Higher ed has 99 problems — and the New York Times is one

Over the past few years, a certain class of nominally centrist white op-ed writers have poured forth vast gouts of ink attacking anti-racist progressive college students. As I’ve argued repeatedly, this vast array of coverage sends the message that sometimes un-nuanced critiques from left-wing students soars among the greatest problems facing American academe today.

But as the song goes, it ain’t necessarily so.

One of the latest examples came this week from New York Times op-ed writer and commissioning editor Bari Weiss. The piece is bizarre and sloppy. She uses a fake Antifa troll account as an example of “PC-run-amok” from students, which prompted a Times editor's note and update to the story. She suggests that University of Chicago students should have protested Rick Santorum over complaining to Dan Savage about his use of anti-transgender slurs (as if she wouldn’t have then complained about snowflake students protesting Santorum). She ignores the complex history of author Christina Hoff Sommers, including her appearance on a white supremacist podcast and her support for Gamergate, and simply calls her a “self-identified feminist and registered Democrat.” Weiss then attacks students at Lewis & Clark for calling her a fascist. You’d never know from Weiss that Sommers in fact was not de-platformed but gave her talk and answered questions.

And then David Brooks struck again, deploying his “not-mad-just-disappointed” dad voice to gently chide “kids these days” for valuing perspective (and identity) over reason and caring about structural inequality. Bizarrely, he dates this shift from rational Enlightenment values to identity politics to the failure of Barack Obama to end racism. Clearly, in this era of global chaos, nothing deserves two op-eds at the paper of record more than students at an elite university being rude to Christina Hoff Sommers.

Here’s the worst part. The focus on “PC-run-amok” is working. As a former professor and current academic advisor, I encounter people outside academe who constantly bring up left-wing protests as their major concern. They’ve read about it, after all, in The New York Times! To be sure, sometimes college students conflate the merely bad (i.e. Charles Murray, the phrenologist) with the truly terrible (i.e. Nazis). Students can be uncivil. Protesters can, it turns out, protest. Alas, either by intention or by accident, the centrist focus on these protesters fuels the broader right-wing assault on the very ideas of the university, academic freedom and the need to educate future citizens.

So before we see yet another high profile column on snowflake students or campus political correctness, I have assembled a list of some other problems facing higher education, to which very serious centrist pundits might consider drawing the attention of their readers. Because academia has at least 99 problems.

99 Problems Facing Higher Education more significant than left-wing students being a little rude sometimes (not wholly in order of importance):

1. Tuition
2. Student Loan Debt
3. Housing Costs
4. Hunger
5. Exploitation of Adjuncts
6. End of Tenure
7. Homelessness
8. Alcohol Abuse
9. Rape
10. Rape Culture
11. Sexual Abuse of Students
12. Sexual Abuse of Faculty
13. Domestic Violence on Campus
14. Soaring Administrative Costs
15. Racism
16. Sexism
17. Ableism
18. Nazis on Campus with Guns
19. Nazi Recruitment on Campus
20. Prejudice in Academic Hiring
21. Textbooks
22. Especially Math and Science Textbooks
23. Predatory Lenders
24. Department of Education Defense of Predatory Lenders
25. Predatory For-Profit Colleges
26. Department of Education Defense of Predatory Colleges
27. Betsy DeVos
28. Scott Walker
29. Defunding the Humanities
30. Legislators Censoring Professors
31. Legislators Firing Professors
32. Social Media Censorship
33. Social Media Harassment
34. Specifically Racist and Misogynistic Intersecting Harassment
35. ICE
36. Lack of Support for Dreamers
37. Undergraduate Business Degrees
38. Accessibility
39. Especially in Housing
40. Lack of Mental Health Supports
41. Laptop Bans
42. EdTech Companies
43. Surveillance Pedagogy
44. Racist Professors
45. Racist Mascots
46. Corrupt Sports
47. Brain-Damaging Sports
48. Rape and College Sports
49. Graduation Rates in College Sports
50. Joe Paterno Fans
51. Larry Nassar Enablers
52. NCAA Comparing Athletes to Prison Labor
53. University of Chicago’s Economics Department
54. Charlie Kirk
55. Tucker Carlson
56. Campus Shootings
57. Conceal Carry on Campus
58. Attacks on Affirmative Action
59. Metrics
60. Assessment
61. Student Evaluations (When Used for Tenure)
62. Accreditation
63. Elsevier
64. Predatory Journals
65. Open Access Fees
66. Academia.edu
67. The REF
68. The TEF
69. Library Budget Cuts
70. Cuts to Basic Science
71. Brilliant Academics Leaving
72. The Postdoc Crisis
73. Big Data
74. Service Loads for Associate Professors (Especially Women)
75. Bad Advising
76. Police Brutality
77. Outside Offers
78. Closing Colleges
79. Right-Wing Indoctrination
80. First-Generation Students Struggling
81. Rural Students Struggling
82. Bad Donors
83. Especially the Koch Brothers
84. Collapse of Public Funding
85. Deferred Maintenance
86. Hazing
87. Staff Excluded from Academic Freedom
88. No Child Left Behind
89. Overly litigious students
90. Censoring Environmental Research
91. Censoring Gun Research
92. Attacks on the NEH, NEA, NIH
93. In-Class Tests
94. Plagiarism and Online Essay Sales
95. Legacy Admissions
96. The Prestige Economy
97. Academics Who Over-Use Reply-All
98. Meetings that Should Be Emails
99. New York Times Op-Ed columnists who write a lot about left-wing students but rarely about the other 98 items on this list.