Professors Behaving Badly
How self-interest and bad incentives corrupted the Ivory Tower
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If you’ve ever suspected that modern universities aren’t quite the paragons of virtue they claim to be, Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness are here to confirm your suspicions… and then some. In their book Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education, they take a sledgehammer to higher education’s moral pretensions, arguing that much of what goes on in academia is better explained by self-interest, perverse incentives, and rent-seeking than by the high-minded pursuit of truth.
The excerpt below is a summary of Chapters 2 through 9 of their book, covering everything from phony advertising to incoherent grading systems to the cynical use of moral rhetoric. What emerges is a picture not of a noble temple to knowledge, but of a sprawling, self-serving bureaucracy, riddled with contradictions, conflicts of interest, and practices that seem to be more about preserving appearances than pursuing education’s core ideals.
I’d like to think the problem isn’t quite as bad as Brennan and Magness make out. But even if it’s only half as bad, academia is still falling far short of its ideals.
Let’s review the main complaints of Chapters 2 through 9:
Faculty, administrators, and students have selfish interests and face bad incentives that may induce them to act in ways that undermine the common good of their university.
Universities regularly engage in negligent advertising. They promise to deliver a whole range of benefits, but lack the evidence to prove that they deliver these benefits. Worse, researchers have uncovered strong evidence that universities simply don’t deliver on some of their promises. Most students learn close to nothing, don’t develop their skills very much, and don’t know how to transfer those skills outside the classroom.
Administrators use student evaluations to determine hiring and promotion, but student evaluations do not track teaching effectiveness. They may also reflect other biases that, ethically speaking, should not be used to determine hiring and promotion.
Professors haven’t coordinated on a common meaning for grades, and GPA calculations are mostly incoherent. The main form of feedback and certification that faculty thus provide to students is a conceptual mess.
Academics frequently use moral language to disguise their pursuit of their own self-interest. Certain forms of activism, including activism on behalf of tenure, appear to be little more than rent-seeking.
Gen eds generally don’t work. Faculty exploit students by forcing them to take useless and ineffective courses that students don’t want to. The purpose of many gen eds is to transfer money from students to professors.
Professors and administrators maintain low-quality doctoral programs that produce too many PhDs in glutted employment markets as a way to increase their own prestige, obtain subsidized graders and assistants, and justify higher salaries and more resources.
Most students cheat a little, and many cheat a lot.
You can read more about Brennan and Magness’s book here.
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Here is a brief review of the book’s claims as they apply to comprehensive state universities in the US. The reviewer notes the book’s "relentless cynicism" and states "Brennan and Magness seriously underestimated the role of intrinsic motivation (e.g., curiosity and creativity) in the behavior of students and faculty members. Their estimate of the workload for faculty was clearly off."
https://scholars.fhsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1076&context=ts
This is worth it for the title alone!