The University of Texas at Arlington consists primarily of large parking lots, brown patches of grass and rectangular buildings capable of holding thousands of students. When I was a tenure-track assistant history professor there, for four years in the mid-2010s, it was staffed mainly by underpaid adjuncts and overstuffed with unmotivated students biding time that would have been better spent in community college, or in some apprenticeship programme. All of us were overseen by a university president who was later forced to resign when revelations surfaced of his cosy financial relationship with Academic Partnerships, the private company that ran the school’s ever-expanding online programme, which was essentially a diploma mill intended to generate cash.
