At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter returns to the state of higher education in the west, this time looking at the plight of Whittier College which appears to be well along in a death spiral:
Whittier College’s most famous graduate, Richard M. Nixon, 1 June 1972.
Official portrait via Wikimedia Commons.
While I like to jump around subject matter here, in order to keep myself – and you – from getting bored, one topic that I return to regularly (as a dog returns to his vomit, as a sow returns to her mire) is the ongoing polycrisis in higher ed. You may have noticed, as I just wrote about this a week ago. Academia Is Women’s Work created a bit of a buzz. It seems to have struck a nerve with a lot of people, both with those who have observed the same things that I’ve noticed, and who had the same “ah-hah!” moment that I did once the phenomenon of male flight was connected to the myriad symptoms of academic decay that we all know so well; and with those (mainly women, naturally) who reacted with sputtering outrage – misogynist! incel! – when my Xitter thread on the subject went viral and broke containment in the basedosphere. Despite quite a few hostile eyeballs on the thread, the only thing they could find to correct was a grammatical typo (*its!) in the opening tweet.
When writing about the DIEvory Tower I usually keep it very general, as the problems are systemic, affecting the entire sector, and the view from orbit avoids giving the impression that the issues are specific to any one institution. But a couple of stories recently came to my attention which are simply too perfect not to share with you. Each of them provides a sort of holographic totality of the academic polycrisis, illustrating all of the afflictions in specific, personalized detail.
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The title of this article really says it all: “Plunging enrollment, financial woes, trustee exodus. Whittier College confronts crisis“. It’s a bit out of date now – it was published about a year and a half ago – but the subject matter remains timeless. It has everything: infrastructural decay, forced diversity, incompetent and corrupt administration, a terrified faculty, accusations of racism, collapsing enrolment, angry alumni, reduced donations, budgetary problems. It’s all there.
Whittier College is a small liberal arts school in California, founded in the 19th century by abolitionist Quakers, and known mainly for being President Richard Nixon’s alma mater. It has seen better days:
[T]he once-bustling quad is often all but empty these days, students say, and inside the Wanberg Hall dormitory, carpets smell musty, the Wi-Fi is spotty, and 25 students share two restrooms with toilets that frequently break down and take ages to fix. The eerie quiet outside and fetid bathrooms inside are signs of the turmoil roiling one of California’s oldest liberal arts colleges.
Imagine spending $49,000 a year to use fetid bathrooms.
Enrolment and revenue have both collapsed over a very short timespan:
Since 2018, enrollment has plummeted by about 35%, from 1,853 students to about 1,200, according to college figures. Annual revenue has plunged by 29% over roughly the same period, audited financial statements show. … This term, faculty report the number of undergraduates is just 1,027.
The athletics programs are being sacrificed:
Partly to save money, Whittier cut football and three other sports programs last year.
One of the other teams that got shut down was lacrosse, which is a very white sport. Sheer coincidence, probably. “Partly to save money,” though, huh.
The president of Whittier College is one Linda Oubré. Oubré has an MBA from Harvard Business School, previously served as a dean at College of Business at San Francisco State University, has worked as a consultant, was president of a teeth-whitening spa, and is also – and this surely the most important line item on her curriculum vitae – professionally qualified as a black woman. Given these impeccable credentials, it will be no surprise to learn that Whittier’s problems commenced immediately upon Oubré taking the helm.
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Oubré is very concerned about people doing racisms:
For a decade, more than half of Whittier’s undergraduates have been people of color. But in an hour-long talk at a South by Southwest education conference earlier this month, Oubré told attendees she encountered attitudes at Whittier such as, “‘We can’t have too many Hispanics,’ whatever, fill in the blank, ‘because the white kids won’t be comfortable’.”
It seems very unlikely that any of the faculty at a contemporary liberal arts college would have dared to suggest that the potential discomfort of white students was something to be avoided – yes, I’m saying that I think Oubré just made that up – but it’s revealing that she thinks that saying that people saying that the white kids might be uncomfortable with too much diversity is an own. The white kids are supposed to be uncomfortable! Also: a greater-than-fifty-percent non-white student body, in a country that is (for now) majority white, is apparently an insufficient level of diversity. Sufficient diversity is zero white people. But we already knew that.
