Untitled

Bon jour, ☕️🥐🍓bon Week-end à tous

"Au Tour de France" rue René Madec 🚲 Quimper 1939

By: Scott Scheall

Published: Jun 12, 2026 

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, 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, 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. 

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, 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. 

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. 

1969 Chevrolet Nova SS

GM corporate policy in 1969 was firm: nothing larger than a 400 cubic-inch engine in anything smaller than a full-size car or Corvette. Don Yenko had been bending that rule for two years already with the Camaro and Chevelle. The Nova was a different problem entirely.

When Yenko pitched the idea of installing his 427 into the Nova SS to Chevrolet executives, they refused to touch it due to safety and liability concerns. A lightweight compact with that much power was considered impossible to insure and potentially dangerous. Yenko built it anyway. He ordered 1969 Nova SS cars equipped with the 375-horsepower L78 396 engine and pulled the motors at his dealership in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. His mechanics then installed 11.0:1 compression L72 427 cubic-inch crate engines producing 425 horsepower and 460 pound-feet of torque.

The 427 big-block pushed the 3,100-pound Nova to 60 mph in approximately 4.3 seconds. One was track tested at sub-11 second quarter mile times. Don Yenko himself referred to it as "barely legal at best" and "the wildest thing we ever did." On the street it looked completely stock. Just a compact family car with simple Yenko stripes. Insurance companies had no idea what was under the hood, which was entirely the point.

250 years ago, a man with four fingers missing from his left hand stood up in a sweltering Philadelphia room and said the words that could have gotten him hanged.

It is June 7, 1776. The Pennsylvania State House. The windows are shut against eavesdroppers despite the summer heat. Richard Henry Lee of Virginia rises from his chair.

He knows how to hold a room. They call him the American Cicero. Years before, a hunting gun had exploded in his hands and taken the fingers of his left hand clean off — and ever since, he has worn a wrapping of black silk over the ruin. He has learned to use it. When he speaks, he lifts that shrouded hand and lets the dark silk fall, and every eye in the room follows it.

Today he lifts it, and he reads three sentences.

The first is the one that changes the world: ""Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.""

He is not asking a question. He is proposing that thirteen colonies stop being British.

John Adams seconds it before Lee has fully returned to his seat.

And then — nothing happens.

This is the part almost everyone forgets. There was no roar, no signing, no leap. Congress looked at what Lee had just put on the table and flinched. They voted to wait. Several delegations had no authority from home to take so enormous a step. Some men wanted alliances and a plan of confederation settled first. And some were simply afraid. They called a recess so the delegates could ride home and ask their people the unaskable question: are we ready to commit treason together?

Because that is what it was.

Every man who would eventually say ""aye"" understood the arithmetic exactly. There was no legal independence yet, no nation, no army that had won anything decisive. There was only a king with the largest military on earth and a very long memory. If the war was lost, the document they were debating became a confession. The punishment for that confession was a rope.

They knew it. They debated anyway.

The next day, Congress appointed a small committee to draft a statement explaining the decision, should they ever find the nerve to make it — Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Sherman, and Livingston. They handed the pen to the quiet Virginian, Thomas Jefferson. The famous parchment we frame on walls and read aloud every Fourth of July was, in a sense, the footnote. It exists to justify Lee's motion. The motion came first.

And here is the detail that ought to be carved somewhere.

When the final vote on independence finally came, on July 2, 1776 — Richard Henry Lee was not there.

His wife had fallen ill. Virginia was building itself a new government and needed him home. So the man who stood up and proposed American independence climbed onto a horse and rode away before the question he'd asked was ever answered. Adams stood in for him and carried the argument across the line.

He proposed it.

He didn't cast the vote for it.

He never seemed to mind who got the credit.

The resolution passed on the second of July. Adams was so certain that date would be remembered forever that he wrote home predicting Americans would celebrate it for all time with bonfires and parades. He was off by two days. We kept the fourth — the day the explanation was approved — and let the seventh, the day a man first dared to say it out loud, slip quietly out of the calendar.

But the courage was never really in the parchment.

The courage was in being first. In standing up in a closed room, lifting a maimed hand, and reading three sentences that made you a traitor the instant they left your mouth — with your name attached, in front of witnesses, before a single other colony had promised to stand with you. Then trusting that strangers would find the same nerve, and finish what you'd started, even if you weren't in the room to see it.

So next month, when the fireworks go up, you might think of an earlier evening. A hot day in June. A man who had already lost part of himself, raising what was left of his hand and betting his life that other people would be brave enough to agree with him.

The question he asked that day was never really about Britain.

It was the same question every generation eventually has to answer for itself: when the right thing is also the dangerous thing, and someone has to say it first —