What Would Aristotle Think? The Infantilization of Higher Education

As university leaders, we face a moment of reckoning. It's not about Harvard visa crisis or the EU's regulations overhaul in universities but beyond that. While we publicly celebrate our institutions' achievements, privately we must confront an uncomfortable reality: higher education has drifted dangerously far from its core mission. We need honest assessment and decisive action before we lose what made universities worth defending in the first place.

The Faculty Burden: When Professors Become Substitute Parents

Let's be direct about what we're asking our faculty to do. We've created an impossible situation where professors must simultaneously conduct world-class research, secure external funding, teach increasingly unprepared students, and essentially parent young adults who arrive lacking basic academic skills and personal responsibility. This isn't sustainable, and it's not fair to anyone involved.

Our students come to us expecting the same level of hand-holding they received in high school, while parents demand regular updates about their adult children's progress. Meanwhile, we pile administrative requirements onto faculty who should be focusing on scholarship and teaching. We've created a system where our best minds spend more time managing student anxieties than advancing human knowledge.

The brutal truth is that we expect faculty to somehow bridge that gap through intensive personal attention that transforms our professors into academic counselors and life coaches. This is neither educationally sound nor professionally sustainable.

The Corporate Colonization Problem

We need to acknowledge that bringing in business executives to run universities has created serious advantaged but also problems. Yes, we need financial expertise and operational efficiency, but when we appoint leaders who have never published research, never taught a graduate seminar, and don't understand academic culture, we get predictable results: the reduction of education to a business transaction.

These leaders implement metrics and processes that make sense in retail or technology but are fundamentally incompatible with intellectual work. They create layers of administrative bureaucracy that consume resources while adding little educational value. Worse, they often view faculty as expensive employees who need to be managed rather than scholars whose expertise drives the institution's core mission.

The Spoonfeeding Epidemic

Different regions manifest this problem differently, but the core issue is universal: we're treating university students like children rather than developing adults. In many educational cultures, students excel through rote memorization and constant supervision, then arrive at university completely unable to function independently. In affluent Western societies, helicopter parenting has created young adults who have never managed their own time, handled failure, or taken responsibility for their learning.

The result is a vicious cycle where we create ever more elaborate support systems to compensate for developmental failures that should have been addressed years earlier. Our professors spend office hours explaining concepts to students who refuse to read assigned materials, providing detailed study guides for examinations that should test independent thinking, and offering emotional support for normal academic challenges.

This isn't compassionate education, it's institutional enabling that prevents students from developing the intellectual independence they desperately need.

The Therapeutic Takeover

We must be honest about how the therapeutic approach has fundamentally altered education itself. When we treat every intellectual challenge as potential trauma and every moment of discomfort as a mental health crisis, we're not preparing students for the real world, we're infantilizing them.

The expansion of counseling services, safe spaces, and emotional support systems reflects good intentions, but the current approach protects students from ideas rather than exposing them to challenging concepts. We've created environments where comfort takes precedence over growth, where professors must provide emotional cushioning for students who view academic challenges as personal attacks.

This approach doesn't serve our students well. They graduate without the intellectual resilience necessary for meaningful careers or contributions to society.

The ROI Reality Check

We've allowed the real value of higher education—intellectual development, critical thinking, cultural literacy, lifelong learning capacity—to be sacrificed for metrics that don't capture what makes education worthwhile. Meanwhile, we pour resources into support systems for students who should be developing independence rather than requiring intensive management.

The tragic irony is that even by narrow financial metrics, our current approach often fails. We're producing graduates who lack the critical thinking skills, work ethic, and intellectual curiosity that employers actually value.

Strategic Imperatives for Leadership

As university leaders, we must make difficult choices:

Restore Academic Standards: We need the courage to maintain genuine academic rigor, even if it means some students struggle or fail. Education that challenges no one educates no one.

Redefine Faculty Roles: We must protect faculty time for their primary missions of research and teaching, reducing the expectation that they serve as surrogate parents for unprepared students.

Reimagine Student Services: Support systems should promote independence and resilience, not create dependency. We need to help students develop the skills they should have acquired before arriving on campus.

Reassess Leadership Priorities: University leaders must understand and respect academic culture while managing institutional operations. This requires different skills than running a corporation.

Communicate Real Value: We must articulate what higher education actually provides—intellectual development, critical thinking, specialized knowledge—rather than simply promising career outcomes we can't guarantee.

The Uncomfortable Conclusion

The current trajectory threatens the fundamental purpose of higher education. We're creating institutions that neither serve students well nor advance human knowledge effectively. The choice before us is stark: we can continue managing decline through increasingly elaborate support systems and therapeutic interventions, or we can restore universities to their proper function as centers of serious intellectual work.

This restoration requires acknowledging that higher education isn't for everyone, that intellectual pursuits demand genuine commitment and capability, and that our primary obligation is to advance human knowledge rather than provide extended adolescence for the uncertain masses.

The alternative is the continued degradation of institutions that took centuries to build, replaced by expensive credentialing services that fail students, exhaust faculty, and waste society's resources. As leaders, we have the responsibility, and the authority, to choose a different path, even when it requires difficult decisions and uncomfortable conversations.

The problems facing humanity require the kind of serious intellectual work that only genuine universities can provide. Our choice is whether we'll be leaders of such institutions or managers of their decline.