\n<\/p>\n
RST:<\/strong> Good morning, my dear hard-boiled egg. Did you have a good trip to Austin, upholding the patriarchy and extolling the manly virtues of the Western canon?<\/p>\n EGG:<\/strong> You are so irritating. Old white men need to have a little space in the lexicon of human endeavors. I\u00a0stand for all of them. So there!! <\/p>\n RST:<\/strong> \ud83e\udd2e There\u2019s been a theme in the responses I\u2019m hearing from people about this column, and it has to do with bodily functions and fluids. People have said they\u2019ve snorted coffee out of their noses and nearly peed their pants while reading our text exchanges. We\u2019re going to have to up our game to get them to actually pee. Higher ed needs more fun, Gordon.<\/p>\n EGG:<\/strong> Rachel, I\u00a0can tell you that I\u00a0am having so much fun because you make it so. And the biggest gift you\u2019ve given me is the gift of your friendship. That may be the last nice thing I\u00a0say to you. <\/p>\n RST:<\/strong> Liar, liar, pants on fire. You can\u2019t help yourself. Nice things pour out of every text you send me. Plus, people are telling me, \u201cI\u00a0didn\u2019t know Gordon Gee was so funny!\u201d Apparently, you hid it well.<\/p>\n EGG:<\/strong> I\u00a0think having a thick skin and a sense of humor is the antidote to all of the whining and complaining common in universities. Besides, there are so many damn funny things that occur on a campus, why not laugh?<\/p>\n RST:<\/strong> Now, let\u2019s get into majors and the siloification of knowledge. I\u00a0think we can agree expertise matters and U.S. higher ed is the expert factory. We need to keep cranking out Ph.D.s with specific knowledge about things like science, medicine, history and the global and pluralistic world\u2014all the stuff we all teach. This matters more now because we have a government that offers dangerous \u201cadvice.\u201d Welcome back, measles!<\/em> I\u00a0mean, plenty of people in your beloved state of West Virginia thought COVID wasn\u2019t real and\/or ate horse dewormer. I\u00a0felt sorry for all those poor equines whose poop was wriggling with bot larvae.<\/p>\n EGG:<\/strong> I\u00a0must admit that some of your analogies are clearly made to irritate me. It is hard to believe that you are a Yale graduate. (Actually, it is not that hard to believe.) Certainly some of the advice that is coming out of the government is dangerous, particularly regarding public health. But they are also asking legitimate questions that should not be dismissed. I\u00a0hope you are not a member of AA.<\/p>\n RST:<\/strong> Alcoholics Anonymous? WTF, Gordon?<\/p>\n EGG:<\/strong> Academic Antifa.<\/p>\n RST:<\/strong> Oy. Anyway. I\u00a0think we agree that we must protect and sustain disciplinary knowledge, and we need to maintain research and scholarship to keep our country healthy and our democracy alive. But many faculty members, no matter where they teach, including at small private colleges and regional publics, act as if they are still training mini-mes and are preparing students for nothing but graduate school. <\/p>\n EGG: <\/strong>That is because universities are organized around departments and colleges rather than ideas. I\u00a0think that we need to reorganize universities around centers, institutes and working groups, allowing both undergraduate and graduate programs to be very fluid and making disciplines not be the organizing principle but part of the creative process. Knowledge is doubling every few hours, so we need to evolve ideas and creative efforts at the same speed. Universities are elephants and need to become ballerinas and not just elephants with a tutu. <\/p>\n RST:<\/strong> So we agree: Majors are dumb. I\u00a0am at odds with some faculty because I\u00a0don\u2019t think we\u2019re serving students for the world as it exists today. And when students come to us from community colleges and choose to major in creative writing (to my dismay, and I\u00a0realize I\u00a0may be writing myself out of a job), they can\u2019t take courses that will round them out intellectually without jeopardizing their financial aid, because everything has to count toward degree completion. Given the way my university and many others are set up, I\u00a0can\u2019t even team teach with a professor in history or engineering.<\/p>\n EGG:<\/strong> Rachel, I\u00a0would say that you are not at odds with faculty, but rather your colleagues are at odds with academic reality. So many times I\u00a0have seen people hang on to the way things are, even to the point that it is a death spiral. As a president, I\u00a0would ask the question \u201cWhy are we doing this?\u201d and the answer would be \u201cThis is the way we have always done things.