In many encounters with academe, in the course of journalistic duty, I have been told:

Morale here is low.

The president is a fool.

The administration is incompetent.

The faculty is weighted with dead wood.

The students are not held to high standards.

Hiring and tenure decisions are suspect.

It’s a rare campus that lacks at least one of these accolades, and there are more than a few that register all of them.

Given that there are more than 4,000 two- and four-year postsecondary schools in the country, some unworthiness is bound to flourish here and there. But the aforementioned laments, and others, occur too frequently to be written off as local peculiarities or wine-bar fulminations.

As sometimes manifested in Brainstorm posts and ensuing reader commentaries, bitterness among faculty and staff is no rarity in our institutions of higher education. It may be that the same is true in industry, finance, government agencies, etc., but falls from grace in those sectors occur so often as to be regarded as normal. Higher education, on the other hand, at least claims noble responsibilities to the young and the general public.

In reality, professors are not drawn from sterner moral stuff than are hedge-fund operators or pharmaceutical executives. In fact, quite a few hedge-fund operators and drug manufacturers used to be professors. Moreover, while academe’s rules and expectations for veracity and dedication to duty are lofty, universities are fairly lax about surveillance and compliance. Instances of professors failing to report income from pharmaceutical companies have become front-page regulars, and exasperated journal editors continue to find authors neglecting to disclose financial conflicts of interest. Universities may boast of their dedication to teaching, but little or no teaching is a lure for recruiting superstars.

A dour sketch of academe’s moral condition was provided in 2003 by Derek Bok, former president of Harvard, in Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education (Princeton University Press):

The university strikes many critics as a kind of anarchy, ill-suited for any purpose other than securing the comfort and convenience of the tenured professors. Officials of the university have very little authority over their senior faculty. The latter have virtually complete license to do as they choose, thanks to the security of tenure buttressed by the safeguards of academic freedom. Since it is difficult to monitor closely the work of highly educated professionals, faculty members can travel more than the university rules allow or remain at home tending their garden or enjoying their hobbies without much fear of detection. So long as they meet their scheduled classes and refrain from criminal acts, they can stay happily in their jobs until they retire.

And that’s the view from the presidency of Harvard.

Grousing is so prevalent in academe that after a while it blends into the campus environment. But an outsider who frequently visits can’t help but wonder whether the bitterness so often encountered arises from serious and neglected defects.

(Images from Photobucket.com)