This morning's Chronicle of Higher Ed lists thirteen ways higher ed has contributed to the economic crisis it now faces. These include risky investment strategies and over-reliance on cheap credit, trustees asleep at the wheel, building and boosting too much and for the wrong reasons, spending sprees and associated poor relations with the state house, ignoring students' needs, failure to meet public demands for accountability, and "failure to play well with others," a category reserved for the tenured professors and faculty unions that are more concerned with preserving their perks than with pitching in during tough times.

None of this is new; if you read higher ed news, you read about this stuff every day. Still, distilled to their essence and gathered in a list, these summary criticisms have a certain clarifying effect; the Chronicle has painted a portrait of an academy that is not only systemically corrupt, but whose corruption originates in some of its most foundational and treasured values (tenure, for example). In its own words, the Chronicle's list explains "how greed, incompetence, and neglect led to bad decisions." That's quite an indictment from a publication entirely dedicated to higher ed, but there you have it.

I was thinking about this list as I read through Heather MacDonald's new Weekly Standard piece on how victimology and identity politics are factoring into Yale's decision-making about what to cut, what to keep, and what to create.

In December 2008, Yale University president Richard Levin announced a series of budget cuts to compensate for a 25 percent drop in the value of Yale's endowment. This February, the university launched the Office of LGBTQ [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer] Resources to provide support for Yale's homosexual community. According to its director, the new office is intended to make the "University feel like a friendly place as opposed to an alien, hostile place" to gays. The recession, it appears, is going to have little impact on the academic culture of victimology and the ever-growing bureaucracy that supports it.

The idea that Yale is an 'alien, hostile place' to gays is one of those absurd conceits that could only be maintained in the alternative universe of academia. Yale students and faculty are undoubtedly the most tolerant, least homophobic people on earth; Yale helped launch the field of gay studies three decades ago and has only increased its involvement since.

[...]

In light of this history, one might think it impossible to maintain that Yale needs a new LGBTQ office in order to "feel like a friendly place as opposed to an alien, hostile place" to gays. Especially since the director of that new office, Maria Trumpler, has already been serving as "special assistant to the deans for LGBTQ issues." But Trumpler herself charges that Yale has heretofore failed to confer on gays the power to form a community, reported the Yale Daily News.

If you're tempted to ask why students require administration backing in order to form a "community," you don't understand the codependent relationship between self-engrossed students and the adults whose career consists of catering to that self-involvement. Students in today's university regularly act out little psychodramas of oppression before an appreciative audience of deans and provosts. The essence of those psychodramas is to force the university to recognize a student's narrowly defined "identity" through ever more elaborate bureaucratic mechanisms. Rather than laugh the student players off the stage, the deans, provosts, and sundry other administrators willingly participate in their drama, intently negotiating with them and conferring additional benefits wherever possible.

[...]

Faced with such a pliant oppressor, students have to get quite creative in manufacturing new causes of grievance. At the opening ceremonies for the new Office of LGBTQ Resources, junior Rachel Schiff, a coordinator for the LGBT Co-op, complained: "The fact that we don't actually have a physical space says lots about Yale's stance towards LGBT life on the ground at a metaphorical level." Actually, whatever the metaphorical meaning of the lack of office space, the literal meaning is quite simple: Yale was in a hurry to roll out the new office, and it faces a shortage of empty buildings. Finding an independent home for LGBTQ Resources is one of director Trumpler's first priorities. Does Rachel Schiff's clearly delusional idea that "Yale's stance towards LGBT life on the ground" has been anything other than accommodating set off any warning signals among administrators that its students are losing contact with reality? Apparently not; such preposterous charges of administration indifference to this or that favored identity group are greeted at every American college with meek silence.

[...]

Many students come to college asking the question: Who am I? At its best, a liberal arts education responds to that question by pushing students outside of their limited selves and into the vast reaches of human imagination and experience. It assumes that students can enter lives radically different from their own-that a Chinese-American girl, say, can find meaning in Odysseus' quest to return home-and that they can start to participate in a centuries-long conversation that contains sorrows and fears that most 18-year-olds can barely imagine. No freshman can understand the battle between Lear and his daughters, but 40 years later, it might return to him with a deep pang of recognition. Thomas Hobbes's warning regarding the ever-present threat of anarchy will likely remain wholly abstract for secure American students until they have seen more of the world. When they have, however, his articulation of the fragility of social order may echo in their minds as terrifyingly true.

