It’s Time for Regime Change in Higher Education

There is much discussion these days about the need for “regime change” in certain countries. I don’t generally like the phrase because it can be misunderstood. It implies that a legitimate administration is in charge of a country or institution, and that illegitimate methods will displace it.

Much of the world, however, actually needs regime change, from countries, states, and cities to government agencies and many corporations.

So do universities.

Interestingly, alongside each of our politically infiltrated state and city government administrations are local universities that act as their ancillary political organizations. They provide the most critical element of successful political operation: ideology, belief, and agenda.

Universities are also a “professional labor mill” that supplies trained members to the political class. They bring with them a Weltanschauung, or a worldview comprising ideas, concepts, and abstractions. The university law school may be the most organized ideological site within the university. More than business and medicine, law requires both greater abstraction to advance its claims to expertise, while simultaneously necessitating procedural complexity to format those abstractions into protected routines and rituals. This reinforces faculty and student “confirmation bias,” whereby law’s ideologies are seen as both real and tractable. (I have written in more detail about the ideological capture of law schools here.)

Universities are especially suited to do this, because they can hold out an array of hard incentives, rewards, and punishments, that effectively guarantees ideological assimilation and behavioral compliance: The awarding of degrees, the promise of jobs; the social ranking by grades and honors; the favor of faculty recommendations; the enticement of scholarships; and the burden of tuition debt, which shapes risk and reward behavior. Students will often go along to get along, protect their employment prospects, and have a desperate need for income. The university converts ideology by institutional threats and by the presumption of authority.

It’s worth asking whether all of this is just a deeply corrupted version of something simple and legitimate: learning.

Are universities still the best way to foster authentic learning and knowledge? Or have they become something else entirely—complex, tightly controlled social systems with their own rules and hierarchies?

Think of Michel Foucault’s idea of the panopticon—a society built on constant surveillance, strict discipline, and obedience. In many ways, the modern university reflects this model, particularly in its role in shaping policies related to medicine, technology, and biosecurity.

And is it really surprising that so many universities have shown solidarity with Iran? After all, Iran’s authoritarian regime mirrors the kind of top-down, rigid institutional behavior that many universities seem to admire and replicate.

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In the meantime, university faculty, administration, unions, and government rules have created an out-of-touch and entitled class of academic insiders. In business and politics, there is only one traditional way to remove these types of holdouts and institutional “squatters”: by force, through a “hostile takeover,” to serve the interests of the actual shareholders, rather than the lifestyle of the managers. It is a form of regime change by fiduciary duty.

The concept of regime change is especially apt for most of our university system. While some new White House pushback has occurred over federal research funding levels and related university financial abuse, the real underlying problem and solution are still not being squarely faced: university management culture.

The reason why bad university administration can persist, including self-dealing, inter-university tuition collusion, and financial mismanagement, is that university governance by trustees and directors generally takes an arms-length approach to university management. Trustees somehow believe that only professors can run colleges, and somehow, they alone know something others don’t.

The reality is that professors and administrators do know something: how to rig the university system to benefit themselves at the expense of students and taxpayers. Much of higher education runs on the illusion of tradition, which helps justify why universities continue to operate as they have for centuries.

But today’s system is far from traditional in key ways. Senior faculty now command unprecedented salaries. Executives receive multi-million-dollar compensation packages. Faculty workloads are often reduced. Meanwhile, federal funding has soared, and universities have taken on staggering amounts of corporate debt.

The most practical path to university improvement through regime change stems from basic management practices, particularly in organizational science. Part of the problem involves organizational learning, including issues related to skilled incompetence and overcoming defensive routines. The bottom line is that everything a university does can be accomplished in half the time, at half the cost, and with twice the efficiency, including knowledge creation and teaching.

College administrators, unfortunately, prioritize faculty. Since administrators are drawn from the same faculty Ph.D pool, they naturally protect it. This is akin to pilots running an airline, doctors managing hospitals, or lawyers overseeing the court system: they become self-serving, closed institutions that resist outside perspectives or expertise.

This underscores a vital truism of modern corporate finance, which may be the key to improving university operations: it works through the contractual presence of external financial obligations and competence, measured by objective metrics subject to audit, and reported to equity shareholders who possess avenues of redress, including the replacement of management. The modern university is almost entirely removed from the modern corporate finance model, and this may be the main reason why its inefficiencies persist.

Extending from the university’s separation from modern corporate finance is that, in its day-to-day operations, thinking itself, from a social psychology perspective, has become less, rather than more, independent.

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How could this be?

Isn’t the ideal of university education and the “life of the mind” based on strengthening perception, increasing suspicion and doubt, and building the reflexes of probity and argument? Upholding rational empiricism? How is it that university administrators, especially, become fully entrenched in a passive, obedient, and even docile managerial routine that obeys inter-institutional commands from agencies, centers, institutes, foundations, and global organizations, such as in biosecurity, in an automatic, non-thinking manner?

But there is another related problem in university willingness to absorb and blindly follow ideologies: our universities are being allowed by administrators to function as a magnet for radical foreign political and ethno-religious extremism.

Iran, for example, is extending outward as a symbolic youth movement, and acting as a catalyst for social disruption, almost all of it self-organizing on university campuses. It is fueling a dangerous new political ideology that is anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Christian, and anti-Semitic. Its political philosophy is based fundamentally on violence and a primitivism that rejects Western industrial economics. It has few champions more excited than university professors.

This new ideological war has in many ways been incubated within the university system itself. Political movements, especially those targeting university students and faculty, utilize universities as ideal centers for the formation and conversion of mass psychology. Is it a coincidence that radicalized New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is overwhelmingly backed by college graduates, students, and professors?

The senior university administrators who oversee, guard and perpetuate this culture have no desire to see it end: a system has been created that can be maintained as long as the participants—students, parents, faculty, donors, government and corporations—believe that the university tradition continues to deliver some reassuring sense of success, order, and self-identity, even or especially if this comes with membership in political movements that promise an illusion of social justice.

To paraphrase justice Robert Bork, it is the new “tempting of America” through political seduction. That makes it a war of culture. Regime change is the appropriate response to cultural war.

But more, when university administrators act like corrupt governments and allow or deliberately facilitate actions that misserve or even harm their constituents, then they invite change. By their own mismanagement, they may have created the conditions necessary for learning, which, by definition, is a change in behavior resulting from experience.

Image: “Pro Palestine protest and encampment in Stanford University April 2024” by Suiren2022 on Wikimedia Commons