Why Film Professors Can't Fail Students Who Won't Watch Films

The ABCs of the higher ed economy

The recent Atlantic piece by Rose Horowitch on film students who won’t watch movies is all about how awful college students are now: coddled, shrinking attention spans, addicted to their phones, addicted to short-form media. It’s a great narrative and all the grownups can feel good about themselves. Professors can be maligned for “grade inflation.”

But the real problem is that professors cannot fail students for not doing the work any more. Students know this. Faculty are under immense pressure to pass all students. Every student has a dollar figure attached. Every student is a revenue stream. Faculty who fail students may find themselves swiftly out of a job.

Sure, professors could, in theory, fail students who don’t watch the assigned films at the elite places Horowitch looked at. At Johns Hopkins, where I taught film classes (including film music with Thomas Dolby ten years ago) attendance was taken scrupulously and class discussion was a major part of a grade.

But how do you do that with an online asynchronous class in a big state school or a struggling mid-tier private college? Horowitch’s piece does not even mention online courses. Increasingly film courses are online and most programs will not tell you who is teaching the classes. I challenge you to look at the Arizona State University film program website and figure out who your professor will be and whether you’re required to watch any films to the end. As with most online courses AI bots are doing the reading/watching and posting about it on discussion boards. You’ll likely read all about it on Moltbook.

Short-attention-span students are a tiny part of the problem in higher education. The structural problem is that universities cannot afford to lose the students they have. Small colleges are going bankrupt everywhere. Sixteen campuses closed in 2025, the same number as 2024. You can track them here. It is competition to the death.

The country is at the top of an enrollment cliff even before the current administration decided to halt immigration. The high school graduating class of 2025 (3.9 million) were among the 4.3 million babies born in 2007. Three years later, in 2010, that number had fallen to 3.9 million. In 2024, just 3.6 million babies were born. By 2041, the number of traditional-age incoming college students will be down 13 percent. Basically everywhere will see declines.

So while pundits focus on elite admissions offices as hotbeds of discrimination, non-elite admissions offices are more like Glengarry Glen Ross (the film version of which everyone should watch to the end).

Have I got your attention now? Good. ‘Cause we’re adding a little something to this month’s sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac El Dorado. Anyone wanna see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired. Get the picture? You laughing now? You got leads. Mitch and Murray paid good money to get their names to sell them. You can’t close the leads you’re given, then you can’t close shit! You ARE shit! Hit the bricks, pal, and beat it ‘cause you are going OUT!

Still from the 1992 film of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross

It’s a high pressure recruitment environment out there. Don’t believe me that higher ed’s ABC is “Always Be Closing?” Read Joshua Brown’s terrific book, Capitalizing on College. He documents the same air of desperation, the same recognition that not meeting quotas mean you’ll go home with nothing.

As I wrote in my recent review, Brown recognized the financial incentives to simply enroll more and more students in more and more online programs constituted the fundamental problem. Doors were open wider than they should have been. Once sub-par students were admitted, the word went out to college faculty that professors who maintained former grading standards would be punished.

None of this is new. Ten years ago the stories were about academic standards collapsing. Students have now been considered revenue-producing customers rather than simply students for over a decade. Now it goes without saying that keeping students content and enrolled by handing out As passes for education.

The irony is that AI and lowering student loan caps have changed the equation for everyone.

FIRE and HxA want you to believe that the problem on college campuses is ideology. It isn’t. Or rather, the problem on campuses is that faculty have no power at all, the best ones quit, and the ones who stay act out ideologically. I’ve written about it here and here: how business metrics broke the university.

The faculty who used to be comfortable failing students who don’t do the work have largely walked away. And teaching quality now? Nobody knows, because the dirty secret is that universities won’t tell you anything about it. There is no good data. There is no way for anyone to know how good or bad teaching is, beyond anecdotes.

Of course, the professors still left are going to blame students, particularly in the huge online programs. But students aren’t complaining about not watching films in asynchronous courses where the discussion boards are generated by chatbots.

Do the math. Losing 100 students at a school of 1,000 is catastrophic. When you treat a student as a customer, the customer is, of course, always right.

What would you have done to keep enrollment up if you were a college president? You might well have turned every campus and every classroom into a place of safety and belonging. You might also have strangled a university that once attracted top students.

I’ve watched over the past 15 years as institutions that struggle for enrollment see every student not as a person but as a revenue stream. You can’t fail a revenue stream.

Students didn’t create this system; neither did faculty. Institutions created it when they built universities on business models dependent on continuous enrollment growth in a country with a declining birth rate. Students scrolling Instagram during The Conversation are responding rationally to a system that has communicated, through years of grade inflation and lowered expectations, that completion matters more than comprehension. Everyone knows this.

And next year, students will be bypassing college and Instagram and scrolling ChatGPT. It’s later than you think.