Whiplash: Special Issue Part I: Higher Education Year in Review 2023-24
What a year on America’s college campuses. Commentators who had lived through the civil rights and anti-war protests and riots of the 60s and 70s were hard-pressed to say they had it worse.
Chaotic, but Rich and Deep
This special issue begins with a few facts about the archive we used to create it: 819 pages of headlines and summaries of stories about (mostly) American colleges, over 11,000 headlines, covering nine months, from October to July. The Word app says that it amounts to 167,070 words, 2,532 kilobytes – and it’s all searchable. Harvard is mentioned 995 times; Yale, just 124. New York Times, six times; Wall Street Journal, 482. But wait, nytimes gets 523 search result votes and wsj just 55. How about The Chronicle (32) and just chronicle (902)? We might have been tempted to put this little database through the AI meatgrinder; instead, we have written a story about ChatGPT and made it one of the year’s top ten stories. You can read three of the top stories of the year in this issue, Part I, of our Year in Review (numbers 10 through 8), here now below; the remaining seven will be in the next two issues, Parts II and III—see if you’re surprised—a year that we believe will be one of the most memorable in the last half-century, which is one reasons we call it Whiplash, a word that appeared only two times among the 167,000 we searched. (historic: 46, unprecedented: 6.) And this is also one reason we call our Timeline of the past year a serendipitous one; it ain’t rocket science or artificial intelligence or fake news or even skin deep—but it provides a challenging perspective on the year.
We don’t celebrate what happened by any means, but we congratulate our nation’s rich media coverage of these head-spinning events and recognize the persistence of, if not always the benefit of, the “if it bleeds it ledes” ethos. A whiff of cherry blossoms is not the stuff of tear gas. But we hope this is a valuable contribution to the first draft of real history.
And the tail-end of summer—which is now—may be the best time to think about what happened last year; too late to make big decisions for the fall semester, it gives us (especially the administrators among us) more courage to face them.
My thanks to our writers Elizabeth Janice, Amy Genito, and Andrew Nason for tackling the challenge of summing up a year in a few hundred words, to our researchers Skyler Scampoli, Brittany di Palma, and Rachel Genito for pouring over thousands of headlines, and to our designer, Christopher Wajda, for creating the images to make these timeline sidebars possible. As always contact me at Peter Meyer with questions, comments, or suggestions.
Story #10
What Was Behind the Pro-Palestinian Campus Protests?
There are many theories about what precipitated the immediate and vocal pro-Palestinian outpouring of support for this year’s Hamas/Israeli war—the one started by a massacre of mostly Israeli citizens last October 7. But when Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America” went viral just weeks after the Muslim terrorist group attack, it was clear to some that an antisemitic fuse had been lit long before Israel began its Gazan bombing campaign. The “Letter to America” from the 9/11 attack Muslim mastermind was first published in 2002 and attempted to justify the targeting and killing of American civilians. It was widely condemned at the time. But according to Christopher Nadon, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College (CMC), a colleague of his at CMC, a cultural Marxist professor, had lectured a staff meeting on the need to understand and sympathize with the 19 [9/11 attackers] as “unfortunate men who had been driven to their martyrdom by Western colonial oppression.” “Those in the towers,” says Nadon about his Marxist colleague, “had it coming.” Nadon says that other colleagues at the time “reacted… with derision and contempt. But the virus had arrived.” And it was this virus, Nadon argues, that had spread in classrooms on campuses all over the country in the ensuing two decades and explains, according to Nadon, why bin Laden’s letter went viral on social media last fall, with many students actually praising it, espousing what some of their professors have been teaching for years; that “the West is a totally rotten, corrupt place.” This year what began as a handful of statements by student activists who followed instructions from groups like Students for Justice in Palestine quickly snowballed into a popular cause. For some, praising Hamas became “a way to bundle their discontents and antipathies into one giant outrage,” according to Peter W. Wood, writing in The Spectator. In January students at Harvard filed a lawsuit against the university, claiming it failed to protect Jewish students from “severe and pervasive” antisemitic harassment sparked by the Israel-Hamas war. In a 79-page federal civil complaint, they said the university “has become a bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment.” This quiet revolution – a virus?—could signal the most important question of the 2023-24 college year, a nexus where academic freedom, free speech, and intellectual and academic standards come together –and decide to work out some rules or throw in the towel. ---Elizabeth Janice
Sources
Osama bin Laden, Big Man on Campus (Wall Street Journal)
