The New Feudalism

In 2009, an anonymous university support staff member wrote to C.K. Gunsalus—a prominent academic who specializes in the study of higher education administration—looking for advice and, frankly, a little bit of kindness. The staffer claimed that many of the faculty members at their institution, including a number heavily involved in campus activism, refused to treat them with any respect. Their collective attitude towards non-academics, even those who worked for the university, was akin to that reserved for “a servant or a child.”

Gunsalus’ answer, which Inside Higher Ed published as an advice column, amounted to little more than word salad. But the gist of her response was that the employee should simply grin and bear it. After all, those rude academics were just trying to signal their authority, and who is to say that the anonymous employee is as good at their job as they think they are? Sometimes, professors simply need situations explained to them in a more scholarly manner.

I see no evidence to indicate that Gunsalus thought she was doing anything other than helping. And to be fair, this was reasonable advice for navigating a profession where people in positions of authority are notoriously prickly, political, and prone to anxiety regarding their reputation or social status. But the fact that this was a question that even needed to be asked underscores something darker about the academy—for all many professors talk about dismantling oppressive structures or re-litigating past evils, they are often utterly unaware of how they treat people.

Almost everyone who has spent significant time in academia has a story about someone: the professor who makes rude demands of the IT department; the dean who plays favorites (much to the detriment of everyone around them) or treats disagreement like disloyalty; the graduate advisor who relentlessly belittles anyone under their care, making a mockery of mentorship; or the insecure adjunct who thinks that their lawn guy must have a doctorate to be worthy of acknowledgement. 

The problem, however, is not that academics are merely rude, or that insecurity is simply one of the negative trade-offs of a proper life of the mind. The problem is that this poor behavior has a structure and logic governed by academia’s obsession with credentials. In this respect, degrees, titles, and interactions with “prestigious” institutions play the same role that bloodlines and courtly prestige did in medieval Europe. They mediate all interactions, tightly regulate the social order, and aim to prevent any disruptions from malcontents or free thinkers. 

After all, a Ph.D is not merely a signal that someone can write a publishable paper, but, much like the medieval knighthood, confers a different order of being. In other words, to many academics, someone who has a Ph.D is categorically different from someone who does not. Those with the right credentials are not only treated with more respect—they are the only ones with an opportunity to be heard at all. Someone with a Ph.D is uniquely positioned to enter the halls of academe and ascend through the ranks until they ultimately receive tenure.  

But a Ph.D alone is insufficient to become a “true” academic. Indeed, more than half of those with doctoral degrees leave academia after graduation. Only those formed by the proper institutions with the correct ideological or methodological attitudes, social connections, politicking abilities, and research agendas receive permission to remain. Even after this initial culling, academic life is still intensely precarious. One misdeed, or even a single heterodox publication, can result in excommunication from the academy. 

Not even tenured professors are spared. Committees routinely deny faculty members who exist outside the department’s ideological mainstream promotions, often for vague or unspecified reasons that nevertheless communicate a clear message: you violated the social order. No matter the scholar’s capability or the importance of their research, academics often prioritize the established way of things. In doing so, they mask themselves in merit while engaging in political patronage that would make Edward II of England blush. 

This state of affairs produces a vicious irony—the people most vocally committed to dismantling all sorts of social and institutional hierarchies have created what is perhaps the most rigid status hierarchy in contemporary American life. And while the arbitrariness and structure of the medieval aristocracy were widely known, academia (despite the DEI industrial complex’s explicit rejection of meritocracy) uses a meritocratic self-justification for this system that makes it difficult to understand and challenging to correct. 

What’s more, academia has done a poor job of fulfilling its broader social obligations. Medieval nobility, through what they called chivalry, operated under a framework of noblesse oblige—the idea that those with power and status have an obligation to use their position for the public good. Academics often fashion themselves as a modern chivalric elite, with obligations to serve economic equity, social justice, or a host of other passion projects. In fact, this argument was even explicitly incorporated into my graduate training in public administration. 

Yet academics frequently fixate on the noblesse without the oblige. They fashion themselves as “priests of democracy” but act as reliable progressive operatives. They talk about fighting for the little guy but make very little effort to understand their background or values. They are quick to vocally support reparations for past injustices, or offer land acknowledgements, but the tip jar at local businesses remains suspiciously empty. Simply put, the obsession with social status comes with a whole lot of bark and very little bite. 

But bark alone has serious repercussions even for those outside of academia. Degree inflation has disseminated across industries, with many employees in industries that traditionally did not require a college education now needing a bachelor’s—or even a master’s—to get ahead. Politicians overwhelmingly hire staff from elite universities, meaning that tradespeople, small business owners, and experienced professionals are undervalued in public debate. Most importantly, status-obsessed academics get to set the contours of what that debate even is.

Unfortunately, this also means that new laws or even more vigorous state control of public universities are, at least by themselves, unlikely to generate meaningful reform. Personnel is policy, and academic feudalism will continue as long as the status warriors control hiring committees, promotion and tenure committees, grant dispersals, and the lesser-known machinery of academic life. Changing these structures will require a commitment to reforming every academic function—even the less flashy ones—and that is easier said than done. 

The anonymous staffer who wrote to Gunsalus in 2009 probably never anticipated that their question would illuminate something so fundamental about academic life. They just wanted to be treated with respect by the people they worked alongside every day. That they could not take that for granted was a symptom of what academia has become. An institution whose members are so obsessed with hierarchy that they cannot extend common courtesy to someone they do not consider their intellectual equal is incapable of reforming itself. The serfs are still waiting. 

Garion Frankel is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.