ON THIS WE AGREE. The dean at Anonymous Community characterizes the academic nonaggresion pact as the "real scandal of higher education."

A small but non-zero number of faculty have decided to exploit this quirk of our industry, and establish a sort of arms-control agreement with students. I won't ask much of you, and you won't bad-mouth me. In certain programs, people can make careers doing this.

We may be at different parts of the food chain, and the experience of an economist dealing with aspiring accountants, engineers, and the occasional pre-med or pre-law (read the full text of the Standard Oil case, 221 U.S. 1 (1911) and then ask me for a reference letter!) is different from that of an administrator at a two-year college, but on this, no disagreement.

The non-aggression pact has been present for a long time and as a commenter notes, at a wide variety of colleges and universities. I had some earlier thoughts on the phenomenon here, with links to a number of related posts elsewhere, and here, with the suggestion that at research universities the nonaggression pact might be a Nash equilibrium.

The payoff to a student who would like to ski rather than attend class or study is larger given that the professors are dealing in inflated grades anyway. Thus if the reward to a professor is r and the reward to a student is s, both r(research,ski) > r(advise,ski) and s(ski,research) > s(inquisitive,research) . Neither the students nor the professors have cause to regret their actions, given the actions of the professors and the students, which means the students and the professors are using their Nash equilibrium strategies.

In Profscam, Charlie Sykes suggests multiple causes. First, at p. 84:

But the gut (easy course) is not an aberration in the modern university: It is the inevitable byproduct of the professoriate's desire to expend as little time and energy on teaching combined with the imperative of keeping classrooms stocked with warm tuition-paying bodies. Nor is this limited merely to the lower end of the academic spectrum.

On the other hand, p. 85 suggests other forces are at work.

The pressure to open admissions, argue Professors [William] Rau and [Paul] Baker, is academe's "original sin."

"Perhaps Socrates or Jesus Christ could educate this range of students, but most faculty cannot walk on water, nor do they care for the taste of hemlock," they wrote. But given the "grinding, impervious logic" of the numbers game, academia must make compromises. Among the first things to go, the authors argue, are any introductory textbooks "written at a 12th-grade reading level or above. ... Since students can vote with their feet, introductory courses are typically geared to keep the bottom quarter of the skill range from fleeing in panic."

The numbers game also virtually dictated the collapse of standards within the classroom itself. "If two-thirds of the students do not possess the skills necessary for professional success," wrote Professor David Berkman, a former chairman of a journalism department at an urban university, "there is no way you can flunk out a number anywhere near that percentage. There is simply too much intimidation in the academic environment. This is especially true for junior -- meaning untenured -- faculty members who teach many of the lower division courses where the bulk of the weeding out should take place. ... No junior instructor [c.q.] who wishes to gain tenure will flunk out 67 percent of an introductory course." The result, charges Berkman, is rampant pandering.

And yet truth will out, if higher education's defect rate has any information content. But isn't there an enormous waste of resources in letting people decide over five or six or seven years that higher education really isn't for them, particularly in an environment where there is excess demand for the fifty or so institutions claiming to be in the U.S. News Top Twenty?