student support the staff refused to staff. And the institution keeps its self-image as a place of learning while quietly functioning as a brand licensor for a third party. The student pays full tuition for a product the institution did not build. The vendor takes most of it. The institution takes its cut for the use of the name. Everyone involved calls this innovation.

It is not innovation. It is the most expensive form of cowardice the sector has ever invented. And the same people who attack reformers for being too corporate are the people who created the conditions that made the OPM industry possible, because they refused to build internally what they were happy to rent externally.

I watched institutions I respected sign those deals. I watched leaders I had admired defend them publicly while privately admitting they were a mistake. The OPM industry is the inversion’s confession, written in revenue share agreements that no institution wants to publish.

And Now, Artificial Intelligence

If you want to watch the inversion happen in real time, instead of reconstructing it thirty years after the fact, watch how the sector has responded to artificial intelligence. This is the rare case where you do not have to take my word for the pattern. You can see it unfolding right now.

The most powerful general purpose technology in a generation arrives, a technology that is already reshaping the labor market every one of our students is about to enter, and the sector’s first question was not the student’s question. The first question was how do we stop them. How do we detect it. How do we ban it.

How do we preserve the essay, the exam, the assignment, the workload, the course design, the assessment model, all the machinery that the existing workforce was built around. The reflex was surveillance. The reflex was the plagiarism panic. The reflex was to treat a tool that students will be expected to master in every profession as a threat to be policed rather than a capability to be taught.

Ask yourself whose interest that reflex served. A student about to graduate into a labor market transformed by this technology has an obvious interest: learn to use it well, learn to think alongside it, learn what it cannot do and become excellent at exactly that.

The institution claiming to serve that student should have been redesigning the curriculum around that interest from the first month. Instead, the energy went into detection software, honor code revisions, and faculty workshops on catching cheaters. The student’s interest pointed toward transformation. The workforce’s interest pointed toward preservation. The sector chose preservation, and called it academic integrity.

I am not naive about the disruption. AI genuinely threatens a great deal of how the academy currently operates, and some of that threat is real and hard and deserves a serious response. But notice that the threat the sector mobilized fastest against was the threat to itself, not the threat to the student of graduating unprepared for the world as it now is.

When the institution’s interest and the student’s interest diverged, the institution moved first to protect the institution. That is the inversion. It is not a story I am telling you from memory. It is a story you can watch the sector write this year, in its own words, in its own policies, with the same moral vocabulary it always uses to make self-protection sound like principle.

The institutions that take AI seriously as a teaching obligation rather than a cheating problem will be doing it because they decided the student comes first. The institutions that lead with the ban are telling you, plainly, who they actually work for. Watch which is which. It is the clearest live diagnostic of the inversion you will ever get.

The Accountability Vacuum

Here is what unifies all of this. There is no accountability anywhere in the system. Faculty are accountable to peers who share their incentives. Staff are accountable to handbooks written by predecessors. Administrators are accountable to boards that meet four times a year.

Accreditors are accountable to the institutions that fund them. Consultants are accountable to the leaders who hire them. Search firms are accountable to the boards that pay them. The entire feedback loop is internal to the same small population of people who rotate through the same small set of roles, evaluating one another’s work using one another’s standards.

Students are not customers, the sector insists, which is true in some philosophical sense and convenient in every operational one. Because if students are not customers, then student dissatisfaction is not a signal that something is wrong. It is a signal that the student does not understand the value of what is being offered. The complaint becomes evidence of the student’s deficiency, not the institution’s. The outcome data, when it is bad, becomes evidence that the wrong students were admitted, not that the wrong education was delivered.

No other industry could survive this. No hospital could tell a patient that their poor outcome was a failure of patient mindset. No restaurant could tell a diner that their bad meal was a deficit of culinary appreciation. Only higher education has built a culture where the failure of the product is reframed as the failure of the consumer, and then sold that reframing back to the consumer as a tuition increase.

I know how this sounds from the inside, because I once was the inside, and before that I was the student it was done to. I came from a relatively low socioeconomic background, a densely populated port city, a family for whom a degree was not assumed.

The version of me that arrived in Maine in 1995 would not have understood a word of the language I later learned to speak fluently, the language that explains to a struggling student that the problem is the student. I learned that language. I spoke it. The young man who needed the acceptance letter would not have recognized the administrator who learned to justify the system that makes acceptance letters mean less every year.

