How Universities Commit Unassisted Suicide

The University of Tulsa has decided to shoot itself in its other foot.

It was only five years ago that the University of Tulsa decided to rubbish its robust liberal arts program that featured a well-regarded honors college. Jacob Howland, at the time chair of the philosophy and religion department, told the whole sad story in detail in City Journal:

A new administration has turned a once-vibrant academic institution with a $1.1 billion endowment and a national reputation in core liberal arts subjects into a glorified trade school with a social-justice agenda. . .

TU’s governors do not understand what a university is: a precious cultural institution whose essential task is the preservation, cultivation, and transmission of knowledge. Absent a board willing and able to defend our integrity as an academic institution, we have experienced what one could call a hostile takeover that appears to have made TU a subsidiary of Tulsa’s biggest charitable foundation and an agent of the city’s corporate interests. Our infantilized and indoctrinated students will receive but a light wash of liberal arts before they are popped from the higher-education oven. They will perhaps be credentialed, but they will not be educated.

Read the whole article for full details. Howland departed Tulsa shortly thereafter to join the startup University of Austin.

But then Tulsa seemed to have a change of heart, after a new president, Brad Carson (a former moderate Democratic congressman and Iraq War veteran), took over the helm in 2021. He decided to revive the honors program at Tulsa, and recruited Jennifer Frey from the University of South Carolina (where she held an endowed chair) to be the inaugural Dean of the revitalized program. Frey is a solid “Great Books” classicist.

In her first two years as Dean, her accomplishments include:

Growing enrollment by over 500%
Raising retention rates to 85%
Creating an exceptional great books curriculum in small, Socratic seminars
Revitalizing the study of Greek and Latin
Centering character and civic education throughout the college
Creating a Humane Letters major
Bringing in multiple major grants and gifts
Creating two successful programs for high school students
Creating an honors residential college
Establishing an endowment for study abroad.

Carson stepped down as president of Tulsa this spring, and the interim president is . . . a former athletic director. And a new provost was appointed—more about this appointment momentarily—after which Tulsa has decided to shoot itself in its other foot.

About two weeks ago Jennifer Frey made this announcement on Twitter/X:

Today is my last day as Dean of the Honors College. I was stunned to be informed by our new university leadership that there will no longer be a Dean of Honors, period. Nor an Assistant Dean. Rather, I was informed that there will be a “director”—and that director will not be me, and that Honors needed to "go in a different direction" despite our success. My Asst. Dean, Dr. Matt Post, has resigned from the university and taken another position in the Fall.

Despite the shock and sadness I feel, I remain immensely proud of all we accomplished together as a college in the past two years. Being Dean of Honors has been the highlight of my career, and working with these students has been a privilege, honor, and joy. I will now return to philosophy full time after a six-month research leave.

Today, Frey appears in the New York Times with a terrific article reflecting on this travesty:

The curriculum I helped build and teach required students to read thousands of pages of difficult material every semester, decipher historical texts across disciplines and genres and debate ideas vigorously and civilly in small, Socratic seminars. It was tremendously popular among students, who not only do the reading but also engage in rigorous and lively conversations across deep differences in seminars, hallways and dorms. For the past two years, we attracted over a quarter of each freshman class to this reading-heavy, humanities-focused curriculum.

Our success in Tulsa derives from our old-fashioned approach to liberal learning, which does not attempt to prepare students for any career but equips them to fashion meaningful and deeply fulfilling lives. This classical model of education, found in the work of both Plato and Aristotle, asks students to seek to discover what is true, good and beautiful, and to understand why. It is a truly liberating education because it requires deep and sustained reflection about the ultimate questions of human life. The goal is to achieve a modicum of self-knowledge and wisdom about our own humanity. It certainly captured the hearts and minds of our students.

Sadly, this education has fared less well with my university’s new administration. After the former president and provost departed this year, the newly installed provost informed me that the Honors College must “go in a different direction.” That meant eliminating the entire dean’s office and associated staff positions as well as many of our distinctive programs and — through increased class sizes — effectively ending our small seminars. . .

An unpleasant truth has emerged in Tulsa over the years. It’s not that traditional liberal learning is out of step with student demand. Instead, it’s out of step with the priorities, values and desires of a powerful board of trustees with no apparent commitment to liberal education, and an administrative class that won’t fight for the liberal arts even when it attracts both students and major financial gifts. The tragedy of the contemporary academy is that even when traditional liberal learning clearly wins with students and donors, it loses with those in power.

Now, I am told by some people close to the scene that the short-sighted trustees of the University of Tulsa were behind this decision for “budgetary reasons,” but if so I suspect they were bamboozled by enemies of Frey’s program. One thing you have to understand about higher education is that many faculty, especially in the humanities and social sciences, are deeply insecure people, both professionally and intellectually. They hate competition and greater intellectual rigor.

So—about that new provost: She is Jennifer Airey of the English department. And here is how she is described:

Airey specializes in restoration and eighteenth-century British literature, with an emphasis on women’s literature and theater history. Her research concentrates on depictions of gender and sexuality, and she is particularly interested in interrogating the relationship between extra-literary sources–propaganda pamphlets, circulating broadsides, and popular sermons–and British literature. Her first book, “The Politics of Rape: Sexual Atrocity, Propaganda Wars, and the Restoration Stage,” was published in 2012 by the University of Delaware Press, and is the first full-length study of representations of sexual violence in restoration theater and political culture.

Oh-kay. Did I mention that Airey has been the editor for several years now of the journal Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, which the budget-conscious university apparently pays for? And you can guess what kind of articles it runs. Things like:

Victorian Sélams and Talking Bouquets: Phallic Invasion of the Feminine/Floral Order

Empowerment and Exploitation: Sexual Dynamics in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian

Monuments and Moral Memory: Contemporary Black Women’s Experimental Poetics of Reproductive Justice

And my favorite, because of the pitch-perfect abstract:

The Black Woman as Artist: The Queer Erotics of Rita Dove’s Beulah

Abstract: This article offers a corrective to scholarly focus on themes of racial authenticity and Thomas’s grief in Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah (1986), instead recovering the section on Beulah from the gendered sequestration that is marriage and domesticity. The essay reads Beulah’s subjectivity through queerness, first by acknowledging that her characterization elides the gendered politics of black heterosexuality and then in exploring Beulah’s longing for her own self as a black female—and queer—erotic. Beulah’s nonnormative genderedness is represented by an aesthetic of emergence that is signaled by the section title (“Canary in Bloom”) and that resonates with the black feminist coupling of ontology with creativity. The artfulness of Beulah’s becoming is evident in the negotiation of voice between the narrator and character; that is, the book’s queer erotics become structural in the collaboration between the narrator and Beulah, a mix of direct and free-indirect narration that permits a female camaraderie as the narrator’s authority is used to sustain Beulah’s limning.

So, traditional liberal arts and great books Socratic seminars are too costly for the University of Tulsa, but they can afford to float marginal esoteric publications like this? I’d be willing to wager that literally no one reads these articles—not even the other contributors to the journal.

And universities wonder why they are facing declining public esteem. Who needs assisted suicide when universities seem fully capable of killing themselves?

I predict, by the way, that Frey will move on from Tulsa very soon, and will be a great success at whatever non-crazy, non-idiotic college or university that has the wit to hire her.