Lots of truth to this. But faculty are right to distrust presidents and VPs who use strategic planning for portfolio building. I think faculty, especially at smaller institutions, should be seen alongside the exploited student. These are people who sacrificed a decade of industry earnings to become experts, often with the intent of serving students. But then they find themselves at institutions that don't explicitly value their expertise and want them instead to serve the lie -- while working for stagnant pay. So no wonder they get a little turf-bound and protective. That mindset does come at the cost of prioritizing students sometimes, but can faculty really do that when the institution doesn't have their best interests at heart either?
I wrote about the lie a few years ago using Vaclav Havel as a touchstone.
The sad fact is that if you look deep enough, we can spend the next generation blaming each other instead of realizing that we are within a system that was never designed for scale. I tried to touch that on an earlier piece I wrote. Which simply defined is to ask the question if education was ever designed to be an industry or not, and then have the argument using that lens. The answers would be different.
We agree. Higher ed needs to reclaim its birthright, which is truth seeking. Faculty find themselves caught in a trap. They were trained to become a world expert in their field, but their institutions rarely value their real expertise. It’s one of many reasons I chose to leave.
Thank you for this. I am currently working on a different aspect of the issue, as I have for decades, trying to figure out the best argument for the liberal arts. And I have come to a related conclusion. The never-ending, maddeningly-repetitive crisis in the humanities--ongoing for at least four decades--always leads us back to the same data points: undergraduate majors and faculty hires. When those numbers fall, we panic. When they rise, we feel ourselves arguing from a position of strength. But neither response makes any real sense because those data points only monitor bureaucratic concerns. They monitor the way the system is running, but they do not monitor the education we provide...the quality of the course offerings, the access to new ideas, the way we cobble together a well-rounded experience, the very reasons we care about higher ed in the first place. Everything that really matters over the long haul--if we agree that institutions and procedures and even departments come and go--everything of lasting value is overshadowed by the bureaucracy--which, as you suggest, is too often confused with its educational purpose. No wonder no one is quite sure what the humanities are about in 2026, or why a liberal arts education continues to matter. We keep focusing on the trappings, rather than the substance of what we do.
I agree with some of the arguments but have bones to pick with the way the university is compared to other institutions.
"Hospitals exist for patients. Restaurants exist for diners. Law firms exist for clients. Manufacturers exist for customers. [...] Higher education inverted this. The institution exists for the workforce.
Later, you say:
"I have watched leaders deliver passionate keynotes about access and then quietly approve policies that priced out the exact students the keynote described."
All of the examples you used are also guilty of this. Surely no restaurant chain lies about fresh ingredients, no manufacturer cuts corners to widen margins, and no hospital kicks patients to the curb because they need a free bed.
Hospitals are a special case because they do truly care but are caught between a rock and a hard place– forced to make difficult decisions about cost and service. The university is no different. I think what you're trying to describe in this piece is that unlike all the other industries mentioned, university employees actually have many protections which allow for significantly less precarity. (Except for, of course, adjuncts, temporary employees, and those on visas.)
There is real harm that comes from tenured professors and dusty administrators refusing to change the way they work even as the world around them is being reinvented. I believe that's because higher education needs, to some degree (pun intended), to move slowly in order for the education that takes place within its walls to be consistent, reliable, and authoritative.
"The unfamiliar is treated as the unproven. The familiar is treated as the standard."
This line is just silly because you're trying to make it sound like the unfamiliar is proven, when it isn't, and that the familiar isn't standard, which it is! A more difficult problem to tackle is how universities can embrace the unproven and non-standard without sacrificing the rigor of their pedagogy.
I also wish you had even a modicum of skepticism about AI you have for the university. You write the following in response to educators initially working hard to identify and ban AI from student work:
"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."
There's so much to dive into here I'm not sure where to start.
- plagiarism is plagiarism; if a student was not explicitly allowed to use AI but did nonetheless, that's plagiarism
- AI use by students happened at a sickening pace with the release of gpt; universities needed time to figure out how to adapt.
- figuring out how to use AI well in the context of learning is really complex; we still do not have a consensus on best practices and yet you're is mad the university wasn't ready when gpt was first released?