\u201d There is this belief among many that there are certain sacred issues that cannot be challenged. In my view, sacred cows make the best hamburgers. <\/p>\n RST:<\/strong> Well, there\u2019s a lovely image. When you were slashing and burning at WVU and destroying all that was good and holy\u2014<\/p>\n EGG:<\/strong> You know how to be really irritating. I\u00a0suspect you would have been out in front of my office with a bullhorn\u2014<\/p>\n RST:<\/strong> Being irritating is one of my few superpowers. But, no, I\u2019d be pelting you with stale bow-tie cookies or writing nasty op-eds. Did you try to reimagine how to fundamentally change things? Was there ever real conversation about inquiry-based learning? Could WVU have built a \u201cuniversity within a university\u201d\u2014a pilot college centered around problems, not majors, that attracts those faculty who want to try something different to serve today\u2019s students? Have you heard about places (other than UATX\u2014again, leaving that for later) that are doing cool things to get away from the tyranny of disciplines? I\u00a0have.<\/p>\n EGG:<\/strong> There was no slashing and burning. It was a necessary process to start to transform the university, a process that is now playing out across many institutions. The tyranny of disciplines and colleges has made it almost impossible to create new and more thoughtful ways to organize universities. The guild mentality requires loyalty to the discipline rather than the university\u2014<\/p>\n RST:<\/strong> You do know I\u00a0wrote about this in the fall, right? I\u00a0like to interrupt you. (Little Jewish girl from New York disrupts polite Mormon\u2019s manners. Hell yeah!)<\/p>\n EGG:<\/strong> \u2014means it is difficult to start fresh and interesting programs within the body of the university. That is the reason, for example, that civic institutes are being created by legislators, due to the fact that the universities have refused to think of new and creative ways to teach and to organize themselves. <\/p>\n RST:<\/strong> Oh, sure, the innovation of civics requirements some states are mandating, like the way your little patriarchal friends at UATX are trying to turn back the clock on a half century of social awareness?<\/p>\n EGG:<\/strong> Well, part of this is due to the strong belief among many in the political community that institutions are rampant with wokeness. A premise I\u00a0reject (although there is a good deal of \u201cwokeness\u201d in parts of many universities). <\/p>\n RST: <\/strong>I\u00a0have no idea what \u201cwokeness\u201d means, and surely you\u2019re not dismissing the real and structural inequalities built into the legal foundations of our society. Really, Gordon, you were the dean of a law school (centuries ago). A couple of presidents, when I\u00a0said that higher ed had barely changed in the last century and half, pointed out that if that were true, I\u00a0wouldn\u2019t be here. Is coeducation wokeness? Is looking at our sometimes ugly history with a critical eye wokeness? But if you\u2019re saying that we could have done a better job of teaching why diversity (of all kinds), equity and inclusion matter, I\u00a0agree. Everyone got real shouty, which resulted in a whole bunch of people feeling condescended to and left out.<\/p>\n EGG: <\/strong>If university faculty had been more attuned to the changing nature of the world in which our universities are operating, they would have found ways to nurture new and different structures within the university that would allow multiple roads to academic conversations and salvation. <\/p>\n RST:<\/strong> But we tend to stay within our little silos. And we\u2019re also just swinging the pendulum of \u201ccancellation\u201d back and forth. I\u00a0wonder if part of the problem with majors and departments is the way we\u2019ve traditionally rewarded faculty, which is to say, we all act like we\u2019re at mini R-1s.<\/p>\n EGG: <\/strong>Now let\u2019s really get into it. My question to you is, when are you going to give up tenure?<\/p>\n RST:<\/strong> As soon as you find me another gig with even better benefits. Oops. Doesn\u2019t exist because being a full professor is the most luxurious job in the nation. And you can keep your elephants in tutus. I\u2019m obsessed with a baby pygmy hippo named Mars who lives in Wichita. <\/p>\n Rachel Toor is a contributing editor at <\/em>Inside Higher Ed and the co-founder of The Sandbox. She is also a professor of creative writing. E. Gordon Gee has served as a university president for 45 years at five different universities\u2014two of them twice. He retired from the presidency July 15, 2025.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" RST: Good morning, my dear hard-boiled egg. Did you have a good trip to Austin, upholding the patriarchy and extolling the manly virtues of the Western canon? EGG: You are so irritating. Old white men need to have a little space in the lexicon of human endeavors. I\u00a0stand for all of them. So there!! RST:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44246,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[23007,23006],"class_list":{"0":"post-44245","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-disciplines","9":"tag-tyranny"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44245\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/44246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}