Today's solipsistic university, however, allows students to answer the "Who am I?" question exclusively, rather than inclusively. Identity politics defines the self by its difference from as many other people as possible, so as to increase the underdog status of one's chosen identity group. (Women have commandeered an underdog identity even though they are the majority on campuses; that no one objects is a measure of their clout.) And because the robust growth of the student services bureaucracy depends on the proliferation of identity groups, administrations busy themselves with identity-based constituencies that might not even exist.

[...]

While the drive to define oneself oppositionally is good for student services administrators, it is not so good for education. Can a student who is furiously itemizing the many ways she has been dissed as a female of color or a lesbian, say, lose herself in the opalescent language of A Midsummer Night's Dream or hear the aching melancholy in Wordsworth's "Intimations" ode? She will have been taught to scour books for slights to, or affirmations of, her own self, but neither the play nor the poem is directly about her carefully cultivated identity.

Yale's sprawling student services bureaucracy is drearily typical. It matters not whether a college is private or public, large or small; all are encrusted with layers of expendable adults catering to students' most narcissistic tendencies. The growth in this bureaucracy helps explain exploding annual tuition costs, which at elite private colleges now run over half the median family income.

In the years ahead, expect to see a new constituency pushing for the expansion of identity-based services and courses: graduates of the solipsistic university. Older alumni might have provided a brake on the trivialization of their alma maters; instead they blindly shoveled hundreds of millions of dollars into colleges about whose radical transformation they preserved a carefully cultivated ignorance. Now those older alumni are being replaced by younger generations who take for granted that universities should cultivate students' narrowly defined identities. Yale, for example, administers two alumni funds to support undergraduates pursuing LGBT studies; their respective donors come from the classes of '83 and '85. Other identity fiefdoms in colleges across the country have their own recent alumni patrons.

Yale's new Office of LGBTQ Resources is initially funded at $20,000 a year, obviously a minute fraction of the college's $100 million deficit for 2009-10. But the costs of the office exceed its immediate budget. By perpetuating the premise that Yale not only should officially recognize students' balkanized identities but has still not satisfactorily done so, LGBTQ Resources guarantees ongoing student demands and continues distorting the idea of a liberal arts education. Yale could take that $20,000 and purchase every low-income student a complete Shakespeare, the Federalist Papers, and all the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. It could fund a Ph.D. candidate to conduct an evening reading group on the Enlightenment philosophers. Surely such endeavors would contribute more to the expansion of students' minds than making another offering to their self-regard.

In his December 2008 letter on Yale's budget problems, President Richard Levin affirmed the university's mission of "educating the most talented and promising students for leadership and service." Teaching students to identify phantom insults to their egos doesn't train them for leadership and service but merely for future whining. The economic crisis is the perfect opportunity for every college to say to its students: "We recognize you as young people forged from a common humanity. We hope to cultivate in you humility regarding the limits of your knowledge, a passion to overcome those limits, and a deep gratitude for the landmarks of human thought that it will be your privilege to study for the next four years. We are dismantling the college's multicultural, identity-based services because you don't need them. Find yourselves by engaging with beauty, intellectual complexity, and each other."

Things to note--how budgeting decisions, bloated self-serving bureaucracy, and educational mission all coalesce in movements such as the one MacDonald traces; how the last is sacrificed to, or warped by, the first two; how the juvenile posturing of students feeling their political oats--something we tend to dismiss as just that, and as not deserving much attention--fuels a massive and growing academic bureaucracy that in turn encourages ever more posturing and grievance-mongering; and how the tragic outcome is one in which the finest liberal arts education on offer results in psychologies that are not enlarged by broad humane awareness, but narrowed into an echo chamber of bitter, unhappy self-regard. I suppose that's all right though, as long as the student life bureaucrats get to keep their jobs.

UPDATE 3/12: Over at NAS, Peter Wood lists a few mistakes that the Chronicle left out. They include "became addicted to student debt" and "luxuriated in one-sided politics."