As a recent graduate of UCLA, I saw up close some of the worst excesses of the student anti-Israel movement: a massive encampment blocking access to the central part of campus, classmates chanting violent and vicious slogans, and an attempt to purge student government of “Zionists” (in practice, Jews). The last item led me to file a formal complaint with the university.
I’m not the first to point out that these problems, all too typical of American universities, are the result of a much deeper institutional crisis. I’d like to call attention to one aspect of this crisis, based on my own experience: the decline of mentorship, itself connected to the unwillingness of teachers to teach and students to learn.
There’s a reason why mentorship is the subject of some of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks’s most personal writings, the epitome of love in Plato’s Symposium, and the theme of one of my favorite films, Dead Poets Society. The wisdom in all three is the same: learning happens not just within the mind, but in the interaction between students and teachers.
Every achievement I’ve earned can be attributed to a wonderful mentor who took a chance on me when there was no obligation to do so. It was my mentors who lovingly corrected me when I mispronounced Max Weber’s name, guided me through my first encounter with Heidegger, and patiently read 100 lines of nonfunctioning code just to find that I mis-defined the path on the second line. They told me frankly when my writing sounded too mechanical, offered me wisdom for interpersonal relationships, set standards higher than I thought I could meet, and expanded my sense of what was possible. They didn’t just shape me as a student and scholar, they shaped me as a person. A mentor does not tell students who they are, but pushes them to become someone worth being.
Although I was fortunate to encounter such wonderful teachers during my time at UCLA, such faculty members are the exception, not the rule. Today, professors are evaluated not based on teaching or mentorship, but for the algorithmic prestige of how many peer-reviewed citations their research garners, or for a favorable book review from a superstar academic like Judith Butler. In classes with 200 students and office hours limited to two hours a week, it’s nearly impossible to build a relationship. Current incentives mean that, for most faculty, teaching has become nothing more than a box to be checked.
Take, for example, the email a friend received in response to requesting feedback on a draft in a class specifically dedicated to cultivating writing skills:
Thank you for your email. I do not provide comments on writing via email because I work really hard to de-center myself in students’ writing instruction. In many cases, the lesson for Wednesday will clear things up for you so you can trust your intuition. If not, and you need a little more support, I can come to you during independent time and answer questions.
This is not mentorship, or even really teaching. This is abdication of responsibility. When a student seeks guidance and receives vague affirmations about “intuition,” we should not be surprised when the university ceases to feel like a serious place.
Faculty and administration bear a large part of the blame for the drought of mentorship on college campuses, but they do not bear it exclusively. To have better mentors, it’s necessary to have better students. This doesn’t mean students with better SAT scores or students who have had better preparation in high school. Rather it means students who enter college with the proper orientation to learning. First and foremost, students must relearn humility. Too many young people arrive on campus expecting not to be challenged but to be validated, not to learn but to declare. When students see themselves primarily as identities to be affirmed rather than minds to be shaped—a phenomenon described by Yascha Mounk in his book Identity Trap—they are incapable of being mentored.
As a result, every seminar, instead of fostering relationships and engaging with ideas, becomes a stage for hollow acts of performative politics. Students root their opinions solely in their feelings, and any challenge to those feelings is treated by peers and professor alike as an act of violence. Students will protest before reading the syllabus. The classroom thus becomes a stage for moral posturing instead of serious learning. Too many students are simply unwilling to grapple with difficult ideas, accept criticism, and revise assumptions.
By elevating feeling over thinking, today’s universities are giving up on their fundamentals task of intellectual formation. Wrestling with difficult texts, being trained in the rules of a discipline, testing assumptions and prejudice against facts and logic—these have all been replaced by emotional urgency and performative certainty.
If we are to save the university, we must return to what made it noble in the first place: the covenant between teacher and student: which rests not on the transfer of information, but on the transmission of wisdom.
We need professors who are willing to teach, and students who are ready to be taught. Or as the Talmud put it, “Make yourself a teacher, and get yourself a friend.”
That’s how we begin to save the university.
