Why the Worst Get on Top in Academia

“In Chapter 10 (“Why the Worst Get on Top”) of The Road to Serfdom , F. A. Hayek argued that centralized political authority tends to elevate the worst people in society. Goons and demagogues do not rise to the top in totalitarian systems by accident. The logic of totalitarianism selects for thuggish leaders. A less dramatic, but equally perverse, logic governs American academia. The incentive structure of the modern American university encourages relatively unsuccessful scholars, those who fail to establish fruitful research programs early in their careers, to pursue administrative positions, where they wield authority over more successful colleagues, who actually generate educational value. As a result, the American university is disproportionately governed by relative academic failures. An effective scholar enjoys benefits impossible to find elsewhere in today’s workforce: freedom to follow ideas wherever they might lead and a considerable amount of free time to do it. Those who succeed aren’t inclined to leave the laboratory or library for administration. Though administrative salaries tend to be higher, the rest of an administrator’s work-life is poorer in every other respect, involving endless committee meetings, paperwork, budgetary knife fights, student and parent grievance adjudication, and the difficult business of cultivating donors. Intellectual freedom and scholarly prestige are nowhere in evidence. The professoriate views administrators less as leaders to be admired than as annoyances to be tolerated. --> The professoriate, with some justification, views administrators less as leaders to be admired than as annoyances to be tolerated. For a productive academic, a move into administration, high salary and resplendent office notwithstanding, seems less like a promotion than banishment. The incentives flip for those who do not manage to develop fruitful research programs. Within a few years of entering academia, young professors often find that they are not likely to produce the publications, citations, and grants that tenure requires. By this time, though, they have invested almost a decade of their lives in the study of specialized topics that leave them poorly equipped for comparably remunerative work outside the university. For them, an administrative position seems like salvation. Moreover, personal dispositions that are liabilities in scholarly pursuits—e.g., concern for procedure and bureaucratic minutiae, tendencies toward groupthink and committee-based decision-making—are often assets in administrative jobs. As political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg argues in The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters , over the last 40 years, the governance roles that faculty members traditionally served at American universities have been absorbed by an ever-expanding assortment of new administrative positions, many of them staffed by persons with few scholarly contributions to speak of —“deanlets” in Ginsberg’s mordant prose. Full-time administrative jobs at American universities grew by over 85 percent between 1975 and 2005. --> Full-time administrative jobs at American universities grew by over 85 percent between 1975 and 2005, but faculty positions grew by only 51 percent. According to Ginsberg, professional university administrators have downgraded scholarship and teaching in favor of “administrative imperialism,” the expansion and preservation of the institutional bureaucracy. Administrators see faculty not as the prime movers of learning, the front line advancing the university’s scholarly mission, but as fussy nuisances to be managed or otherwise ignored. Deans, provosts, and even presidents are now disproportionately drawn from the large pool of unsuccessful academics. The talented stay where they are; the rest become overseers, having drifted into positions where scholarly talent has no purchase. This pattern is manifest at the highest levels of academia. Tenure typically requires, depending on the field, one or two peer-reviewed articles per year and a book with a major academic publisher. At the time that Harvard made Claudine Gay its president in 2023, however, she had written around a dozen scholarly articles in two decades as a researcher and no single-authored book—a middling record for an associate professor, much less the president of America’s most celebrated academic institution. The subsequent detection of plagiarized material in her few scholarly works only heightened the irony. Hiring and promotion decisions reward the administration’s favorites. --> The consequences of academia’s misincentive structure are harmful. Instead of being deployed in support of rigorous research, limited resources are redirected, by its own administrators, to the university bureaucracy. Hiring and promotion decisions reward the administration’s favorites, the compliant box-checkers, rather than more accomplished, if less accommodating, scholars. Instead of focusing single-mindedly on scholarly excellence, young professors are encouraged to build alliances with administrators. Gay’s brief stint at the top of Harvard is a clear illustration of the misincentives confronting mediocre scholars. Her slender publishing profile became the basis for well-remunerated administrative work, further cultivation of her institutional peers, and wildly successful bureaucratic positioning. Like too many among the highest reaches of the American academy, Gay’s métier was not scholarship, but institutional politics. This is Serfdom’s tenth chapter applied to academia. The mission of a university is the disinterested pursuit of truth through rigorous scholarship. The internal labor market of a university, however, tends to place those who fail at this mission in positions of authority over those who succeed. In universities, the incompetent supervise the competent. Offices whose inscrutable missions are indicated by buzzwords like “sustainability” and “assessment” have proliferated, often requiring professors whose time would be better expended on scholarship to squander valuable resources on pointless rubrics and inane compliance trainings. The University of Michigan employs more DEI administrators than academic historians. Stanford now employs some sixteen thousand administrators and staff persons to support a faculty one-seventh this size. Contemporary American academia is just the kind of social system about which Hayek warned. --> Contemporary American academia is just the kind of social system about which Hayek warned, one that promotes individuals with personal traits inconsistent with the system’s alleged objectives. Those who fail at the basic academic mission too easily find snug sinecures from which to tyrannize those who succeed. Correcting this aberrant situation requires more than happy talk from university boards of trustees. Universities truly committed to the academic mission should reward successful scholarship with better pay, require that administrators maintain a record of active scholarship during the term of any appointment, and limit these terms to a few years at most. Superfluous administrative posts that too often serve as sanctuaries for failed scholars should be purged. --> Accomplished professors might be rotated in and out of short-term administrative positions with an assurance of return to faculty status at the end of any appointment. Most importantly, universities must puncture the overinflated bureaucratic balloon that has swollen over the last 30 years or so in American academia. Superfluous administrative posts that too often serve as sanctuaries for failed scholars should be purged. Faculty must reassert governance over the aspects of university life that most profoundly affect scholarship. Purdue University under Mitch Daniels, who served as its president from 2013 to 2022, offers perhaps the most instructive example. Daniels capped staff hiring and reoriented the university back to its scholarly mission. The University of Chicago has also taken steps to insulate faculty from administrative capture. Faculty governance bodies, emasculated for the past two decades, have begun to reassert themselves, advocating for the authority to eliminate administrative roles that do not serve the university’s scholarly mission, a measure that could check administrative self-proliferation. Until reforms along these lines occur, American academia will continue to serve as a pathetic illustration of a basic economic truth: even the loftiest of intentions can be undermined by distorted incentives. Scott Scheall is Associate Professor of Philosophy & Economics and Chair of the Faculty Council at the University of Austin, America’s newest university. Scott’s research considers the significance of human ignorance for decision-making, particularly in the political realm. He is the author of F. A. Hayek and the Epistemology of Politics: The Curious Task of Economics . He occasionally posts and podcasts at his Substack page, The Problem of Policymaker Ignorance . 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