Although the University of Chicago bears “Let knowledge grow from more to more; and so be human life enriched” as its official motto, a different slogan entirely has attained much wider fame. Thanks to long-cemented campus lore, the university is best known instead by the refrain of its student body: “Where fun goes to die.”

The slogan is spoken in weary, ironic tones, suggesting a strange marriage of acceptance and self-congratulation. Yes, life can be miserable, and yes, the vigor of UChicago’s curriculum is exactly what I came here for, and it will not break me. Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) have their own versions — “Duck syndrome” and “Penn Face,” respectively — the brave demeanor a student puts on to hide their stress. To suffer is a mark of virtue, and there is a perverse sense of pride that bleeds out of it — if a student is not suffering, do they truly belong at their institution?

Imani Wade, a college student beginning her fourth year at UChicago, told Jacobin that mutual misery seemed to be the point. “There was this kind of bonding over the fact that we’re all in the study room until 3 a.m., and we’re all sporadically crying at different moments, and then we all have 9:30s and 8:30s the next day that we’re going to still go to,” she said. “Even now, in my third and fourth year, I feel like there’s never a time when I should not have anything to do.”

Wade’s description of student life as a mirror of the modern American workplace captures a transformation of colleges over the last half-century, from institutions nominally dedicated to civic and intellectual development to what scholar and cultural critic Henry Giroux, in an interview with Jacobin, called “little more than an adjunct of corporate efficiency [and] corporate logic.” This transformation is visible in the hollowing-out of humanities departments, the reduction of faculty to precarious adjunct labor, and the punitive suppression of student unions. But the structural conditioning of students to accept their own exploitation — and if they are successful, the subsequent management of others — remains the modern university’s most profound ideological victory.

“Many students are pressured to define themselves in terms of how the university is going to reward them,” Giroux said. “This kind of culture says you must overwork, it says you must overperform, it says you must beat everybody else out, it says that you must organize yourself around the values of the market, competition, productivity, efficiency, and conformity.”

Deep-seated American cultural beliefs equating ceaseless toil with divine grace predate the founding of the country itself, serving as a convenient framework for justifying chattel slavery or framing unionizing workers as lazy and ungrateful. With the expansion of the white-collar managerial class, the university has become a primary site for this cultural reproduction. While the apparently Calvinist-flavored ethos generally takes on a less overtly religious character on college campuses, the underlying theology remains the same: work is not only a practical means for professional advancement but a virtue in and of itself. All-nighters, skipped meals, and stress-induced panic take on the character of redemptive sacrifice, while having nothing to do while colleagues toil constitutes a moral failing.

This shows up in “a big culture of busy-bragging that is really endemic to a lot of workplace cultures in the United States, where people feel like they have to prove that they belong through talking about how overwhelmed that they are all of the time,” Devon Price, a social psychologist, told Jacobin. “If you’re going to try and really belong in those spaces, it is all about putting forward this front or living that reality that you are just sacrificing your life for your career.”

To their credit, college administrations have generally avoided “fun goes to die”–style slogans in favor of more sanitized narratives. Marquette University’s installation of high-tech “nap pods” in libraries, pitched as a “wellness” initiative, baits students into staying in the library rather than going home to rest on their own beds. That logic — sleep as recharge for work rather than a fundamental human need — is the same logic Amazon uses when installing “mindfulness chambers” on its warehouse floors. Institutions like Johns Hopkins University and the University of Southern California, meanwhile, have partnered with corporate meditation apps like Calm and Headspace to provide free subscriptions for their students. Penn’s administration, not to be outdone, runs a “Resilience Program,” available by online request, that trains students to “thrive in challenging environments” and “overcome counter-productive thinking habits that undercut performance.”

What these universities don’t seem to relinquish to their students is the actual workload they assign. Wade told Jacobin that in her first year, she would have to stay up until 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. three times a week. “I was in the college for only about a month and a half before my birthday came around, and I physically broke down on my birthday, and I didn’t want to do anything, and I vividly remember that being one of the worst birthdays I’ve had, just because of the stress, and I was not sleeping well,” she said.

Misery, then, is framed not as a structural failure of universities that overwork their students but as a personal failing of students who lack the fortitude to, in Penn’s own vocabulary, thrive in challenging environments and overcome counterproductive thinking habits that undercut performance. But all of it is justified in the end. A student who is smart or hardworking or rich enough to attend an elite university makes a calculated wager: they choose to submit to a crucible that promises to train them for the professional or intellectual vanguard, accepting whatever pains come with it.