- how do you know what the future of AI in the workplace will be?; most technologists I've heard speak about the the future of labor say that the AI use 10-20 years from now will be unrecognizable from how AI is used today. Are we supposed to drop all tradition, all research, all methodology just to serve new tech releases? Remember the metaverse??
- becoming excellent at what AI cannot do is not enough; student need full, holistic education in order to be adaptable to change.
In general, you pick up on gripes that could easily be identified by almost anyone who has worked in higher ed for just a few years, and offer very little in terms of nuanced, practical, and productive thought for how things should be different.
Thank you for taking the time to read the piece so carefully and for writing such a thoughtful critique. I genuinely appreciate the engagement because these are exactly the conversations worth having.
I actually agree with more of your points than you might think. One article cannot carry thirty years of experience or the full set of arguments I have made across dozens of essays. Some of the nuance you are looking for, particularly around AI, academic rigor, governance, and the pace of institutional change, is explored much more deeply in other pieces. This article was intentionally focused on a narrower question.
I also want to acknowledge something important. What I wrote is not an abstract theory for me. It is my lived experience. I entered higher education as a first generation student whose life was transformed by it, and I have spent three decades leading institutions from the inside. The observations come from that vantage point. Others will have different experiences, and I respect that.
On your broader point about hospitals, manufacturers, and restaurants, I agree that every sector struggles with balancing mission, economics, and human realities. My argument was never that higher education is uniquely imperfect. It is that higher education too often explains away behaviors that would be recognized as misalignment in almost any other mission driven enterprise.
On AI, I do not think skepticism is the enemy. Blind enthusiasm is just as dangerous as blind resistance. My concern has never been that universities took time to develop policy. My concern is that too many institutions treated prohibition as the strategy rather than adaptation. Those are different things.
Finally, I would push back gently on one point. My goal is not to provide a detailed implementation manual in every essay. Sometimes the role of writing is to surface a tension worth wrestling with. Other pieces focus much more heavily on practical models and solutions because I agree that criticism without alternatives is ultimately unhelpful.
Thank you again for the thoughtful response. Even where we disagree, conversations like this are far more valuable than the easy applause that often surrounds topics like these.
Thank you for publishing the original piece. I think it does cover a lot of fertile ground in terms of problems that higher ed keeps SAYING they are trying to fix but never actually following through on those promises.
You have more experience in this area than I, so I would genuinely like to see individuals like yourself tackle the question I mentioned in my reply: "how universities can embrace the unproven and non-standard without sacrificing the rigor of their pedagogy." Most colleagues I have cannot even define what "innovation" means in the context of higher ed. Even fewer are willing to do the work of renovating the foundation of the university to allow more modular and agile program development.
Thanks, Aleksandr. I appreciate the thoughtful question.
I hesitate to speak for higher education as a whole because every institution has different constraints, leadership, governance, and appetite for change. I can only speak from what we've tried to build at Unity, which you can read in both my Substack and LinkedIn pieces.
One lesson we've learned is that rigor and reinvention are not opposing forces. They only become opposites when assessment is tied to tradition instead of outcomes. In our enterprise model, we deliberately separated learning from assessment. Learners can experience different instructional approaches, but the standards remain anchored to clearly defined program and course outcomes. That allows experimentation without lowering the academic bar.
If you're interested, this article goes into that philosophy in more detail
Whether others choose the same path is up to them, but I do think the conversation has to move beyond asking whether change is possible and toward asking how to redesign institutions so rigor and adaptability reinforce each other rather than compete.
I happened to grow up in Maine, became a first generation college student, and then ended up (somehow) in an academic career. My wife came to the U.S. for graduate education, stayed, and did the same. So your essay struck me as especially relevant.
I have long thought that the actual incentives that exist in higher ed are not being considered when reform is sought. The circular motivations do not serve either the students or the industry.
Agreed, it was a noble design for a time when it was fully funded, and that design was never reimagined. There are no villains in this story, that is the true sad part just a system that was never designed to do what we thought it should do.
