Alma Muted: The Tragic Farce of Modern Higher Ed

Canada’s campuses no longer ignite thought—they tranquillize it. Inflated grades, disengaged faculty, and zombie lectures are the new rites

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Beneath the placid surface of institutions lies a truth too often ignored: when purpose drifts, rot festers. Organisations—be they corporations blind to their customers, hockey teams mistaking battle for sport, or churches worshipping their pews—capsize when they cease to ask, “Why do I exist?”

The query is a lifebuoy; without it, they sink into irrelevance. Yet self-awareness is rare, and those who should steer us back—managers, friends, spouses—often remain silent, complicit in the drift.

Post-secondary education is the Titanic of this aimless flotilla, a grand vessel taking on water while the band plays on. Universities, once lighthouses of learning, now wallow in the shallows of credentialism, their mission drowned in a flood of inflated grades and hollow rituals.

What other industry boasts clients who pay for a service never delivered, then toast their fleecing? Only academia, where complacency is bought with A’s, and introspection is as welcome as a squall.

The crime is not mere mismanagement but a betrayal of first principles. Academic institutions exist to ignite minds, not mint diplomas. Yet they’ve traded this noble charge for the tawdry robes of an uncommitted priest, chanting empty syllabi while the congregation dozes.

Classes and credentials are tools, not ends—oars to navigate the seas of knowledge, not anchors to moor ambition. To mistake the map for the voyage is to maroon both teacher and student on barren shores.

Students, too, are complicit, wading through this academic swamp with eyes fixed on extrinsic baubles: grades, GPAs, degrees. As Daniel Pink has shown, such rewards spur only the dullest tasks, not the deep currents of thought. True learning flows from intrinsic desire, a spark that cannot be conjured by PowerPoint or imposed by a rubric.

I tell my business students: if all your courses bore you, you need to set out and find a new harbour.

Yet Canada’s dogma—that all must sail to university while trades are scorned—fills classrooms with listless mariners, then feigns shock when graduates can’t navigate a spreadsheet or a wrench.

But even the keenest student may not flourish in barren soil. A professor who drones, slides flickering like a lighthouse gone dim, is no farmer of minds but a slumlord of ideas, letting weeds choke the field.

Mark Antony, mourning Caesar, knew this: to stir blood, one must speak from within, not parrot what’s known. When lecturers treat teaching as a paycheck and students view learning as an obstacle course of exams and projects, the message is clear: both are treading water, waiting for the bell to ring and escape.

Why not bypass this academic quagmire? Let companies hire the capable and test their mettle, sparing them the university’s bloated bureaucracy. Or let universities grow selective, demanding instructors who till fertile ground for those eager to learn.

Instead, we have a faculty of those who can’t do, teach.

Or administrators—those who both can’t do and teach

If they can’t teach, do or administer, they can work full-time for the union.

Universities measure success by bums in seats, graduation rates, and classroom fill, as if a ship’s worth lies in its passenger list, not its course.

The truth surfaces in fleeting moments: a teacher who wrestles with ideas, who tends the fragile seeds of curiosity until they break the surface. Our fondest classes are tied to such captains, not the listless deckhands reading from the manual.

Yet we’ve industrialised education into a soporific tide, teaching what’s easy, not what’s good. Learning is no waltz but a grappling match, a churning struggle to wrest meaning from theory. Without it, the classroom is flotsam, forgotten before the semester’s end.

We must stop pretending that herding young people into vast lecture halls, with fancy tech and expensive speakers, will make them philosophers or poets.

Even the gifted will not engage; they’ll scroll their phones, waiting for permission to abandon ship. Education’s salvation lies not in more funding or fancier ports, but in rediscovering its compass: to stir the mind, not stamp the passport. Until then, it remains a leaking vessel, foundering in the deluge of credentialism.

However, in our wanderings, we rarely have the self-awareness to admit that we have become detached from our mission.

Post-secondary education may be the worst of the wanderers; it is the marriage where bills are paid, but fidelity, unity and love have been abandoned, leaving just the minimum of cohabitation.

Our education systems receive too much respect and not enough comprehensive evaluation; the incentives are misaligned, with too much focus on grades, and students’ complacency is often rewarded with inflated A’s.

Universities and colleges have chosen to lose heart, set aside their consciences, and turn off the light on the truth that academic institutions do not exist to manufacture credentials and run classes.

Those things should only be tools to facilitate learning, but they have become like robes and talismans to an uncommitted priest who foolishly invests what remains of his faith in empty rituals.

The preparation and execution of good teaching and learning are not slow dances; they are wrestling matches full of friction and exertion, and discovering meaning for theory is exhausting. But if it is not done, the classroom time will be forgotten and will have little value.

We need to stop pretending that making millions of our youth stand in the biggest classroom in the world while playing music from great, expensive speakers will make them members of a dance company; even the authentic dancers will not dance; it will simply be a room of annoyed, bored youth looking at their phones, and waiting to be told that they may leave the room.

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