The Loss of Academia: No More Gatekeepers of Democratic Thought

The true power and influence of colleges and universities used to be on the uniqueness and qualifications of individual faculty. There was little about higher education that was generic. Yes, there are exceptions. Many public universities were “teachers’ colleges,” and they were very good at turning out teachers who met state standards. But even within those teachers’ colleges, the best schools had a variety of unique and talented professors.

At my own state school, we had a professor who specialized in Woody Allen films. Armed with a Ph.D. from Harvard, he could have taught anywhere. But here he was at Small State School. His class was so popular that it was a lottery draw just to get in. He would walk down the hall and talk to ghosts, claiming that Hartwell Hall was haunted. Yet, he was a phenomenal teacher. Students never lost a minute of engagement with him. He was a master at lectures and an expert in film studies.

There was no one else on earth like him. Even though by today’s standards we may ban Woody Allen films because of prior abuse claims against Allen and that he married his stepdaughter, the professor’s expertise and focus could allow us a place to address these issues and the filmmaker’s movies. Far from a place of censorship and silence, directly engaging the sexual in all of its forms is what being in academics is all about. History should not be nostalgic because it ain’t. Universities and colleges are supposed to be the gatekeepers of truth and reality. That makes them targets, unfortunately, for those who seek totalitarian or personal gain.

But suppression of the original, the awkward, weird, and inappropriate did not really start so much as a political make-the-world-Bambi movement. Rather, it was the continuous loss of state and federal funding that put higher education administrators in a bind.

We had to develop a business model for higher education, and, to do that, we needed to eliminate what set colleges and universities apart, what gave them their reputation: the specialized professor, the Disney specialist, the Woody Allen scholar, the Dr. Sex. A guy like me never had a chance.

The curriculum became generic. Cut all the original classes and include only the classes that most people needed to take so they could get a job. But doing such meant that we were attempting the AI University, the Bot professor, before we even had the internet.

For businesses, they need to focus on higher sales, right? They need to sell what sells. Though our weird professor sold seats, his focus on Woody Allen did not sell much. Who cares about a genius filmmaker who had accusations of child abuse against him? We could say the same thing about Michael Jackson and many, many others. Why study Prince since he was a “druggie.” He was a musical genius who was fighting a losing war, as were Jackson and Allen. We fight our wars, and we all have hurt someone. No harm is a total and damaging illusion.

Sex sells, and, and the dark stuff would sell more, but the fear around liability and negative attention thwarts specialists like me from teaching altogether.

This is not minimizing the bad things we or famous people do. But most people don’t do just bad things or good things. They do a lot of things, and we need people to study them and to study issues that are controversial. These individuals need protection because they are vulnerable to society. But higher education sold them–and me–out, and now it appears our government wants to finish the job.

In 2013, I was awarded a Fulbright to go to a South Korean university and teach representations of girlhood and womanhood in American literature and media. My department and college would not support me, to the utter dismay of the folks at Fulbright. I was not afraid to show minor girls the way they are presented in social media. All I was doing was showing students what their kids see regularly. Because I was teaching research writing, students needed to pick a related topic, research it, and write about it. This was a big hit in my classes.

We could talk about odd sexual fantasy and human sexuality within the context of research, or lack of research for that matter. They watched Dance Moms and kids on YouTube. We addressed foot and popsicle challenges. We discussed child exploitation, child pornography laws, and the balance between the artistic, erotic, free, and pornographic.

Though I had strong evaluations, no complaints, and was a popular teacher, I was told that “a man cannot teach that.” I was told to take out Dance Moms though this was a perfectly good example at the time of pop culture and so-called real TV. I did not really listen, and when I put on presentations of sexualized girlhood in media for the college community, I got very positive reviews and had more people in attendance than most other presentations. What I was showing was the truth, the reality: Secretly, many people look legally at young girls. But this scares people, so they distract from the issue by pulling in pedophilic tropes. We fail to fully understand the phenomenon.

It is true. People want to talk about sexuality, even when it goes into uncomfortable places. Kids also live in a social and sexual world, and nothing anyone does will change that because humans are fundamentally sexual. The key is not elimination, the extreme result of mental illness, but in balance. On that note, most mental illness, even some traumas, are created by the culture, not a shortcoming in a person.

We cannot create no harm. That equals failure. We cannot create a perfect world. Such ends in genocide. We can do less harm, and that means we have to accept that people like different things, even in terms of our sexual interests. Survival is based on flexibility, not fundamentalism. Fundamentalists survive because flexibility allows them to, even taking care of them and giving them a space to survive. However, when fundamentalism takes control, our society teeters on total disaster.

When looking for some support, I found a local business professor who got a Fulbright and went through a similar issue. He told me what I just wrote to all of you. Colleges and universities have decided to focus only on generalists. They are eliminating any specialized teachers because the degree has become a product to sell. The professor has become the disposable sales clerk that you can fire and rehire at will. Students are “cash cows” that bring in loan money (they cannot afford) that financial aid certifies and uses to create more general degrees, totally unneeded, that support institutional growth over institutional and personal merit.