I agree with the content you present here, but I think it's a bit dramatic to say that you will be punished over it or that it will somehow end your career. Many of us insiders have been saying these same things for decades, especially about the big public universities we work for (or worked for in my case). Undergraduate tuition dollars fund operations, but the operations are hardly geared toward undergraduate students! The system is all of what you say it is at places like that, but that's not new. I have said this for decades. And as I said it, and the more I said it, the more I drew people to me who cared and who wanted to make a change. It seems like you have done the same, no?
I have not read your piece on "scaling" education, but I would have to agree that a strong educational system that aims to provide opportunities for social mobility is not going to happen in a big scale. If you run a school like a school and not like an engine of prestige, a football program, or a research company, you'll actually have a school. I think there are lots of schools doing this where there is a high level of commitment to students and a low level of commitment to the "inversion" you elucidate - an inversion that is very real and that I have seen in action. But we tend not to be good at making headlines or drawing the ire of people in congress. That's because we are spending our time actually doing the work.
Thank you for this. It means something to hear it from someone who has carried the same truth for decades and kept doing the work.
You are right that none of this is new, and you are right to push on the word punished. Maybe it is fairer to say the cost is quieter than a firing. It shows up as doors that do not open, invitations that stop coming, and the slow sorting of who gets called serious. Plenty of people pay that price without ever losing a title. But your point stands. The ones who say it out loud also tend to find each other, and that is worth more than the cost.
And yes, exactly your last point. Run a school like a school and you have a school. The places doing this rarely make headlines, because making headlines was never the work. I would rather be one of the quiet ones doing it than loud and hollow. Thank you for naming that so plainly.
I know it does have a cost to miss out on the invitations and to get sorted out of "serious." But from my point of view you should wear it like a badge of honor. Unity is doing it right and showing up for students. And you played a major part in making that really take off. That's what really matters. The rest of that stuff is just noise anyway.
An outstanding essay. The only part I would dispute is the claim that there is no accountability. There is always accountability to oneself, if nothing else. This essay seems to have been born from exactly that, and you have my sincere respect for taking this step. I hope it becomes a rallying cry for others to hold themselves to the same standard.
A few months ago, a department head blocked me after I told him the market would force the changes universities wouldn't make on their own. The arguments he made beforehand were the very ones you name in the cover story. He wasn't a bad person, and he seemed to have a firm grasp of his job and his responsibilities. His fervor for serving students struck me as genuine, but the inversion was so complete that he couldn't see the fallacy in his own words.
I've always stood outside the ivory tower, looking in, trying to find the missing pieces that would explain an obviously broken machine. I told myself there had to be a reason for the inaction beyond plain stubbornness and the usual resistance to change in a mature industry. Thank you for putting a name to some of those reasons, disheartening as they are.
Thank you. This is the kind of reading that makes the writing worth it.
You caught something I should have said more carefully. You are right that there is always accountability to oneself, and that is exactly the point I was circling without landing on. What I meant is that the external structures of accountability have mostly fallen away. No market discipline, no real consequence from above, no reckoning that arrives on its own. What is left is the internal kind, the standard you hold yourself to when no one is forcing it. That is harder, and rarer, and it is the only kind that still works. So I will take the correction gladly. It makes the argument truer.
The department head you describe is the whole thing in one person. Sincere, capable, genuinely devoted to students, and unable to see the inversion because he was standing inside it. That is what makes this so hard to name. The people sustaining it are rarely villains. They are good people who cannot see the water they swim in. Naming the reasons does not fix that, but it gives the next person something to point at. I am grateful you have been standing outside the tower long enough to see the shape of the machine. That vantage is worth more than you might think.
Lots of truth to this. But faculty are right to distrust presidents and VPs who use strategic planning for portfolio building. I think faculty, especially at smaller institutions, should be seen alongside the exploited student. These are people who sacrificed a decade of industry earnings to become experts, often with the intent of serving students. But then they find themselves at institutions that don't explicitly value their expertise and want them instead to serve the lie -- while working for stagnant pay. So no wonder they get a little turf-bound and protective. That mindset does come at the cost of prioritizing students sometimes, but can faculty really do that when the institution doesn't have their best interests at heart either?
