Respect and Hierarchy in Higher Education

Hope springs eternal for university administrators. After declining to punish student protestors who flagrantly flouted institutional rules (and even local laws) last year, they nevertheless seem to think that they will be able to rein in disruptive protests this fall. They’re introducing new policies, strengthening old policies, explicitly informing students about the policies, and pledging to enforce them—because this time, you see, kids, they really mean it.

But at the end of the day, the problem is not the policies or students’ ignorance thereof. The problem is that the three main arms of the university—students, faculty, and administrators—do not respect one another. And they do not respect one another because each arm has abandoned its essential purpose, engaging instead in tasks it is not qualified to do.

If you’ll indulge me for a moment: A university is not unlike the cities Plato describes in the Republic, where three types of people jockey for position. Plato tells us that in a healthy city, the three types perform the jobs for which they are most naturally suited. Those who love reason and truth and have studied for many years—philosophers—are rulers; those who are driven by a love of money and appetitive pleasure are craftsmen and wage-earners; and those who are driven by honor assist the rulers by serving as guardians to keep everyone safe. This hierarchy is sustained through mutual respect: an appreciation for the relevant qualifications and expertise that each citizen contributes to the city’s benefit. But in an unhealthy city, by contrast, the pleasure-seekers are in charge, their appetitive desires catered by the honor-lovers, while genuine truth-seekers like Socrates are put to death. This city hangs together not through respect, but through fear.

In a healthy university, truth-seeking professors lead appetite-driven students away from the pleasures of the body—the sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll of college life—and toward the pleasures of the mind, assisted by a small administration that keeps everything running smoothly. Teachers teach, students learn, administrators administrate. In Plato’s terms, everyone does the job for which he or she is most naturally suited.

But as the cost of college has risen, the balance of power has shifted: Students are paying customers, and the customer is always right. Administrators have multiplied to keep up with students’ every whim, from waterparks to therapy dogs, while professors are forced to lower academic standards, handing out good grades like candy. Under this regime, the mission of the university is no longer truth-seeking but whatever students—or at least the loudest students—say it is. 

And all too often, spurred on by what Plato might call the “drones” among the faculty, the loudest students say that the university’s mission is to advance progress, where progress entails a kind of Marxist, anti-racist social engineering. Whenever the university falls short of this mission, student activists start issuing “demands”: The anti-capitalist customer demands to speak to the manager.

In this way, professors who should be teaching Milton and administrators who should be raising money for laboratories get roped into saying and doing things that go well beyond their areas of expertise: commenting on Supreme Court decisions, organizing safe spaces. Sometimes they do this because they feel bullied; other times they do it because they are true believers in the cause at hand. But in neither case does it earn them any respect. On the contrary.

Professors earn respect from students and colleagues by demonstrating expertise in their field: producing innovative scholarship, delivering insightful lectures, and leading engaging seminars. High-ranking administrators, typically selected from the faculty, earn respect from students and colleagues by demonstrating that they are simultaneously innovative scholars and effective leaders. 

But there is rarely anything innovative, insightful, or engaging about the political statements professors and administrators now regularly churn out. It’s just the same old jargon and talking points, repackaged for each new crisis. After all, a philosophy professor or college president is (usually) no more of an expert on, say, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than the president of the College Democrats—and everyone knows it.

Thus the proliferation of student-led “teach-ins,” where activist students forgo their actual classes to lecture the community on the political issue du jour. At the “People’s University for Palestine” (the moniker proudly adopted last year by student encampments around the country), academic hierarchies collapse, and participating professors serve at the pleasure of student organizers.

Of course, the students making demands aren’t looking for innovation—they’re looking for affirmation. They don’t care if their history professor or university president is a serial plagiarist, as long as the plagiarist is useful to them and their cause. (Those who are not useful they throw to the wolves.) They appear to have no interest in being shaped by experts whom they can respect: They come to college not to learn what is true but to learn how to wield power.

Even in this ambition, however, their professors and administrators are failing them—because they are letting the students exercise power but not authority, that is to say, power without respect. Administrators know perfectly well that students should not actually be in charge. That is why they keep trying to regain control through new policies and threats. And when they invariably cave to student demands, it is not because the students have persuaded them through rational and expert arguments of a better course of action. It is simply because they are afraid. As Plato wrote, the teacher in the unhealthy city “is afraid of his students and flatters them, while the students despise their teachers.”

If professors and administrators respected students, they would start treating them like the adults they are—adults who voluntarily chose to join a hierarchical community of learning and consented to the terms of matriculation. This means enforcing campus rules and telling students what they need to hear, not what they want to hear, even if the student is, in this unfortunate climate, the customer. After all, the salesman who respects his customer tells him not to buy the unflattering suit. And thanks to his expert honesty, the customer may even come to respect the salesman in turn.

If administrators and professors do their jobs correctly, then eventually the student will deserve to be heard not because he shouts loudly but because he speaks wisely. Unlike the Platonic castes, which, once determined, are fixed for life, the position of “student” is temporary. Temporary, but noble in its own right, and worthy of respect.

Solveig Lucia Gold is the Senior Fellow in Education and Society at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

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Photo by SWinxy via Creative Commons. Image cropped.