A Word For The Schools This Does Not Describe

Let me be fair to the institutions this does not describe. The most elite, most heavily endowed universities in the country will not recognize themselves in any of this, and they are right not to. They were never built for access. They were built for selection. They exist to admit the few and confer the signal, and they perform that function exactly as designed.

I hold no grievance against them for it. But precisely because access was never their purpose, they cannot be the model for the institutions whose purpose it is. The sector spends enormous energy imitating the prestige of schools that solve a completely different problem, while neglecting the schools that carry the actual weight of educating most of the country. The aspiration is always upward, toward exclusivity, when the need is the opposite.

And let me be clear that we are not alone in this. Across the country there are institutions carrying the same weight, fighting the same headwinds, redesigning themselves the hard way because they refuse to keep the promise only on paper. I hope what I say here speaks for them too, because the work belongs to all of us who still believe the door was meant to lead somewhere.

And this is where the nation has to be honest with itself about something larger. In 1965, the Higher Education Act made a promise. It said the door to a degree, and the mobility a degree confers, would be opened to anyone, regardless of wealth or origin. The federal government would fund it. The institutions would deliver it. I am living proof of what that promise could do, because some version of it carried me from West Africa to a campus in Maine and changed my life. I do not say what comes next lightly. That experiment, as the sector chose to run it, failed. Not because the promise was wrong.

The promise was the most important educational commitment this country ever made. It failed because the institutions took the federal money and the moral mandate and declined to do the hard part, which was to redesign themselves to actually serve the people the promise was meant for.

We expanded access to the front door and changed nothing about the building behind it. We let new students in and handed them a structure built for someone else, then blamed them when it did not fit. The dream was kept on paper and broken in practice, and we have spent decades calling the paper a success.

The Den of Lies

Stack it all together and you do not have a sector with problems. You have a sector built on a structural lie. The lie is that the people inside the institution are aligned with the students the institution serves. They are not. They are aligned with each other, with their contracts, with their schedules, with their tenure clocks, with their committee assignments, with their conference invitations, with their consulting side gigs, with their peer review appointments, with their next job at a wealthier school, with the social capital they have accumulated inside a system that rewards longevity over outcomes.

This is not, primarily, a moral failing of individuals. Most of the people inside higher education are decent, hardworking, and well intentioned. I worked alongside them for thirty years. I am one of them. The failing is structural. The system selects for compliance with the system. It promotes those who defend it and exiles those who question it. It rewards those who speak reform while avoiding it and punishes those who execute reform without speaking it artfully enough.

It mistakes the protection of its own habits for the protection of its mission. It has confused the preservation of the workforce with the service of the student. And it has done this for so long that the people inside it cannot see it anymore, because seeing it would require admitting that the work they have been doing was not the work they thought they were doing.

That was the hardest sentence in this essay to write. Because it is true of me. The work I was doing was not the work I thought I was doing. I was inside the inversion. I defended it. I was rewarded for defending it. I rose through the ranks of an industry whose actual function I could not see, because the language I had been given to describe my work was the language the industry used to hide its actual function from itself.

That is the den of lies. Not a conspiracy. A consensus. I lived inside it for most of my career. I am writing this because I no longer can.

I Am Not Writing This On My Way Out

Almost everyone who writes this kind of essay writes it from the exit. The Chronicle of Higher Education is full of these pieces. The retired president who finally says what he really thought. The provost who waited until the pension cleared. The dean emeritus who tells the truth from the safety of a title that ends in the past tense. They wait until they have nothing left to lose, and then they call their caution wisdom. I understand the impulse. I have felt it. The difference is that I have decided not to obey it.

I am writing this while I still hold the job. I am writing this while Unity is in its prime and still growing. I am not settling a score on my way out the door, because I am not going out the door. I am proud of where I work. I am proud of what we have built. I believe in the people who built it with me. This is not the lament of someone the sector chewed up and spit out. It is the testimony of someone the sector cannot dismiss as bitter, because by every metric the sector claims to value, the work is succeeding.