Behind the anger of the young American Hamas apologists (The Spectator)
Harvard Students Sue University over Failure to Address ‘Severe and Pervasive’ Antisemitic Harassment on Campus (National Review)
Further Reading
What Universities Should Punish and What They Shouldn’t (Reason)
Should colleges and universities speak on political issues? (The Hill)
Why Campus Life Fell Apart (Chronicle of Higher Education)
The Feds Have Been Flooded With Campus Complaints of Anti-Jewish Bias. Now What? (Chronicle of Higher Education)
Columbia U. Investigates Reports of ‘Unknown Substance’ Sprayed at Pro-Palestinian Rally (Chronicle of Higher Education)
Story #9
Brain Drain in Florida as Liberal-Leaning Academics Begin to Flee
Florida governor Ron DeSantis—for whom Donald Trump officially retired the nickname “Ron DeSanctimonious”—is known for his war on “woke activism” in education. The last presidential hopefuls to focus on education reform were Michael Bloomberg and Jeb Bush. Even with DeSantis dropping out of the presidential race, higher education policy, typically a backburner issue, is poised to play a prominent role in this year’s election. Republicans have latched on to the issue, and so Republican presidential candidate Trump, who focused little on it in his first term, has been talking about it more—saying that the system is out of touch with everyday Americans, threatening to fire what he calls “radical left” accreditors and proposing a plan for free, online national universities. DeSantis continues to reshape the higher education system in his state to fit his conservative principles (see also “DeSantis Continues to Shake Up Higher Education”), and some liberal-leaning professors have had enough. Departure rates have been slowly ticking upward at colleges and universities across the state. At the University of Florida, for example, overall turnover went from 7 percent in 2021 to 9.3 percent in 2023. The University of Florida’s law school has been particularly hard hit, with a 30 percent faculty turnover rate this year. ---Elizabeth Janice
Sources
‘DeSanctimonious’ No More: Trump Says He’ll Drop Ex-Rival’s Nickname (New York Times)
Higher Education in Political Crosshairs as 2024 Election Heats Up (Inside Higher Ed)
In Florida’s Hot Political Climate, Some Faculty Have Had Enough (New York Times)
Further Reading
Facing Off in Washington, DeSantis Tries to Shake Trump’s Hold on Christian Right (New York Times)
New College of Florida approves Corcoran’s president contract—doubling his predecessor’s salary (Higher Ed Dive)
College Board Confirmed to Have Removed Various CRT Topics from African-American Studies Curriculum following DeSantis Pushback (National Review)
AAUP: DeSantis’s Florida Part of ‘Assault on Democracy Worldwide’ (Inside Higher Ed)
The Biggest Threat to America’s Universities (New York Times)
Why Faculty Members Are Fleeing Florida (Chronicle of Higher Education)
The Christian Liberal-Arts School at the Heart of the Culture Wars (New Yorker)
Story #8
The Year in College Sports: Upheaval and an Abundance of Lawsuits
It’s been a tumultuous year in college sports, with, for example, “obituaries” declaring amateurism officially dead. shock waves from a reconfigured Power 5 major college athletic conferences—and related mega-bucks media deals—that have forever changed the Division I Conference landscape, and, unfortunately, the Mel Tucker football coach scandal at Michigan, which proved that in some areas, at least, change is hard to come by. The inevitable move toward paying students could come as early as the 2025-26 academic year, with a landmark settlement between the NCAA and Power 5 that would require the NCAA to dole out $2.8 billion in past damages and allow Division I schools to pay roughly $20 million a year to their athletes. Many smaller Division I programs, like that of Houston Christian University, are concerned that the financial obligations in the agreement will benefit the richest schools.
Meanwhile, federal lawmakers are pondering an independent regulatory body that would oversee national NIL (name, image, and likeness) rules and procedures. Plenty of thorny issues are still pending in court: past payment to athletes not covered by that landmark settlement; how closely schools will need to follow Title IX rules when compensating athletes; and the NCAA’s transgender eligibility policies. Another unresolved matter is whether student athletes are employees. Earlier this year, when members of Dartmouth’s men’s basketball team voted 13–2 to unionize, as part of the Service Employees International Union, the college announced it would not bargain with them and reserved the option of refusing to do so pending a final ruling by the National Labor Relations Board. In a related decision seen as a setback for the NCAA, the Third Circuit Court ruled that student athletes may qualify as employees.
If we needed reminding that media contracts and student pay aren’t the only things that can shake up big programs, Michigan State ousted Mel Tucker over allegations of sexual misconduct. Rightly or wrongly, the saga was compared to other infamous college-sports sex abuse cases, as schools search for a remedy for such pernicious, recurring episodes. The Mel Tucker story is likely to continue now that he has sued Michigan State for wrongful termination. ---Andrew Nason
Sources