The Academic System: Modern Feudalism or Pyramid Scheme?

Executive Summary

This commentary draws attention to the disparity between the modern ideals of university education and the reality of its operations. For all the romantic ideals put forward by the modern university and its rhetoric around “intellectual life,” the institution functions in a profoundly stratified model of academic feudalism based on a pyramid scheme. The elite in this scheme is made up of the professoriate and the administration, and its members enjoy a very comfortable and stable existence, thanks to the vulnerable population of adjuncts and graduate students that are essentially in a constant state of precarity.

A consequence of an overproduction of elite graduates is that the university is always in need of an excess of terminal-degree holders, which is necessary even though it is practically impossible for them to get a professor position. In the end, the university has weaponized the discourse of vocationalism to make sure that its victims view their exploitation not as a systemic injustice but rather as a sign of their personal flaws.

The Castle, the Factory, and the Church

Take a walk on any American college campus, and you may observe three different types of sub-institutional tranches co-existing. First, there is the corporate factory—a multi-trillion-dollar industry fixated on making money, construction, and enrollment. Second, there is the medieval estate, a societal structure with rigid class distinctions—high-ranking officials, titles, robes, scepters, and lineage that confer permanent status in the system. And lastly, there is the monastery, a group committed to holy work in the language of vocation and calling.

In the classroom, the contradictions between the three institutions become apparent. While the tenured professor can live comfortably on salary, the adjunct professor who teaches the same course earns a fraction of that amount. According to the American Federation of Teachers, more than 25% of adjuncts are likely to live below the level of poverty line for a family of four, and nearly a quarter of them rely on public assistance.

The thesis of this observation is not to describe our higher education system as a financial fraud and not just a result of budgetary cuts. This commentary highlights a system, in fact, a contemporary case of academic feudalism and a sophisticated franchise structure born out of the extraordinary production of elites. A great deal of worth is extracted from an army of scholars living in penury, while a sustainable incumbrance of labor is maintained thanks to the incredible power of a special language of work-oriented discourse.

The Geometry of the Fiefdom: How the Modern Feudal Pyramid Operates

Several critics observed that the system of higher education resembles a feudal pyramid scheme, which is not just because some workers earn more money than others. The researchers try to describe in detail how value, labor, and prestige are transferred upwards while precarious conditions are forced down. While the pyramid scheme is usually based on money, the academic fiefdom is based on the same process but with the use of labor exploitation and gaining prestige.

The Stratification of the Estate

Various scholars have explored that the modern university system is structured on a three-tier structure closely resembling the medieval social framework:

1. The Sovereign Administration is the highest entity. They control the budget, make internal policies, and supervise the development of assets, real estate, and branding of universities. Their power is of a bureaucratic and financial nature. From the 1990s to the present, the administrative body has grown by 60% to 146%. The top 50 schools today have 3 times as many administrators as professors. The Atlantic has illustrated that today’s layers of bureaucracy eat their way into the resources that were previously intended for teaching, while the Boston Globe reported that the growing amounts spent on administration outpaced those on instruction by a large margin.
2. The landed gentry is the second highest entity. They are made up of tenured professors, who oversee departments, chairs, and laboratories. Tenure gives them lifetime control over their entities, freedom from arbitrary dismissal, and most importantly, the exclusive right to determine the identity of the members of the gentry. Benjamin Ginsberg’s The Fall of the Faculty shows how over the years this gentry has been turning into a subordinate group under the administrative monarchy while still enjoying certain privileges.
3. The Landless Proletariat, which includes adjuncts, lecturers, post-docs, and graduate assistants, has limited claims to property rights within the institution. They are signed on short-term contracts and often find out about their employment status only shortly before classes start. According to a report issued by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), most university employees (68%) are now on contingent contracts. Their working conditions and pay are so despondent that they regularly go on strike. In the past ten years, the American higher education system has undergone an unprecedented amount of labor unrest. The teachers belong to the non-tenured category, and as such, they face difficulties in finding employment. University teachers on non-tenure contracts, being underpaid and having insufficient job security, are increasingly uniting and leading strikes.