The use of grades puts the focus on completion and “getting it done” over learning. What if we had no grades? What if people went to school because they loved to learn? If you want a good job, drive a truck and stick to it. Start as a bank teller and work up to CEO. Elon Musk is right on that point.  If you want an education, take my class, the one I would love to teach. It will be a tough go, but I am right there with you.

However, my issue was a bit deeper than profit-making because the issue behind the college’s push-back was that I was a man teaching about young girls, so naturally I must be an untreated pedophile or monster of some sort, or even a typical man that must be silenced. While this messenger has always acknowledged his love for girlhood and art, such assumptions distract from the truth about our society and world. Feminist studies did to men what Virginia Woolf wanted to do to the angel in the house. Women strangled men. They created the male Angel in the house, the six-pack ab metrosexual that loves older plus-sized moms. Men, women, too, want thrill and excitement, not propriety.

The drawback is that women are not men and don’t have men’s sexual struggles or interests. In an attempt to “protect” girls in media we have desexualized them; they are all little trauma victims whose advocates see as extensions of themselves instead of what they really are, simply a kid in shorts or dance attire that guys have access to and will occasionally look at. We made the “prostitot” the sexual abuse victim by default, calling dance competitions a form of child sex trafficking. The harm this does to many girls is egregious. This movement is not about protecting kids, keeping little girls angels in the house. It’s about our discomfort with human sexuality and sexual development as a whole. When does cute become sexy? Is there a legal age to finding one attractive? Now, these are academic discussions not fit for social media texts.

I left my position and went into social work where I focused on paraphilia and sexual crimes against kids. I still wanted to teach and work in my area of specialization, but few can even grasp the idea that those who look at legal images of kids don’t go on to look at illegal images. Such virtual offending involves a host of comorbid issues for that individual, even beyond pedophilic (elementary school age) or hebephiliac (middle school age) interests. Most people are really not as exclusive as we think. Many folks are attracted to kids and adults or find certain characteristics attractive in a child, teen, and/or adult. Others have harmless fantasies or even hobbies that may prove as a better coping strategy than the alternative. People are messy, not easily compartmentalized. True people don’t fit well in a political slogan.

In prisons, I found the same problem. The sex offender treatment program we were using was 20 years outdated. Inmates were being taught the same curriculum that everyone else was being taught. The only thing that changed was the tag used to describe individuals. An alcoholic was changed to “sex offender.”  These guys could recite the whole curriculum because it was the same thing! Corrections controls the curriculum, which means a guy with a B.A. in criminal justice is telling clinical psychologists and social workers what curriculum to use. The whole thing is a fraud. It’s never been about sexual abuse prevention. It’s about profit, about cashing in.

It turns out that a prison and higher education are doing the same thing, cutting costs. That is fine when you are a banker, a CEO, or an investor on Wall Street, but at some point, we need to spend money for quality and for originality. Higher Education was not meant to make money. It’s a necessary cost of humanity and democratic states.

For example, the U.S. Postal Service was never meant to make money. This is obvious. Why? Because the Postal Service delivers to every address in the United States. No other company can come close. We, the public, own the Postal Service, not the President or DOGE alone, not a political party.

In fact, UPS, Amazon, FedEx, and DHL will contract with the Postal Service to deliver to addresses that would be unprofitable to those companies. If you live in rural Alaska, you better hope and pray the Postal Service does not become a private enterprise. If you are one of those companies, you better also hope so. If not, some packages are going to cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send to rural America, even though much of rural America is red.

Capitalism, like our sexual natures, has its limits. The way it is now, it is terminal cancer. It’s growth for profit’s sake is killing our institutions, government, and its people. I don’t want capitalism to go away, just like I don’t want our sexual natures to go away, but we need balance. Some things are important, but don’t make money.

Professors once served as the gatekeepers to democracy, innovation, and thought. The great public and private universities in the United States gave us a powerful military, the right to speak about injustice, and the ability to think about things no one else had before us. Sometimes that thinking seems outrageous, offensive, weird, inappropriate, or wrong, but I do think that even a person like me is really needed in academia. But no path exists, and even if I could find it, one social media post could ruin my life.

I would like to think that the hundreds of thousands I spent on my education can be used to benefit society, but that means I need to be allowed to have a voice, even if what I write or speak or show makes people uncomfortable. Even if my former fellow feminist scholars disagree with me, good can come from disagreement. I know what I am doing is important, but there is much fear and trauma around my specialization for men and women. There is also prejudice. As a male, I understand what males are dealing with. As a survivor of abuse, I understand trauma and sexual deviancy, as we like to call it. The best we can do with a harmful past or dark thoughts is use them to help society make better choices. These will not be perfect, but they will cause less harm than the alternatives.

Academics are not woke or bad or communist or neoconservative; rather, it’s a combination and representation of us. The difference is that, as academics, it’s our job to think, speak, research, advocate, and write to the public because the rest of you are busy with other things. I think we need to restore that. Such benefits everyone. We also have to clearly understand that everyone has a selfish motivation beyond what they are actually advocating for. We all strive to be better than what we are and feel worse about ourselves than what we communicate. Academia opens a clearer path to deal with and process the difficult, the inappropriate, and the uncomfortable.