Ten Secrets to Academic Success | Fighting Educational Malpractice Institutionally: A Consumer Rights Issue

Others in the series:

#1: Remember Why You’re Going to College

#2: Give Yourself the College Orientation You Deserve

#3: Great Debates About Great Books Yield Deep Knowledge, Sharp Minds and Constructive Citizens

#4 Make for Yourself a Teacher – Acquire a Friend

#5 Turn It Off! Managing Social Media, Middle East Minefields, and Political Difference

#6 Fighting Educational Malpractice Personally: What Do I Do with a Politicized Prof – or Teacher

Although academia is broken, beware counterattacks that make matters worse. We need more open-mindedness and free speech, not less. We need more institutional independence, not less. And we need fewer orthodoxies imposed, not alternative blinders.

I wrote “To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream,” urging students – and everyone else – to reject the gaslighting. An ideological monoculture dominates many universities – especially the elite 20 percent generating 80 percent of new professors. Now, I may have to write a follow-up, “To Resist the Resistance – Within Reason.”

The Trumpian assault on academia includes many important initiatives, from demanding that mask-wearing students display their IDs, to challenging universities to return to merit-based hiring. Still, “Woke U” is going underground and doubling down. So many Politically Correct Commissars, even more convinced they’re right, now dismiss any university reformers or iconoclasts as Trumpian fascists.

True, the government shouldn’t target nonpartisan scientific research. And universities shouldn’t be whipsawed, as America lurches left to right. The Biden administration distributed more than one billion dollars pushing Diversity Equity Inclusion – the Trump administration now repudiates DEI. Universities need proper, responsible, thoughtful, consistent, educationally-minded, independent governance.

Genuine reform must come from within not without.  It can, however, be championed by perhaps today’s biggest suckers: blue-state parents, including many Jews. They spend an average of $38,270 per student annually, sending their kids to colleges propagandizing against the very values and skills the parents mastered to afford college today – and raise their kids to get ahead. As tuition doubled in 20 years despite educational quality lagging and universities’ reputations crashing, parents remained as silent as a Baby Boom professor out-Woked by younger colleagues.

It’s doubly scandalous. No professors should “propagandize”: their job involves educating, not indoctrinating. And most Ivy-stained brainwashing is unidirectional: anti-American, anti-Western and illiberal, not “just” anti-Zionist.

Until more blue-state parents get mad and fight educational malpractice, the systemic change academia needs and their kids deserve won’t happen. Still, it’s important to plan for that collective wake-up call – while pursuing progress wherever possible.

Here are 10 ideas parents should push and universities could start implementing quickly.

1. Reexamine and enforce codes of student conduct: Too many students, especially Jews, have been harassed. If universities lack rules proscribing bullying – make them. If fair rules exist – enforce them rigorously. Moreover, if administrators dither amid antisemitism or other bullying, parents should organize a tuition strike, parking their fees in an interest-bearing escrow account. If one parent does it, the university will suspend their child; if 100 do it collectively, the university will stop the harassment!

2. Reexamine and enforce professorial protocols, from classroom conduct to constructive citizenship. Hold professors to proper standards too. While turning educational podiums into political platforms, many professors favor one set of tuition-paying students over another. Professors who oh-so-bravely shielded students during encampments but never escorted a threatened pro-Israel student across campus, only protected fellow partisans. After redefining classroom dos and don’ts, address how professors – each university’s lifelong citizens – behave, on campus and online. They should embody the university’s educational values, not sabotage them. 

3. In assessing professors, ranging from student evaluations to promotion files, linchpin benchmarks should be “respects a broad range of opinions” and “runs an open, nonpartisan, thought-provoking classroom.” These shouldn’t need highlighting, they’re givens. Alas, given so many professors’ closedmindedness, emphasizing these attributes has become essential.

4. Update your university’s mission statement – then assign an admissions essay asking applicants how they will uphold those values. All organizations should reexamine their core values periodically. Meanwhile, admissions essays have become toxically self-absorbed. Beyond showing how they stand out, applicants should explain how they will fit in – and contribute to their campus. 

5. Map out both students’ and professors’ partisan profiles, aiming to avoid a political monoculture. In 2022, 1 percent of Harvard’s faculty and 6 percent of its students called themselves “conservative” in a polarized nation with 36 percent identifying as “conservative.” Such lopsided results are cultivated not coincidental. They deprive students of opportunities to learn about the wider world in all its richness, navigate difference, and disagree agreeably.

6. While envisioning centers for civics education, great books and classic liberal thought – start one class at a time, one professorial hire at a time. Clearly, many faculties and curricula need rebalancing. Because universities are so intractable – especially now — and Woke professors so zealous, reformers must improvise bypasses. While planning major centers, administrators should champion true “diversity” among new faculty and with new courses. Go beyond the “oppressed-oppressor” binary and other orthodoxies to celebrate the smorgasbord of ideas constructive education enjoys.

7. Don’t follow the Qatari money – just stop taking it – but do follow the learned societies. Qatari money didn’t ruin universities. As the professional organizations of sociologists, anthropologists, historians and other humanists turned Woke, however, they heavy-handedly imposed their agendas. They demanded only politically-correct hires, serving as thought-police via book prizes, awards for the best journal articles written and letters of recommendation for promotions within each discipline they control. 

8. And follow the pro-Palestinian money targeting Jews, Zionists, and Israel. Ever wonder why so many tents in every encampment nationwide looked similar? An anti-Zionist network pushes ideas and spreads money on campus. Wendy Sachs’ documentary “October 8” features a secret FBI recording capturing 25 Hamas leaders in Philadelphia in 1993 outlining a plan of “infiltrating American media outlets, universities, and research centers,” using human rights language, their money, and their lackeys. 

9. Encourage Ruth Bader Ginsburg-Charlie Kirk reading groups and clubs honoring liberal and conservative icons committed to free speech and robust debate.  Both Justice Ginsburg and Charlie Kirk had proud, thoughtful, unapologetic partisan identities, while learning from rivals – students should emulate them.

10. End Tenure! Now!!!  Do the math.  Woke professors tenured recently might still hold their positions in 2050, even 2060. As I argued in Tablet, tenure once preserved the freedom to be bold and different, now it perpetuates academic groupthink and professorial privilege.

Parents and students need a consumer rights revolution to save academia from today’s academics. The time to start was yesterday.

Gil Troy, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, is an American presidential historian. Last year he published, “To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream” and “The Essential Guide to October 7th and its Aftermath.” His latest, “The Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism and Jew-hatred” was just published and can be downloaded on the JPPI Website.