I could go into a whole song and dance about all my own biases and self-interest here, but I’ll just go ahead and say simply that I’ve given up on the hope that our media, particularly our digital media, will ever be anything but unremittingly hostile to our higher education system. It’s one of the clearest and most powerful biases in our media today. It’s almost the mirror image of the pro-Apple distortion that makes our media into essentially an unpaid wing of Apple’s advertising department. The traditional right-wing media’s hatred of academics is of course baked right into their ideology. But that hatred is also common to the technocratic neoliberals who run our media, and who are unaware of the way in which their ideology colors that vast majority of what we read. This is added to natural resentments from journalists about who gets to make knowledge and whether knowledge is best made fast or slow. The result is something like today’s digital media, where you’ve got endless fear mongering about college crowding the pages of our most prominent “general interest” publications.

“Bias” is a term that many are trying to challenge lately, and I’m fully on board with that. I don’t want journalists to adopt the View From Nowhere on college. I have a powerful bias regarding our higher education system for obvious reasons. But I would like it if some of the self-important greybeards in the media would examine the quality of their reporting on this issue, and I think it would be worthwhile for some publications to try and find people who aren’t so relentless in their pursuit of the most hysterical takes on college possible. Not to pursue some false ideal of objective journalism, but to better recognize that there are lots of interested parties who are trying to get rich off of the college crisis industry, and whose interests are essentially never given a critical examination. Graeme Wood’s piece on Minerva is bad journalism not because it reaches conclusions that I don’t like but because it is so relentlessly credulous towards its subject. There is no time within that long piece in which Wood meets what I would call an even minimal level of appropriate skepticism towards the revolutionary changes that a (for-profit, self-interested, clearly working him) company tells him are  coming. That despite the fact that claims of revolutionary change for education through technology are ubiquitous and inevitably utter failures. Where is Wood’s history? It’s discarded in his rush to find a particular conclusion. And this is the problem with the bias I’m talking about: not that it violates some bogus ideal of perfect journalistic neutrality, but that it blinds journalists to the evidence that cuts against the cult of Disruptively Innovating Innovative Innovators Creatively Destroying college. You don’t have to endorse the View From Nowhere to ask journalists to do their jobs and apply appropriate skepticism towards a Silicon Valley vision of education that floats on an ocean of unsupported assumptions and empty buzzwords.

For my dissertation, I’ve written a chapter about the crisis narrative in higher education. I trace it from the Truman administration to the present day, showing how the narrative simply changes to meet current national worries: in the 40s, it’s fear that colleges have inadequate capacity to enroll all the new students returning from war; in the 50s, it’s competing with the Russians for military technologies; in the 60s, it’s the Space Race; in the 70s, it’s recovering from the chaos and protests of the 60s; in the 80s, it’s competing with the Japanese and West Germans; in the 90s, it’s alternatively trying to undo age-old inequality and injustice in our colleges and fighting against “political correctness run amok.”  And then it’s globalization, and China, and 9/11, and inevitably, the internet. The narrative of crisis never, ever changes. It simply adapts to suit the needs of current political parties, and more, for the privateers who exploit the media’s panic reflex in order to wring more dollars out of our investment in higher ed. Looking over the sweep of my primary historical sources, I often asked myself why nobody ever seemed to notice that this notion of a new crisis was perpetual. How many times can the usual suspects ring the same alarm bell, claiming crisis, but changing their justification? Time and again, the American university system met its various challenges. Never perfectly, often too slowly, but consistently. Why does this never seep into the media’s narrative? Probably for the same reason the crisis narrative gets sold again and again: because the right people get paid.

My basic thesis about American elite culture right now is that pretty much everybody who isn’t employed on Wall Street or in tech feels shitty and scared about their professional lives. For perfectly understandable reasons. And that insecurity is uncomfortable, so it inevitably becomes weaponized, projected out onto what everyone else is doing. This has resulted in the Chumps genre, where a particular job or major or calling gets ridiculed as impractical. That way, you get to distract yourself from your own unhappiness and fear for awhile. Those industries that are most commonly described as serving higher callings and greater ideals than simple financial remuneration, which includes the arts, media and journalism, and higher education, are those most likely to receive mockery. But we are all chumps now, and what’s required is not sniping at each other and our desires for meaningful work but to challenge the basic economic policy of this country, which is oriented towards enriching the already rich against all other priorities. We can’t wage that battle if our media is busy carrying water for the masters of the universe by blaming college for its failure to maintain a healthy labor market entirely on its own, a job it was never designed to do.

I have a list of complaints about the modern research university as long as your arm. I don’t know what college will look like a hundred years from now. But I do know that the idea that it’s going to look precisely how some Silicon Valley plutocrat wants it to look is propaganda, and it is incredible how much ink our media spills in spreading that propaganda. And if we can’t have solidarity, let’s at least have variety. Editors of the world: we are already drowning in Hot Takes about how college is in crisis. Those pieces choke the servers of Slate and The Atlantic and The New Republic, published by the dozens every week. Maybe try a new angle. You know, just for fun.

Alternatively, you can just make fun of what I’m saying.