I’ve been watching the Northwestern hazing scandal unfold, and reading about the horrors those athletes endured is heavy. When the stories came out, I wasn’t shocked or surprised. I didn’t clutch my pearls and say “how could this have happened there?” I just breathed a heavy sigh, felt a deep pain for those students, and watched as an institution, so steeped in its own toxicity it can’t see the light through its murky waters, began scrambling to save face.
I was a student at Northwestern. Twice (both postgraduate degrees, not undergrad, thank goodness). I was on staff at Northwestern. I was a faculty member for more than five years. Aside from a brief and ill-conceived stint at a law firm, I was in that institution nearly continuously from 2007 to 2021. I know that place. I know that place specifically from the perspective of a person with very little power in the institution. And I would never send my child there.
Northwestern reflects so much of the worst of our society. It’s effectively run by wealthy white men or people who derive proximate power from them (the trustees and senior admin), so the values of wealthy white men govern the institution. Like so many places, diversity, equity, and inclusion at NU is little more than a marketing tactic. Gender and racial discrimination are all too common, and that’s true for students, faculty, or staff. The social hierarchy of the institution is rigid and you’re made to feel it, either explicitly or implicitly. I learned that as a staff member. Staff are at the bottom of the hierarchy (unless you’re a senior administrator). Support staff are treated as disposable or invisible. There’s a particular disdain for administrative assistants, despite the fact that they’re the backbone of academic departments and essentially keep the institution running (no coincidence these are positions mostly held by women and people of color).
I’ve chronicled my own experiences with Northwestern before, so I won’t get into that here. I really want to turn my focus to the students.
When I taught there, my classes were not hard. That was by design. Partly, it was that I grew to see little value in teaching entrepreneurship and churning out Silicon Valley tech bros and “Girlboss” CEOs with some new (but, rarely actually innovative), useless app idea or product nobody needs. That said, I did my absolute best to create classes that would move students away from that mindset, despite the fact that it didn’t align with mainstream entrepreneurship education. Northwestern is keenly interested in these students starting high tech, high-value companies so they can milk the “success story” - and now moneyed alumnus - for all it’s worth (that is, until it erupts in scandal, like this billion-dollar disaster that was founded in the department where I taught).
But also, my classes weren’t hard because I knew too well what a toxic, high-pressure, isolating, competitive, and unhealthy environment these students were in. And I had no interest in contributing to it. I didn’t assign tons of homework, was quick to give extensions when asked, and was generally a generous grader. Did some students take advantage of it? Sure. I didn’t care (and most professors who do care if a student isn’t working “hard enough” in their class care only because of their own ego). I knew some students really needed it.
One of the plaintiffs in the now widespread hazing scandal at Northwestern… he was my student. I, of course, knew nothing about this back then. But I do know that, over the years, I had numerous students struggling with mental health issues. My time teaching at NU was marked by a string of student suicides, including four in a single year (none of whom I knew, but I had students who were friends with some of these students). Sadly, none of this is really unique to Northwestern. Anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation are now at an all time high for college students across the country. Institutions of higher education are failing their students, with dire consequences.
The culture at NU places career success above all else and the pressure to succeed is extreme. It seemed nearly every student was studying economics or business and vying for the job at Goldman Sachs or a global consultancy. Call me old, but it’s profoundly sad to me that kids go to college these days just to get all the right things on their resumes so they can get the “good” jobs, instead of, you know, taking advantage of four years to learn about virtually anything they could be interested in. I understand that most kids aren’t gonna do what I did and take literature and philosophy and religion and ethnomusicology and art history and film and creative writing classes. I mean, they’re missing out, but I get it. That said, I absolutely refuse to believe that there are this many twenty year olds genuinely interested in… finance? Ugh. No.
I looked at college as an opportunity to learn about the world and learn about myself, not as a mere check box for a six-figure job. I didn’t even understand what working for a consulting firm meant until I got to law school. Honestly, I’m not sure I understand it today… it’s one of those jobs that’s not a real job. You won’t find “consultant” in the pages of a Richard Scarry book, which is the clear standard for what a real job is; all other jobs were just invented at some point for the sole purpose of getting people to buy shit they don’t need so some rich asshole can get even richer.
It’s hard to imagine what the world will be like in a little over a decade, when my oldest will, in theory, be heading off to college. If she still wants to go to art school like she says now, great. If she thinks she’s going to school to study economics and go into investment banking, so help me god, she’s got another think coming. I shouldn’t say this as someone with multiple degrees, having spent a huge portion of my life in academia, but I secretly hope my kids just want to learn a trade. College has already become such a bullshit investment, driving young people to the brink mentally and emotionally (and in the case of athletes, physically - while the school makes a pretty penny off of them, no less), while saddling them with insurmountable debt. I can’t imagine in a decade’s time it’ll be any better. The world could use carpenters and electricians. These are real skills that are likely to come in handy in a deeply uncertain and highly destabilized future. But if my kids just go to school to learn how to make nice Powerpoints and send emails while under soul-crushing pressure to achieve material success, they’ll likely be miserable, ill-equipped for life, and I’ll have failed to properly guide them.
There are many lovely people at Northwestern and brilliant professors who genuinely care about their students and want to see them grow and stretch themselves intellectually and emotionally. And then there are the senior administrators, trustees, coaches, the culture - the underbelly of exploitation and discrimination, egos, power plays, pressure, and profit motives. This is the higher ed that triggers such dread for too many people within its supposedly hallowed halls. It’s way past time it reckons with itself.