I wrote about the lie a few years ago using Vaclav Havel as a touchstone.
https://joshuadolezal.substack.com/p/academe-is-suffering-from-foreign
The sad fact is that if you look deep enough, we can spend the next generation blaming each other instead of realizing that we are within a system that was never designed for scale. I tried to touch that on an earlier piece I wrote. Which simply defined is to ask the question if education was ever designed to be an industry or not, and then have the argument using that lens. The answers would be different.
https://melikpeterkhoury.substack.com/p/education-was-never-an-industry-that?r=52n3nw&utm_medium=ios
We agree. Higher ed needs to reclaim its birthright, which is truth seeking. Faculty find themselves caught in a trap. They were trained to become a world expert in their field, but their institutions rarely value their real expertise. It’s one of many reasons I chose to leave.
Thank you for this. I am currently working on a different aspect of the issue, as I have for decades, trying to figure out the best argument for the liberal arts. And I have come to a related conclusion. The never-ending, maddeningly-repetitive crisis in the humanities--ongoing for at least four decades--always leads us back to the same data points: undergraduate majors and faculty hires. When those numbers fall, we panic. When they rise, we feel ourselves arguing from a position of strength. But neither response makes any real sense because those data points only monitor bureaucratic concerns. They monitor the way the system is running, but they do not monitor the education we provide...the quality of the course offerings, the access to new ideas, the way we cobble together a well-rounded experience, the very reasons we care about higher ed in the first place. Everything that really matters over the long haul--if we agree that institutions and procedures and even departments come and go--everything of lasting value is overshadowed by the bureaucracy--which, as you suggest, is too often confused with its educational purpose. No wonder no one is quite sure what the humanities are about in 2026, or why a liberal arts education continues to matter. We keep focusing on the trappings, rather than the substance of what we do.
I agree with some of the arguments but have bones to pick with the way the university is compared to other institutions.
"Hospitals exist for patients. Restaurants exist for diners. Law firms exist for clients. Manufacturers exist for customers. [...] Higher education inverted this. The institution exists for the workforce.
Later, you say:
"I have watched leaders deliver passionate keynotes about access and then quietly approve policies that priced out the exact students the keynote described."
All of the examples you used are also guilty of this. Surely no restaurant chain lies about fresh ingredients, no manufacturer cuts corners to widen margins, and no hospital kicks patients to the curb because they need a free bed.
Hospitals are a special case because they do truly care but are caught between a rock and a hard place– forced to make difficult decisions about cost and service. The university is no different. I think what you're trying to describe in this piece is that unlike all the other industries mentioned, university employees actually have many protections which allow for significantly less precarity. (Except for, of course, adjuncts, temporary employees, and those on visas.)
There is real harm that comes from tenured professors and dusty administrators refusing to change the way they work even as the world around them is being reinvented. I believe that's because higher education needs, to some degree (pun intended), to move slowly in order for the education that takes place within its walls to be consistent, reliable, and authoritative.
"The unfamiliar is treated as the unproven. The familiar is treated as the standard."
This line is just silly because you're trying to make it sound like the unfamiliar is proven, when it isn't, and that the familiar isn't standard, which it is! A more difficult problem to tackle is how universities can embrace the unproven and non-standard without sacrificing the rigor of their pedagogy.
I also wish you had even a modicum of skepticism about AI you have for the university. You write the following in response to educators initially working hard to identify and ban AI from student work:
"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."
There's so much to dive into here I'm not sure where to start.
- plagiarism is plagiarism; if a student was not explicitly allowed to use AI but did nonetheless, that's plagiarism
- AI use by students happened at a sickening pace with the release of gpt; universities needed time to figure out how to adapt.
- figuring out how to use AI well in the context of learning is really complex; we still do not have a consensus on best practices and yet you're is mad the university wasn't ready when gpt was first released?
- how do you know what the future of AI in the workplace will be?; most technologists I've heard speak about the the future of labor say that the AI use 10-20 years from now will be unrecognizable from how AI is used today. Are we supposed to drop all tradition, all research, all methodology just to serve new tech releases? Remember the metaverse??