That is precisely why I am saying it now. The retirement confession is safe, and safety is what makes it useless. It arrives too late to cost the author anything and too late to help anyone still inside. It becomes a memoir instead of a warning. I do not want to write a memoir. I want the presidents who are in the fight right now, the ones being told to slow down, to build consensus, to stop upsetting the people in the room, to know that someone is saying this out loud while it still matters, while there is still something on the line. I am here. I am successful. I am not finished. And I am tired of watching the sector treat institutions like Unity, and the many other colleges quietly doing their best, as anomalies to be explained away rather than examples to be learned from.

I am not disappointed in the students. I am not disappointed in the people doing the work. I am disappointed in an industry that had every chance to learn from the institutions proving a better way was possible, and chose instead to look past them. So I am going to say it plainly, on the record, with my name on it and my job still attached.

What Comes Next

I am not writing this from outside the sector. I am writing this from inside the institution that has spent the last decade doing the opposite of everything described above. At Unity Environmental University we rebuilt the calendar. We rebuilt the faculty model. We rebuilt the credit structure.

We rebuilt the operating cadence. We did not outsource our academic core to an OPM. We built our own capability, hired our own people, owned our own outcomes. We grew from under 600 students to more than 10,000 while most of the small private sector contracted, not because we are smarter, but because we were willing to do the work the sector spent forty years refusing to do.

I did not arrive at Unity already seeing what I now see. I arrived at Unity still inside the inversion. The seeing came slowly, painfully, and against my own resistance. It came because the work itself, the actual work of building an institution around students instead of around its workforce, forced me to confront the gap between the language I had inherited and the reality I was now responsible for.

You cannot rebuild a calendar around student need without realizing how much of the old calendar had nothing to do with students. You cannot redesign a faculty model around student outcomes without realizing how much of the old model had nothing to do with outcomes. The work teaches you what the work was hiding. There is no other way to learn it.

The path forward is not complicated. Stop pretending the contract is the mission. Stop letting the schedule design the institution. Stop hiring people whose first loyalty is to a handbook. Stop treating reformers as threats and treating the status quo as sacred. Stop renting your academic core to vendors who do not share your mission. Stop staffing your accreditation visits with peers who share your blind spots.

Stop confusing the conference speech with the work. Start measuring what students experience, not what employees prefer. Start being accountable to outcomes, not to processes. Start telling the truth about what the work actually requires.

The sector will not do this voluntarily. It will be forced to, by demographics, by economics, by technology, by the simple fact that students have alternatives now and are exercising them. The institutions that survive the next decade will be the ones that stopped lying first. Everyone else will keep performing the mission until the lights go out, which they will, sooner than the sector believes.

I will continue to do my best to make Unity a professional organization built around the people it serves, and to make our model a doorway to education rather than a gate around it. The leaders of this industry carefully sidestep us. They quote us privately and avoid us publicly. They study what we built and decline to say our name. I will keep honoring the accomplished faculty, staff, and board members who joined me over these last ten years to fight a good fight and refused to succumb to the inversion I have described.

For years we were dismissed as irrelevant. That was tolerable to the sector, because irrelevance is not a threat. Now we are a threat, and the treatment has changed accordingly. That is the villain reveal in its simplest form. You are ignored until you work, and attacked the moment you do. The next ten years will decide which story we become.

Either Unity is a model of the future, or the curated language of the keepers of the past succeeds in erasing us, and we become a cautionary tale told to everyone who dares to change the sector and put students first. I do not know which it will be. I know which one I am going to spend the rest of my career fighting for.

I think often about the acceptance letter. About the person I was when I opened it, who believed without reservation that this institution and this sector existed to do exactly what it said it would do for someone like him. That person was not naive. He was right about what higher education could be. He was only wrong about whether the people inside it still remembered. I have spent thirty years becoming one of those people, and I am writing this to become, again, the person who opened the letter. I owe him that. I owe every student who is still waiting for theirs to mean what mine meant.

I am publishing this knowing what it costs. I have been told, by people who care about me, that writing this will end my career. They may be right. I have decided I would rather end a career inside a lie than extend one. If thirty years inside this industry has taught me anything, it is that the elders who knew and stayed silent did more damage than the critics who spoke and were exiled. The students deserved better. They always did. I owed them this, thirty years late, and I am sorry it took me this long to say it out loud.

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