| A recent exchange with my friend Len Waks concerning academic publications prompted his observations on the nation's higher education system. ~GVG |
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A recent article in The Conversation argues that academic publishing is facing a “crisis” of enshittification. The authors point to several interrelated problems: the sheer volume of publications makes it difficult to identify authoritative work; fraudulent journals circulate hoax papers and pirated content; and profit-driven publishing models distort scholarly incentives. The result is a system overwhelmed by quantity, stripped of its original purpose, and increasingly disconnected from the advancement of knowledge.
This crisis in publishing, however, is only one manifestation of a much deeper and longer-standing problem—one that begins not with journals but with mass higher education itself. Depending on how the term is defined, I am generally opposed to mass university education, precisely because it degrades the entire system. The pattern is familiar from secondary education. Consider the “algebra for all” movement. Researchers noticed that students who completed ninth-grade algebra tended to do better later on than those who did not. From this correlation, policymakers drew an invalid inference: that every student should be required to take ninth-grade algebra. The result was predictable. Algebra classrooms were filled with students who could not reliably perform four-function arithmetic. To accommodate them, teachers devoted large portions of class time to remedial arithmetic. The students who needed remediation still did not learn algebra—and, crucially, neither did the students who were already prepared, whose time was consumed by material they had already mastered. The same logic now governs the arts and sciences curriculum at the university level, with even more serious moral consequences. A liberal arts curriculum is traditionally shaped for students above roughly the first standard deviation—those capable of sustained attention, close reading, interpretive nuance, and reflective discussion. Expand access from roughly 16 percent of the population to 40 percent, and many of the new entrants are simply not instructionally ready. They cannot read closely; they cannot engage in the kind of textual analysis that lies at the heart of liberal education. Faculty, understandably, try to respond humanely. They alter the curriculum so that these students can get something out of it—reading snippets instead of full works, replacing textual analysis with informal discussion. Some students benefit in limited ways. But what they receive is not a liberal education. They do not memorize or emulate exemplary passages; they do not learn to write in response to demanding texts; they do not examine literary characters as moral examples, because they lack the interpretive capacities required to do so. Meanwhile, class sizes increase to accommodate expanding enrollments, and the “talented eighth” receive far less attention to close reading, individual interpretation, and moral discussion. As with algebra for all, college for all produces a dual loss: the underprepared students do not receive the education they were promised, and the best-prepared students no longer receive a genuine liberal education—except at a small number of highly selective liberal arts colleges such as Swarthmore or Haverford. Scale limits are only one part of the problem. These pressures reshape the professoriate itself. Faculty are trained at elite research universities where college teaching—especially lower-division teaching—receives little or no attention. More training would not necessarily help, any more than additional pedagogical training alone could fix algebra-for-all classrooms. Faculty enter their careers with unrealistic expectations, then respond in one of two ways: they either come to despise their students and seek escape from lower-division teaching, or they feel compassion and attempt to redesign courses to meet students where they are. Either way, something essential is lost. At the same time, faculty face publish-or-perish pressures that could, in principle, be relaxed for those whose primary role is undergraduate teaching—especially in the first two years. Instead, they produce marginal work simply to survive professionally. That work must be placed somewhere, and so journals with low standards proliferate. Some are legitimate outlets for emerging or niche fields made possible by the sheer number of scholars—Environmental Ethics, for example. But many function largely as repositories. Once publication counts lose credibility as indicators of scholarly merit, institutions turn to citation analysis. In many ways, this worsens the problem. Citations correlate poorly with genuine intellectual value; fashionable or trendy work crowds out more substantial contributions. Yet one now sees scholars of apparent seriousness boasting about their citation counts. This is, frankly, bonkers. Finally, evaluation shifts from scholarship to enrollments. Departments are judged by student numbers. History, philosophy, and literature programs are closed as humanities majors decline from roughly 12 percent of students to about 3 percent over three decades. Meanwhile, computer science departments undergo massive hiring sprees—just as AI threatens to eliminate many entry-level coding jobs altogether. The result is a system degraded at every level: curriculum, teaching, scholarship, evaluation, and institutional planning. The enshittification of academic publishing is real—but it is only one symptom of a much larger structural failure.
Len
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