- becoming excellent at what AI cannot do is not enough; student need full, holistic education in order to be adaptable to change.
In general, you pick up on gripes that could easily be identified by almost anyone who has worked in higher ed for just a few years, and offer very little in terms of nuanced, practical, and productive thought for how things should be different.
Thank you for taking the time to read the piece so carefully and for writing such a thoughtful critique. I genuinely appreciate the engagement because these are exactly the conversations worth having.
I actually agree with more of your points than you might think. One article cannot carry thirty years of experience or the full set of arguments I have made across dozens of essays. Some of the nuance you are looking for, particularly around AI, academic rigor, governance, and the pace of institutional change, is explored much more deeply in other pieces. This article was intentionally focused on a narrower question.
I also want to acknowledge something important. What I wrote is not an abstract theory for me. It is my lived experience. I entered higher education as a first generation student whose life was transformed by it, and I have spent three decades leading institutions from the inside. The observations come from that vantage point. Others will have different experiences, and I respect that.
On your broader point about hospitals, manufacturers, and restaurants, I agree that every sector struggles with balancing mission, economics, and human realities. My argument was never that higher education is uniquely imperfect. It is that higher education too often explains away behaviors that would be recognized as misalignment in almost any other mission driven enterprise.
On AI, I do not think skepticism is the enemy. Blind enthusiasm is just as dangerous as blind resistance. My concern has never been that universities took time to develop policy. My concern is that too many institutions treated prohibition as the strategy rather than adaptation. Those are different things.
Finally, I would push back gently on one point. My goal is not to provide a detailed implementation manual in every essay. Sometimes the role of writing is to surface a tension worth wrestling with. Other pieces focus much more heavily on practical models and solutions because I agree that criticism without alternatives is ultimately unhelpful.
Thank you again for the thoughtful response. Even where we disagree, conversations like this are far more valuable than the easy applause that often surrounds topics like these.
Thank you for publishing the original piece. I think it does cover a lot of fertile ground in terms of problems that higher ed keeps SAYING they are trying to fix but never actually following through on those promises.
You have more experience in this area than I, so I would genuinely like to see individuals like yourself tackle the question I mentioned in my reply: "how universities can embrace the unproven and non-standard without sacrificing the rigor of their pedagogy." Most colleagues I have cannot even define what "innovation" means in the context of higher ed. Even fewer are willing to do the work of renovating the foundation of the university to allow more modular and agile program development.
Thanks, Aleksandr. I appreciate the thoughtful question.
I hesitate to speak for higher education as a whole because every institution has different constraints, leadership, governance, and appetite for change. I can only speak from what we've tried to build at Unity, which you can read in both my Substack and LinkedIn pieces.
One lesson we've learned is that rigor and reinvention are not opposing forces. They only become opposites when assessment is tied to tradition instead of outcomes. In our enterprise model, we deliberately separated learning from assessment. Learners can experience different instructional approaches, but the standards remain anchored to clearly defined program and course outcomes. That allows experimentation without lowering the academic bar.
If you're interested, this article goes into that philosophy in more detail
[Reimagining the Academy, Unity Environmental University on Breaking the Higher Ed Mold] https://acops.com/articles/reimagining-the-academy-unity-environmental-university-on-breaking-the-higher-ed-mold
And this short video gives a quick overview of how we restructured the model
[Enterprise Model Overview Video](https://youtu.be/0beNeWjevj8?si=kEnYDF_eMa6hCVWi&utm_source=chatgpt.com)
Whether others choose the same path is up to them, but I do think the conversation has to move beyond asking whether change is possible and toward asking how to redesign institutions so rigor and adaptability reinforce each other rather than compete.
Sir, courageous and 100% true! I applaud you for going public.
Brilliant. I have more than twenty-five years in academia, primarily as a faculty member, and I see the same thing. I had a similar take on system failure here: https://chadraymond.substack.com/p/the-university-a-total-institution.
