Triumphalism in Decline: A Critique of “They Attack Because We’re Strong”

In his recent Inside Higher Ed opinion piece, “They Attack Because We’re Strong,” Frank Fernandez argues that American higher education is under fire not because it is failing, but because it is too powerful and influential. He calls for a long-view perspective that celebrates the accomplishments of U.S. colleges and universities over the past century. But his essay—well-intentioned as it may be—reads less as a sober reflection and more as institutional nostalgia, untethered from the brutal realities of the present.

Fernandez’s triumphalism overlooks or distorts several truths. It is true that U.S. universities have had moments of undeniable achievement: scientific breakthroughs, professional training, and expansion of access. But to say “higher education won” is to ignore the hollowing out of public trust, the corporatization of academia, and the structural harm inflicted on millions of students and contingent workers. If this is victory, it has come at a staggering cost.

“Higher Education Won”? Who Lost?

One of the glaring absences in Fernandez’s narrative is any sustained acknowledgment of the student debt crisis—more than $1.7 trillion in outstanding loans that have left borrowers in financial limbo for decades. The author does not address how rising tuition, stagnating wages, and declining public investment have turned the promise of higher education into a burden for the working class and communities of color.

Nor does he wrestle with the implications of an adjunct majority workforce. Most college instructors today work under precarious contracts with little pay, no benefits, and no job security. This is not a sign of institutional strength. It is a labor crisis.

The rhetorical move to compare today’s struggles with the early 20th century glosses over the fact that the institutions that once expanded access are now increasingly exclusionary. Public flagships and elite privates alike are doubling down on selectivity, building billion-dollar endowments, and investing in luxury amenities while cutting humanities departments and hiking student fees.

If the past 100 years have brought expansion, the past 20 have brought erosion.

Legitimacy Cannot Be Willed into Being

Fernandez concedes that “our challenge in this new era is primarily one of legitimacy.” But he frames this as a problem of perception, not performance. He cites faculty critiques over gendered language in a voter turnout study as a distraction, implying that the real work of the academy is hindered by too much internal debate. But that line of thinking presumes that legitimacy can be restored by tone and unity, not by systemic reform.

Legitimacy is not gained by declaring relevance—it is earned through material impact. That means resisting extractive tuition models, ending the abuse of contingent labor, and seriously confronting how the industry has facilitated racial and economic stratification.

It also means acknowledging that some of the conservative critiques—about administrative bloat, about ideological insularity, about weak accountability mechanisms—are not entirely without merit. These issues are not the inventions of “Trump acolytes,” but of decades of elite capture and mission drift.

A House Divided

Perhaps most troubling is Fernandez’s call for national solidarity among faculty and institutional leaders, modeled after the early AAUP. But today’s higher education system is profoundly stratified. Community colleges face declining enrollments and funding cliffs. HBCUs and regional publics have long been underresourced. For-profit colleges exploit the most vulnerable. And elite institutions continue to hoard wealth and status.

There is no shared struggle here. There is no unified front. The idea that faculty from a state university in Texas or an adjunct at a California community college share the same institutional mission as leadership at Princeton or Stanford is a comforting illusion. Solidarity will not emerge without reckoning with this inequality.

Conclusion

Fernandez asks us to see the attacks on higher ed as a signal of strength. But what if these attacks are, in part, the result of decades of institutional failure? What if irrelevance is not imposed from the outside but cultivated from within—through inaccessibility, arrogance, and systemic exploitation?

If higher education is to have a future worth defending, it will require more than collective nostalgia and appeals to tradition. It will require a commitment to equity, transparency, and accountability—not just to the ideals of the past, but to the people failed by the system today.

Sources:

• U.S. Department of Education. “Student Loan Portfolio Summary.” Federal Student Aid.

• AAUP. “Data Snapshot: Contingent Faculty in US Higher Ed.”

• Center for American Progress. “The Cost of Cuts: A Look at the Ongoing Crisis in Public Higher Education.”

• Georgetown University CEW. “The College Payoff.”

• The Century Foundation. “How Public Colleges Have Been Undermined.”

• National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS).

Steven Mintz’s Exit from Inside Higher Ed: A Thoughtful Retreat or Quiet Surrender?

After more than a decade of weekly columns on the shifting terrain of academia, Steven Mintz—professor, public intellectual, and longtime contributor to Inside Higher Ed—has stepped away from his platform, “Higher Ed Gamma.” In his farewell post, Mintz characterizes the move as a philosophical shift, not a retreat. But for those engaged in the daily battles to defend the public mission of higher education, his withdrawal from one of the few widely read, accessible venues for higher ed critique feels like something else: a concession at a moment when visibility and resistance are needed more than ever.

Mintz says he is no longer as interested in “reacting to headlines,” preferring instead to explore the quieter realms of cultural inquiry—grappling with themes like grief, historical consciousness, and the inner lives of students through essays on Bob Dylan, T. S. Eliot, and opera. His transition to Substack, where he will continue to write freely and thoughtfully, signals an intentional shift toward what he calls “a different rhythm.”

But what happens when thought leaders retreat from public forums just as the foundations of higher education are being dismantled?

Mintz’s departure from Inside Higher Ed comes amid a historic and escalating assault on higher education’s core values: the elimination of DEI programs, political meddling in public institutions, massive layoffs, closures of small colleges, and a crisis of labor precarity among adjuncts and graduate students. It is a time of culture war, economic shock, and administrative capture—one that demands vigilance, confrontation, and critical dialogue. The silence of well-respected voices like Mintz, even when artfully composed, leaves a vacuum at precisely the wrong moment.

To be sure, Mintz has always occupied an ambiguous space in the higher ed discourse: never quite a radical, but often reflective and open to challenging assumptions. He offered important insights about student success, the role of the humanities, and institutional reform. But his columns were also marked by a cautious optimism that sometimes failed to account for the structural brutality many faculty, staff, and students experience daily—from exploitative adjunct labor to debt peonage and corporate takeovers of the academy.

In retreating from Inside Higher Ed—a public-facing, open-access platform—and into Substack, a more insular, self-selecting venue, Mintz risks preaching to a smaller choir. His musings on literature, aesthetics, and ambiguity, while intellectually rich, come at the cost of direct engagement with the high-stakes political and economic struggles now engulfing academia. In a word: the move feels safe.

But there is no safety for the contingent instructor evicted from their job mid-semester. No retreat for students saddled with unpayable debt. No intellectual sanctuary for librarians, counselors, and staff facing layoffs. The reality of higher ed today demands more than reflective essays on opera and poetry; it demands solidarity, analysis, and resistance.

To be fair, Mintz is not abandoning the field entirely. He promises to continue writing “sometimes about higher ed, sometimes about what it means to be human.” That is a noble aim. But as the privatization and defunding of higher education accelerate, and as faculty governance erodes in favor of corporate management, the fight to preserve the very possibility of the humanities and liberal inquiry depends on public intellectuals remaining in the arena, not retreating to side chambers of culture.

Mintz closes his farewell with an affirmation that “education—real education—is still worth defending.” We agree. But the defense requires more than aesthetic reflection. It requires naming enemies, calling out injustice, and staying embedded in the public struggles that define this moment in American education.

For those of us who continue the work of muckraking, exposing inequality, and sounding alarms about the corporatization of the university, Mintz’s exit from Inside Higher Ed is less a turning of the page than a missed opportunity to stand firm. The page is burning, and too many are still waiting for the writers to put out the fire.