How Academia Lost Its Mind

Universities will have no one to blame but themselves if the spigot of tax dollars they receive is finally turned off. Just ask Naomi Epps Best and Alex Shieh.

The first time Naomi Epps Best enrolled in human sexuality, a course for her graduate program at Santa Clara University, it didn’t go well. The course required her to read a book called The Guide to Getting It On, a sexually illustrative book whose tamer chapters include “Semen Confidential,” “What’s Inside a Girl,” and “Handjobs.” To make matters worse, one assignment required students to write a 10-page paper on their own sexual history.

Uncomfortable with the assignment, Epps Best, who recently shared her experiences in a Wall Street Journal article, requested a different assignment. The department chairman denied her request. So the graduate student appealed — to the Title IX office, the provost, and even Santa Clara’s president.

After striking out, Epps Best, 26, reenrolled in the required class. This time around, her professor played a clip of a woman “engaging in sexual bondage activity.” She walked out of class.

Having had enough of an educational course that featured “submissives” in a “gimp suit” — cue the Pulp Fiction jokes — and songs like “I Beat My Meat,” Epps Best requested to finish her course remotely, an accommodation she says the university offers to Muslim women.

Once again, her request was denied. Having exhausted her options, Epps Best, who is newly married and a mother of a 1-year-old, asked for a tuition refund. She was denied.

The nightmarish experience at Santa Clara, a Jesuit school, is what prompted Epps Best to share her experience publicly — first on Substack and then in the Wall Street Journal. The effort was designed to shed light on what she says is the politicization of her academic field.

“The entire field of [educational] therapy has been hollowed out and filled in with critical theory,” Epps Best said. “Therapists are no longer trained to be neutral; they’re trained to be agents of political change.”

Days after sharing her experience, Epps Best took to X to inform followers that she had been fired from her internship.

The episode is just the latest example in a trend that reveals a troubling truth: America’s university system is broken, petty, and deeply corrupt.

I recently wrote about Alex Shieh, a Brown University undergraduate who, earlier this year, launched a DOGE-style project to expose bureaucratic bloat at the Ivy League university. In response to Shieh’s project, Brown, a $93,064-per-year institution, launched an investigation into Shieh and accused him of trademark infringement — for mentioning his Ivy League school in a headline on Pirate Wires.

Many might be surprised that universities would require students to study smut or would retaliate against them for launching an ambitious investigative project, but they shouldn’t be. When Epps Best speaks of the “ideological capture of academia,” she’s alluding to a trend decades in the making.

Months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the New York Times reported on “the mainstreaming of Marxism in US colleges,” where the ideology had been “relativized” and blended with trendy topics such as feminism, deconstruction, and sexual liberation.

Even as the Soviet Union collapsed and Marxism failed on the world stage, Marxist ideas were taking root on American university campuses, which were becoming increasingly bureaucratic.

Shielded from regular market forces and fueled by federal dollars, universities vastly expanded administration, creating sprawling bureaucracies more focused on compliance, branding, and ideology than education. Today, America’s top universities have one nonfaculty employee for every four students, compared to one faculty member for every 11 students. In 2023, it was reported that the University of Michigan had a diversity, equity, and inclusion department of 142 people.

The dysfunction and radicalization of colleges were apparent to careful observers, but the problems were glossed over with cash — $4 trillion in federal spending over the last 25 years through Pell Grants, student loans, and research subsidies.

Unfortunately for universities, the gravy train may be drying up. The U.S. government is $36 trillion in debt, and President Donald Trump has been on a mission to slash funding for elite universities.

Leaders and faculty of these institutions have cried “academic freedom” in response to cuts, but such cries ring hollow.

Nearly 20 years ago, Harvard University pushed out its own president, Lawrence Summers, for suggesting that the lack of women in STEM fields could be the result of differences between men and women. Shocking at the time, Harvard’s action today makes sense. Universities are far more concerned with reputation management and “brand building” than academic freedom, which has become a shield for orthodoxy rather than a safeguard for dissent.

The case for defunding universities has always been strong. Markets work, and universities thrived for centuries without government largesse. If the cash flow is finally halted, and it should be, universities will have no one to blame but themselves. Just ask Epps Best and Shieh.

This article was originally published by The Washington Examiner.