The Modern Extraction of Corvée Labor

In feudal societies, peasants were obliged to give corvée, i.e., unpaid or low-paid labor to the lord. In modern academia, corvée work has become digitized and intellectualized, turned into an applied concept, although the financial basis of this exploitation has remained unchanged.

The non-land-holding class is assigned low-prestige work with vast quantities: evaluating dozens of papers, teaching lab sections, and teaching the big introductory courses, which professors are not interested in teaching. An adjunct instructor gets paid about $3,900 per course. However, these instructors do not have benefits. The stipend for research assistants, until the recent wave of unionization, was only about $1,400 after taxation in institutions like Oregon State.

By delegating tedious and less-demanding jobs to the contingent workers, the tenured barons do not need to do the labor-intensive work that would drain their time. It is due to this social opportunity that professionals can focus on research and other prestige-producing activities to be able to earn money for themselves and be able to make money for their universities or colleges. Meanwhile, the lower-paid serfs are writing papers and generating money for the institutional system.

The Prestige Economy and the Recruitment Trap

A typical pyramid scheme depends on a steady stream of fresh recruits at the base if returns are to be maintained at the top. In academia, such recruitment takes place largely through the ongoing influx of postgraduates—but the process is not primarily about money.

The quality of a department is significantly determined by how large and selective its PhD programs are. With doctoral throughput aligning well with the rankings, discipline reputation, and eligibility for grants, tenured professors have a direct professional interest in recruiting more students into the pyramid, assigning them the roles of research assistants and co-authors to facilitate the establishment of their own academic empires—regardless of whether there are actual job opportunities in their field upon graduation.

Data from Nature shows that biology PhD production has grown by about a factor of two in twenty years, while the number of tenure-track jobs has remained constant. According to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the typical engineering professor graduates about 7.8 PhD students over his lifetime but creates only one vacancy for a professor position upon retirement. The disparity between the number of recruits and jobs is no coincidence. This is a dilemma that ensures the recruitment process is capitalized.

The Malthusian Bottleneck: Elite Overproduction

The mathematics of an academic pyramid are not simply unpleasant. They can be explained in terms of historian and complexity scientist Peter Turchin, who refers to this as a classic case of elite overproduction—a situation where, within a society, the number of elite aspirants exceeds the number of elite positions available in that society. In his 2023 book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, Turchin argues that elite overproduction, along with what he refers to as a “wealth pump” that moves the benefits up, is the driving force of long cycles of political and institutional instability. He has pointed out the excess of PhD holders in academia as one of the best empirical illustrations of elite overproduction.

The MLA shows that there is a similar collapse in the humanities, which is evident in the new-doctorate/new-hire ratio, which makes up 3.7:1 and has “suddenly increased after 2008 and remained high. Science has revealed that the number of PhDs that work in the private sector is almost on par with the number of PhDs working in universities. This does not mean that there is significantly high demand from companies but rather that academia itself is struggling.

Overproduction is not a malfunction of the system. It serves as its driving force. To keep functioning, the system needs to continuously recruit new generations at the bottom. This is achieved by means of paying tuition for doctoral programs, working as teaching assistants, and finishing postdoctoral programs. The outcome is an army of counter-elites — scholars who are highly educated, who come from different countries and compete for jobs that become scarcer with the passage of time.

The Secular Gospel: Weaponizing Vocational Rhetoric

To make the peasants believe that their earthly agony was a challenge from God, medieval feudalism had to create an ideological superstructure. In its modern variation called “academic feudalism,” words do not have to carry such a heavy burden from the ministry.

The core rhetorical device is the concept of calling. The labor in academic circles is not framed as some asymmetrical wage labor but as a calling, a vocation, or even destiny. Miya Tokumitsu, an art historian and editor of the Jacobin magazine, has proved in her 2014 groundbreaking article “In the Name of Love” and her subsequent book Do What You Love and Other Lies About Success and Happiness that the do-what-you-love idea “devalues real work” and is employed as an ideology to “hide the exploitation.”

