The Zombie Liberal Arts College Apocalypse

an autopsy report

the stairway to my office at Marygrove College, RIP

I was saddened to hear this week that Siena Heights University in Adrian, Michigan, a Catholic liberal arts college in the Dominican tradition, will be closing at the end of the forthcoming academic year. I was saddened, that is, but not surprised. The only thing surprising is that it took this long.

I taught at Siena Heights (and a couple of other places) part-time for a few years following the abrupt closure of my own institution, Marygrove College, in 2017. At the time, the proverbial handwriting was on the wall foretelling the closure of liberal arts schools en masse. Enter Covid and the US government flooding colleges and universities with Monopoly money (you can call it “quantitative easing,” if you like) and those schools found themselves with a new lease on life support—but it couldn’t last.

I liked Siena Heights. It was small, the people and the students, for the most part, were nice. I was given ample freedom to teach a couple of courses that were essentially aimed at orienting students to the Catholic Dominican academic project, kind of an Intro to Philosophy without being an Intro to Philosophy course. In my courses, I would lead the students through some simple questions: What is beauty? Why is there music? How do I know that there is a soul? Why is there color? I would also guide them through the rudiments of phenomenology, especially the indispensable tool of the epoché, the bracketing of assumptions necessary for gaining any kind of insight.

Having said that, I was kind of relieved when Siena—like every other educational institution in the land—sent everyone home in March 2020, ye olde “two weeks to flatten the curve.” I had a student who had been exhibiting disturbing (“psychotic” is not a misrepresentation) behavior in class. I had told administrative types what was going on, that the kid needed help—and I was also concerned that he could get violent. Administration said they couldn’t do anything unless he actually did something—like what? Start shooting? So I guess Covid was good for something. But back to the bigger issue.

Most of my career as a professor can be characterized as being party to a managed decline. While at Marygrove, I witnessed more and more students arriving at college with marginal academic skills—and often leaving without having improved much at all. For a few years, I ran the Writing Center, where my legions of tutors guided students through rudimentary, elementary school-level lessons in basic grammar, sentence structure, and paragraph formation. In my Intro to Literature course I would give my students the same test I gave my seventh and eighth graders at the Waldorf school where I had taught. The middle schoolers far outperformed the college students. It was a very sad state of affairs.

Now, I am not blaming the students for their failure to grasp the difference between a simile and a metaphor: I’m blaming a system that enlisted people who should never have gone to college in the first place in a Ponzi scheme of financial exploitation. In faculty meetings, I would often ask: “Does anyone else feel guilty about saddling these students with enormous debt and marginal skills just so we can play professor?” And that was ten years ago. (To be fair, part of Marygrove’s rapid and unexpected demise was a mismanaged financial aid/scholarship package that was a bit of a bait and switch and caused the President and Vice-President behind it to do a quick exit before anybody noticed.)

Since then, the exploitation Ponzi scheme has expanded to turn these little liberal arts colleges into playgrounds for young adults mesmerized into a prolonged adolescence, much of it through the false promise of “playing college-level sports.” Students who were okay players in high school, who couldn’t cut it to get into Division 1 schools, are made offers of “scholarships” (really discounts on an already inflated tuition) to continue their mediocre high school careers. And not only that, but unscrupulous administrators and athletic directors also offer “scholarships” for “cutting-edge” team sports such as e-sports (“video games” to you and me) and, believe it or not, cornhole (!!!). I wish this were a joke.

But, just as in the story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” administration, staff, and faculty all pretend everything is fine. Everything is not fine—and it hasn’t been for a good long while.

Notice how I haven’t said anything about academics yet?

The problem with this model of long decline is that it is really a numbers game. There simply aren’t enough college-ready young people to fill college classrooms. As a result, admissions offices “reach out” (such a compassionate-sounding term!) to populations who really aren’t interested in college, but would like to play football (or baseball, or tennis, or e-sports) for a few more years. They really can’t do the work—and, honestly, most of them don’t want to, despite institutions getting all weepy talking about their “academic standards” (they don’t exist). Enter AI.

So now we have the perfect storm scenario of disinterested students, self-interested administrators and faculty, and a technology that takes all the effort and tears out of “earning” grades. Before I left teaching over a year ago, I was starting to see students use AI to write papers. (They always think the professors are such rubes.) I was also starting to hear about professors using AI to write exam questions. Now these phenomena are at epidemic proportions. Let these by thy gods, O Israel.

Since 2020, almost fifty liberal arts college in the US have closed, and this is a trend that will probably continue until only a prestigious few are left. This will also impact graduate programs at state universities, for which the liberal arts colleges are often feeders, and not a few private universities. The ecosystem of American higher education is in complete collapse. It will never recover.

I haven’t even mentioned the laughable and laughably tragic fiasco that is the teaching of the humanities at the college and university level. Marxist theory, feminist theory, etc etc have devastated the humanities—which is the core of a liberal arts institution. The result: no one wants to major in English, or history, or philosophy. Not only are these degrees becoming worthless, no one wants to pursue them. And that, I claim, is because most humanities departments have abdicated the mission of the liberal arts project in favor of politics. That is: they have contributed to their own demise—smugly smiling the whole long way. They deserve everything they have coming to them.

There is no fixing this. There are alternatives, however, as I have written about in the chapter on education in my book Transfiguration. I assume the pursuit of wisdom will take other forms, from microcolleges to things resembling the flying colleges that persisted throughout the Communist era to a hedge school approach to wisdom. But the liberal arts college as we have known it is at its end. And this demise will surely afflict even the Harvards and Princetons of the realm. It’s a lab leak of a human-manufactured pathogen.

The jig, at long last, is up.