On Agency — Minding The Campus

Higher education, especially the social sciences, has advanced for decades a cluster of ideas that systematically diminish personal agency. Students learn that individual outcomes such as academic achievement, professional conduct, emotional stability, and moral decision-making are best understood as the effects of social or structural forces, including racism, patriarchy, and power differentials, rather than individual choice. Responsibility is reframed as a weapon of victimization, not a basic feature of moral personhood. The assertion that people retain meaningful capacity to choose and control their behavior is dismissed as naïve, callous, or morally corrupt. Those ideas do not remain on campus after students graduate. Students trained to understand human behavior through this framework go on to become journalists, activists, clinicians, administrators, and other members of the professional class, carrying the same assumptions into the institutions that shape public life. When individuals make catastrophic choices, the resulting explanations often resemble what they were taught in the classroom: look first to racism, mental illness, institutional failure, power disparities, or some other external force. The actor's own will becomes secondary to the corrosive forces surrounding him or her, while personal responsibility is diminished or even nullified as an explanation for the action. Two recent episodes clearly illustrate the pattern. Consider the response to the tragic death of Jason Arday, the former Cambridge professor. After a rapid ascent facilitated by institutional enthusiasm for diversity narratives, Arday faced public exposure of extensive plagiarism and fabricated biographical claims. He resigned; days later, he was found dead. Most commentary immediately shifted the locus of blame: the media's scrutiny caused him harm, and racism was an underlying force. People demanded institutional and journalistic accountability, while Arday's prolonged pattern of deception was minimized or excused. A parallel dynamic appears in the case of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts nurse who killed her three young children and may have attempted to take her own life. Severe postpartum mental illness is real, often devastating, and can profoundly impair judgment. But the dominant public and legal narratives tend to treat her actions as the near-inevitable product of diagnostic failures, pharmacological mismanagement, and shortcomings in maternal mental-health care. While the medical and legal questions are complex, the surrounding discourse often slides toward a broader absolution: if the system had functioned properly, the tragedy would not have occurred. The possibility that, even amid severe distress, a capacity for choice remained, and that the final act was still hers , becomes completely suspect. Both instances highlight the same intellectual pattern: difficult circumstances are sought, found, and then used to create a narrative that swallows the agent entirely. External factors are granted explanatory primacy, and the individual's decision to act is erased, along with their culpability. Instead of moral judgment for bad actions, the framework privileges structures over persons, and the moral response automates a search for culprits beyond the actor. This removal of agency is not morally neutral. Personal responsibility for conduct is a precondition of both individual resilience and a coherent, functional society. People who internalize the belief that their decisions are theirs to make and matter are better equipped to endure hardship, to seek help and move forward, and to make changes for the better. A culture that systematically teaches the opposite weakens the psychological resources needed to thrive. At the societal level, discarding agency breaks down mutual accountability, sowing discord and unrest. When the DEI apparatus connects with externalized blame, certain designated identity categories are given a free pass while others are blamed as culpable despite no actual wrongdoing. Cooperation becomes harder to sustain when people have been trained to treat responsibility as optional for anyone who can be seen as a victim. Beyond that, the anti-agency frame opens the door to broader institutional and government intrusion, such as the ever-expanding administrative bloat in higher education and recent Orwellian restrictions on speech imposed by some European countries. Importantly, accepting the reality of personal responsibility does not require denying the reality of mental illness, social pressure, or institutional shortcomings. Healthy individuals and healthy societies must, however, refuse to let those realities abolish recognition of personal agency. Even when situational factors make certain actions more likely, the individual should be viewed as the pivotal point of decision from which action emanates. Recognizing that fact and holding people accountable is not cruelty. It is an important precondition for offering help that strengthens, rather than reduces, the capacity to choose actions that lead to better outcomes over time. It is also crucial for maintaining a society in which people are afforded freedom and can rely on each other. Higher education's long experiment in teaching students to look outward rather than inward has not produced greater compassion, less social unrest, or greater quality of life. It has produced a reflexive flight from agency when agency is urgently needed. Follow Rebekah Wanic on X. Will you help us continue our work to reform American higher education?