Tokumitsu has also warned university professors not to allow their jobs to be construed purely as spiritual endeavors. The Atlantic has incorporated her criticism further and applied it to the whole of the creative economy. The language of sacrifice is doing the work here. The expression the life of the mind supports a failing economic model with academic respectability, making the suffering incurred while being a part of the academic community seem like an indication of one’s spiritual integrity, whereas the request to be paid according to the norms of the market is viewed as shameful. Stating that a course one has been teaching for years should ensure payment of his or her health insurance and pension contribution seems to imply a total lack of seriousness and a lack of scientific basis. This economic effect can be named the “tax of passion” since universities derive the best quality academic output almost for nothing, as their employees tend to perceive the outcome of their work as a spiritual contribution to knowledge instead of a free good of an enterprising company.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has reported that after ten years of attempts to form labor unions, graduate students at universities like the University of California, Boston University, and the University of Washington are beginning to reject this narrative, managing to negotiate increases in pay varying from 12% to 36% with the argument that education is work and not altruism. Coverage by Science of the grad students’ strike at the University of California revealed that the minimum stipends were raised from about $23,000 to $34,000 because of this strike. The Boston Globe reported about a similar strike that had taken place at Boston University, where graduate students demanded a raise to $62,440. Thus, it can be stated that once the narrative that graduate students are doing their vocation collapses, wages increase.

The Sorting Ceremony: “Fit” as Structural Excommunication

Transparent meritocracy becomes mathematically impossible when the application pool consists of hundreds of landless scholars for a single tenure-track position. The castle needs to reject as many as ninety-nine percent of its zealous applicants, and it cannot afford to admit that such a choice is largely random, thus making way for the language of fit.

The hiring committee moves toward ambiguous cultural filters such as “collegiality,” “departmental fit,” and “long-term potential” instead of referring to transparent, quantifiable measures. In a 2022 study, the National Academies publication elaborates on how the criterion “collegiality” can be very conveniently put into practice, as it does not have a fixed meaning, thus allowing the committee to eliminate irregular candidates from the pool—those who do not fit the characteristics corresponding to the department itself in terms of research interest, gender, race, or other parameters. The report of the National Academies about the faculty hiring inequalities reveals the irony as the concept of “fit” turns out to be nothing but a mask protecting hegemony instead of being a study of merit. In its turn, the AAUW Tenure Denied study provides statistical data confirming that the outcome of the hiring process can vary greatly.

The most significant aspect of this filter is the psychological experience of a rejected candidate. Because the candidate has internalized the notion of calling and calling, being rejected by a potential employer is not seen as just another statistic, but rather as a deep personal failure. The serf leaves the castle with the belief that something is missing on their side—the necessary “spark” to be part of the priesthood. This silent departure is what allows the pyramid to stay intact and not collapse under its own excessive production. The system does not have to enforce rules on the rejects—they do that themselves.

De-Consecrating the Ivory Tower

The issue with modern universities is not just one problem. Rather, it is a manifestation of four different pathologies: an antiquated approach to governance inherited from the Middle Ages; a recruitment model based on a scheme; a demographic approach that results in a chronic surplus of graduates; and a communication model that makes exploitation appear virtuous.

One reason systemic reform is difficult is that the two groups holding power, mainly tenured professors and administrators, have the greatest interest in maintaining the present situation. Tenured professors control their domains, while the administrators control the finances.

Neither of these groups has any incentive to change the situation, which continues to provide them with highly educated and guilt-ridden employees.

To reform the universities, it is not enough to rely on appeals to morality. What is needed is to eliminate the pseudo-religious mystique surrounding the universities. Universities must accept the words borrowed from Miya Tokumitsu and the nascent student union movement — academic work is working, teaching is compensation, and the calling is an employment strategy.

The price of failure can be quantifiable. A generation’s worth of brilliant thinkers is stuck in a loop, chasing fewer places in an institution that was never meant to accommodate them all. According to Turchin’s perspective, this reflects a historical mechanism with a proven record of establishing what happens when a system produces more elites than it can handle. Nonetheless, universities have always covered this in their courses; it is just that, up to now, they have failed even to recognize that they are living through this dilemma.