The answer to university decline is hiding in plain sight

We can use game theory to answer the question of university decline, but we will have to look outside game theory for the answer if we want to turn things around.

Universities once claimed to form character, cultivate wisdom, and preserve civilization. Now many of them offer courses on “witchcraft and social change through gossip,” “decolonizing mathematics,” and the moral importance of “disrupting systems of power with drag shows.”

Ideologues understand something conservatives often forget: Institutions belong to those willing to fight for them.

Parents spend six figures so their children can be taught that truth is oppression and that literacy itself may be colonial violence.

How did this happen?

Part of the answer is laziness. These are lazy ideologies that appeal to people’s base instincts. But laziness alone is too shallow an explanation. The deeper answer is game theory.

Game theory, broadly speaking, studies how rational individuals behave when incentives reward certain actions and punish others. It explains why perfectly intelligent people often cooperate in systems they privately know are absurd.

Once you understand it, modern university decline becomes almost embarrassingly predictable.

The first thing game theory explains is why nonsense replaces good ideas.

Economists long ago noticed something called Gresham’s law: Bad money drives out good money. If counterfeit and genuine coins circulate together at the same legal value, people hoard the good coins and spend the bad ones. Over time, the bad currency dominates public life.

The same principle applies to ideas.

A university that rewards ideological conformity more than truth-seeking will slowly replace good scholars with ideological activists. At first, the institution still coasts on inherited prestige. The physics department still has Nobel Prize winners. The literature department still quotes Shakespeare. The philosophy department still invokes Augustine between land acknowledgments.

However, as advancement continues to depend less on intellectual excellence and more on ideological signaling, ambitious people adapt accordingly.

If a professor discovers that publishing another tedious article on “systems of oppression in medieval gardening practices” produces grants, praise, administrative favor, and social protection, then more such articles will appear.

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Soon, entire academic ecosystems emerge around rewarding jargon and punishing dissent. Aristophanes understood this over 2,000 years ago.

In “The Frogs,” he lamented not merely political decline but cultural degeneration itself. Bad money replaces good money, yes — but bad poetry also replaces good poetry, bad music replaces good music, and inferior men replace superior ones.

Civilizations slump downward because institutions stop rewarding excellence and begin rewarding flattery, manipulation, and fashionable absurdity.

Game theory also explains why woke ideologues are especially attracted to teaching.

Teaching offers something extraordinarily valuable to ideological activists: asymmetric authority over the young.

A professor stands before 18-year-olds who often know almost nothing about history, philosophy, economics, or theology. The professor controls grades, social approval, and often the moral atmosphere of the classroom itself.

For someone driven by ideological fervor, such an atmosphere is the perfect missionary environment. This fact is why universities increasingly attract people who view education less as the pursuit of truth and more as political activism.

Much of contemporary academic ideology has a peculiar economic structure. It frequently operates by cultivating envy and moral resentment. Students are taught to interpret society primarily through oppressor-oppressed frameworks. Achievement becomes privilege, and personal failure becomes systemic victimhood.

Ideologies that pander to hate and envy replace those that call for discipline and character formation.

It is always easier to blame “systems” than confront one’s own moral failings like hate, envy, and gossip. It is easier to denounce civilization than to build and defend one.

The most important aspect of this issue that game theory explains is why conservative professors so often remain silent while their institutions go downhill.

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Imagine a professor who privately believes the university is descending into ideological madness. He sees mandatory DEI trainings becoming political indoctrination. He sees departments openly rewarding activism over scholarship. He sees students being manipulated by emotional propaganda dressed up as education.

Should he speak? Game theory says probably not.

Why? Because the incentives are brutal.

If he speaks while others remain silent, he risks social isolation, administrative retaliation, poor evaluations, stalled promotions, public smears, and endless bureaucratic harassment. Meanwhile, if he remains quiet, he keeps his salary, his colleagues, his research time, and his peace.

From the standpoint of narrow self-interest, silence is rational. This silence, however, is what allows institutional collapse to accelerate.

Every individual dissenter waits for someone else to take the risk first. Meanwhile, the activists never hesitate. Ideologues understand something conservatives often forget: Institutions belong to those willing to fight for them.

The result resembles a kind of academic prisoner’s dilemma. If many professors resisted together, the ideological takeover could be slowed or reversed. But if each calculates personal risk individually, almost all remain silent. Thus the activists dominate despite often representing only a loud minority.

Game theory can describe this dynamic perfectly, but we must look elsewhere in order to solve it.

Eventually, civilization depends upon something game theory cannot fully quantify: courage.

There are moments when virtue matters more than personal advantage. Moments when a man says, “Even if no one stands with me, I will still stand.”

We increasingly reduce all human behavior to self-interest, incentives, careerism, or evolutionary advantage. But civilizations are not preserved merely by incentive structures. They are preserved by people willing to sacrifice for what is true, good, and beautiful.

A society survives only if enough people believe some things are worth defending, even at personal cost.

And if universities are ever to recover from their descent into fashionable nonsense, it will not happen because game theory suddenly changes. It will happen because enough people decide goodness, truth, and beauty matter more than safety.