Thanks for sharing. I will give it a read
I happened to grow up in Maine, became a first generation college student, and then ended up (somehow) in an academic career. My wife came to the U.S. for graduate education, stayed, and did the same. So your essay struck me as especially relevant.
I have long thought that the actual incentives that exist in higher ed are not being considered when reform is sought. The circular motivations do not serve either the students or the industry.
Agreed, it was a noble design for a time when it was fully funded, and that design was never reimagined. There are no villains in this story, that is the true sad part just a system that was never designed to do what we thought it should do.
I agree with the content you present here, but I think it's a bit dramatic to say that you will be punished over it or that it will somehow end your career. Many of us insiders have been saying these same things for decades, especially about the big public universities we work for (or worked for in my case). Undergraduate tuition dollars fund operations, but the operations are hardly geared toward undergraduate students! The system is all of what you say it is at places like that, but that's not new. I have said this for decades. And as I said it, and the more I said it, the more I drew people to me who cared and who wanted to make a change. It seems like you have done the same, no?
I have not read your piece on "scaling" education, but I would have to agree that a strong educational system that aims to provide opportunities for social mobility is not going to happen in a big scale. If you run a school like a school and not like an engine of prestige, a football program, or a research company, you'll actually have a school. I think there are lots of schools doing this where there is a high level of commitment to students and a low level of commitment to the "inversion" you elucidate - an inversion that is very real and that I have seen in action. But we tend not to be good at making headlines or drawing the ire of people in congress. That's because we are spending our time actually doing the work.
Thank you for this. It means something to hear it from someone who has carried the same truth for decades and kept doing the work.
You are right that none of this is new, and you are right to push on the word punished. Maybe it is fairer to say the cost is quieter than a firing. It shows up as doors that do not open, invitations that stop coming, and the slow sorting of who gets called serious. Plenty of people pay that price without ever losing a title. But your point stands. The ones who say it out loud also tend to find each other, and that is worth more than the cost.
And yes, exactly your last point. Run a school like a school and you have a school. The places doing this rarely make headlines, because making headlines was never the work. I would rather be one of the quiet ones doing it than loud and hollow. Thank you for naming that so plainly.
I know it does have a cost to miss out on the invitations and to get sorted out of "serious." But from my point of view you should wear it like a badge of honor. Unity is doing it right and showing up for students. And you played a major part in making that really take off. That's what really matters. The rest of that stuff is just noise anyway.
Agreed .. Thank you!
An outstanding essay. The only part I would dispute is the claim that there is no accountability. There is always accountability to oneself, if nothing else. This essay seems to have been born from exactly that, and you have my sincere respect for taking this step. I hope it becomes a rallying cry for others to hold themselves to the same standard.
A few months ago, a department head blocked me after I told him the market would force the changes universities wouldn't make on their own. The arguments he made beforehand were the very ones you name in the cover story. He wasn't a bad person, and he seemed to have a firm grasp of his job and his responsibilities. His fervor for serving students struck me as genuine, but the inversion was so complete that he couldn't see the fallacy in his own words.
I've always stood outside the ivory tower, looking in, trying to find the missing pieces that would explain an obviously broken machine. I told myself there had to be a reason for the inaction beyond plain stubbornness and the usual resistance to change in a mature industry. Thank you for putting a name to some of those reasons, disheartening as they are.
Thank you. This is the kind of reading that makes the writing worth it.
You caught something I should have said more carefully. You are right that there is always accountability to oneself, and that is exactly the point I was circling without landing on. What I meant is that the external structures of accountability have mostly fallen away. No market discipline, no real consequence from above, no reckoning that arrives on its own. What is left is the internal kind, the standard you hold yourself to when no one is forcing it. That is harder, and rarer, and it is the only kind that still works. So I will take the correction gladly. It makes the argument truer.
The department head you describe is the whole thing in one person. Sincere, capable, genuinely devoted to students, and unable to see the inversion because he was standing inside it. That is what makes this so hard to name. The people sustaining it are rarely villains. They are good people who cannot see the water they swim in. Naming the reasons does not fix that, but it gives the next person something to point at. I am grateful you have been standing outside the tower long enough to see the shape of the machine. That vantage is worth more than you might think.